Hey all,
irregardless of the split in our community between privacy pragmatists
and privacy absolutists, I think we should take note of this step
Mozilla has taken, as I believe FSFE still has a Facebook page (last
active on September 21st as far as I can ascertain).
> Dear global community we’ve had the opportunity to interact with over the past several years here:
>
> We’re taking a break from Facebook.
>
> At Mozilla we champion platforms and technologies that are good for the web and good for the people that use it.
> We stand up for transparency and user control because they make the web healthier for us all.
>
> That’s why we are pressing pause on any Facebook activity. Mark Zuckerberg has just promised to improve Facebook’s settings and make them more protective, which is a start! Please do that! But we can’t help but think we’ve heard it before, so we’re still going to wait and see what materializes before we resume spending our ad dollars or time here.
>
> IN THE MEANTIME:
> If you need support for Firefox or want to tweet at us, you can find us here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/
> and https://twitter.com/mozilla
(Non-tracked link to the source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180323091845/https://de-de.facebook.com/mozil…)
What do you guys think?
Best regards,
Jonke
Hi everybody,
In the blog about fellowship elections being cancelled[1], the
fellowship has been likened to a corporate donor.
A similar comparison was made in the invitation to the extraordinary
general assembly.
On the transparency page[2], there is a link to donor information[3]
where FSFE identifies the significant corporate donors, especially those
who contribute more than 10% of the budget.
The fellowship appears to contribute[4] about a third of the budget,
more than any other single donor. That was almost EUR 190,000 in 2016
A single fellow also made a bequest of EUR 150,000 to FSFE and they were
not identified publicly. Every corporate donor who contributes over 10%
is named publicly. Does anybody feel that the same transparency
principle should apply in cases such as bequests?
Corporate donors (whether they are publicly listed or private companies)
typically have to publish some information publicly, at a bare minimum,
we can see in which country they are domiciled and who their directors are.
I feel it is a good idea to publish more details about FSFE membership
and fellowship. In comparison, while at RMLL, I was at the session
about April where they announced that they have 4,000 members[5] and
clarified that these are all full members of the association with a
right to vote.
FSFE currently publishes[6] the names of all legal members (GA members),
there are 29. FSFE has not directly published statistics about the
fellowship though, although the page[7] about the last elections showed
there were 1,532 people eligible to vote.
There is a weekly report circulated in the team mailing list that gives
a membership breakdown by country. As fellowship representative, I feel
that the information in this report is quite important for the
fellowship at large. I also feel that it is important for other reasons:
- giving volunteers transparency, the same details that GA and team are
aware of
- being consistent with the availability of information about the
corporate donors (e.g. we can see where corporate donors are domiciled,
so it is important to know where the fellows are predominantly domiciled)
- as the "E" in FSFE is for Europe, I feel it is important to
demonstrate the extent to which FSFE is engaged in each European country
The dissemination of the fellowship statistics on the team mailing list
stopped shortly after the extraordinary general assembly. I notice that
the fellowship numbers had been increasing last year but in the last few
months it has been decreasing. Personally, I suspect that two factors
may be responsible:
- the renaming of "fellow" to "supporter", many of the email templates
and web pages only started using the new term in the last few months.
I personally feel this is a downgrade, as a fellow is by definition a
member of a fellowship while a supporter is a more external role. Other
people may have had the same feeling and quit.
- increasing awareness about the GA decision[8] in October to begin the
process of abolishing elections
There is also a report circulated each week about mailing list
subscriptions. I notice in this report that there is a strong
correlation between the number of fellows in each country and the number
of mailing list users in each country. The blog[1] about removing the
elections asserts that fellows are a "purely financial contributor" but
if they are active in the mailing list and volunteering, I feel that
statement does not adequately describe the fellowship and it is even
more critical to have details on the transparency page and to ensure the
GA meeting in October puts in place a new procedure for community
members to vote.
Regards,
Daniel
1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
2. https://fsfe.org/about/transparency-commitment.en.html
3. https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus.en.html
4. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html
5. https://www.april.org/association#Chiffres_cles
6. https://fsfe.org/about/team.en.html
7. http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_29119d29f759bbf8
8. https://danielpocock.com/our-future-relationship-with-fsfe-2018
Hi everyone,
I wanted to point you to this open internship position at the FSFE:
https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170811-01.en.html
As you know, when the FSFE was founded, we put together a document
describing our self conception. That was 16 years ago, and while I
believe it to still be relevant, we'll be looking at making a new
committment towards a revised organisational identity later this year.
As a part of this work, we're looking for an intern to support the
process for 3-6 months, working closely with me and others in the
FSFE on analysing how the different groups within and outside of the
FSFE perceive the organisation's identity, which will then work
towards understanding how aligned they are, and supporting a
renewed committment towards a self conception.
We've already started the work, and will be looking for someone who
could jump on board quite soon indeed, so don't wait to send this
to someone you think might be interested! Work description and other
application details on the page above.
Sincerely,
--
Jonas Öberg, Executive Director
Free Software Foundation Europe | jonas(a)fsfe.org
Your support enables our work (fsfe.org/join)
Hello everybody,
Today we published our annual report "software freedom in Europe 2018"
<https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20181105-01.html>.
"Software freedom in Europe" is the yearly report of the Free Software
Foundation Europe (FSFE). In one document, it gives you a breakdown of
important things the FSFE has done and achieved during the last 12
months. In the 2018 report, you will read about our electoral
campaigns, our input on the European Union's copyright reform, and
about our successful outreach in demanding publicly financed software
be made publicly available under a Free Software licence. You will
also get insights about the events we (co-)organised and about our
community and groups that helped us with these achievements. Finally,
we will display some numbers showing what resources we counted on, and
giving an outlook for the next year.
I am proud what our teams accomplished during the last 12 months; no
matter if it was the members of the General Assembly, one of our working
groups, our web or translators team, a local group team, one of the
booth teams, or in another way. And I would like to thank those of you
who contributed as volunteers to the FSFE's activities, as well those of
you who have donated to the FSFE, or support us regularly financially as
supporters.
Looking forward to another 12 months in which we will improve the
situation for software freedom.
Best Regards,
Matthias
--
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030 |(fsfe.org/support)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner) Weblog k7r.eu/blog.html