An e.V. (eingetragener Verein) is a legal structure in Germany, the tldr is (I'm not a lawyer this isn't legal advice): • there has to be an annual assembly where all members get invited to • members may send in proposals, which get voted on during the assembly (in codebergs case the voting is done asynchronously, you get like 14 days to fill in your votes) • members elect the people on the board • the e.V. also needs to have formal bylaws for which any change has to be voted on and it's a bunch of paperwork to change them (see https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....)

A member is someone that signs up and pays a membership fee (currently that's at least 24€/year, see https://join.codeberg.org/). So yes, the people that pay get to vote. But we're also the ones sending money in to pay for the servers (which is the main source of income for Codeberg), since the e.V. is considered charitable I'm pretty sure this is legally a donation but im not gonna pretend to know things about our tax system.

I get that this sounds strange to people outside of Germany but it's a very common thing here, your local football club is an e.V. for example. It's also not that rare within the foss/software/nerd space, KDE and the CCC are both Vereine as well.