Apply for membership and meet us at FOSDEM (was: Apply for membership - or meet us at FOSDEM :-)

[Werner Koch]

On Thu,  1 Feb 2018 00:25, reinhard at fsfe.org said:

> Daniel has already supplied a pointer to the web page giving some
> background information about the GA, its role in FSFE, and the

To make thinks a bit more clear.  Many members of the FSFE e.V., which
happens to be plain standard German Eingetragener Verein (e.V.), use the
term GA to refer to the members of that Verein.  The term GA was used as
an abbreviation for General Assembly / General Meeting /
Mitgliederversammlung but it is nothing else than the members of the
Verein, that is the Verein itself.

This might have been introduced along with the fellowship to paper a bit
over the fact that the fellows had no legal rights within the Verein -
in contrast to the members, now called the GA.  Later the constitution
was changed to allow an external group (the fellowship) to elect up to
two temporary members of the Verein.  Due to various reasons candidates
for this "fellowship seats" were not in good supply and thus the idea is
now to drop this failed concept of improved participation.

Anyway, the Vorsitzende (uncommonly termed "president") of the FSFE
e.V. has had always the right to accept new membership applications
which will only need to be confirmed at the next general meeting (of the
members).  For the first 15 years this was handled very strict and
basically impossible for a wider audience to be accepted as a member.
This seemed to have changed over the last 2 or 3 years when employees
and very active people were granted membership quickly.  

I personally see a lot of problems that employees of the FSFE are also
members _and_ that they make up a large part of the membership.  Thus I
support the call for new members (as I always did in internal
discussions over the last 17 years) but for organization issues I would
also ask not to rush this.  Sending an applications to the president is
of course fine but please don't get upset if it takes some time to setup
the FSFE for a larger base of members.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner (founding member, not paid, and mostly inactive these days)

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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