On 24 Jul 2001 17:15:54 +0200, Anders Lindback wrote:
Usually one then hold a yearly general assembly where all members can be present and where they have their chance to vote. In a larger organisation this is not the members themselves but representatives of the members who are alected in an local assembly. In FSFE the chapters would elect representatives which would then go on to the european assembly.
The most common in an elcttion is to let the board remain in place. Actually I've never been at an assembly where it's not be know beforehand who will be elected. Usueallay they have a election committy who gives one candidate to each position thus limiting the choice to pre-screened candidates who has no oposition.
I've also noticed that you've never watched a "hostile takeover" in this kind of organization. I've not been so fortunate. The technique is simple, you get a lot of your "friends" to join the organization and then get democratically ellected to the board of the organizations.
If you think that's difficult to do in an organization like the FSFE, just imagine the following: It's standard for a company to pay employees' assotiations dues. Imagine company X (or a big multinational company or a group of companies who have money to loose from Free Software's presence in the market) making all its employees members of FSFE. Then the company X would, helpfully, offer a place for the next assembly, and, coincidently, have a meeting with all their employees at the same place a few hours before (and maybe even later with the assembly in the middle). Imagine that company X put one of their directors in from of a team of candidates to the board and that all company's employees voted on him.
Tell me how do you protect yourself from this scenario? Every protection I've thought about I've also found either a easy work-around or that it made joining so difficult that it would never any member. This was the kind of protective measure FSF and FSFE decided to take.
-- Joao Miguel Neves
Hi,
Just wanted to make a couple of points concerning FSFE finances and membership.
To address João's point (hostile takeovers):
On 24 Jul 2001, João Miguel Neves wrote:
I've also noticed that you've never watched a "hostile takeover" in this kind of organization. I've not been so fortunate. The technique is simple, you get a lot of your "friends" to join the organization and then get democratically ellected to the board of the organizations.
Tell me how do you protect yourself from this scenario? Every protection I've thought about I've also found either a easy work-around or that it made joining so difficult that it would never any member. This was the kind of protective measure FSF and FSFE decided to take.
Are you a member of the Association for Computing Machinery?
Do you suppose that with membership of the ACM comes rights to alter the constitution of the association? In fact, you can be a voting member, an associate member, a student member, or be awarded 'ACM Fellow' status to recognise and honour outstanding achievement in CS/IT.
Another example: I'm a member of the Institute of Physics. It means I pay them some money, get a copy of Physics World through the door every two, three months, and get to put a few extra initials after my title. It does mean I have some limited rights - if they wanted to make a decision that was purely cosmetic, I suspect they might ask us to vote. I doubt that they make proton-accelerator sized decisions by majority vote.
If you like, don't consider it as opening membership of the FSF(E) up to anybody who wants to pay. Instead, think of it as a subscription to 'Free Software Quarterly' (or whatever).
Unless refined somewhat, FSF(E) membership by payment would be something of a joke anyway. I mean, even after opening up membership there'd be two ways to get any official association with the FSF(E)
1) Become a staff member/founder (unlikely) 2) Pay money
What about all those people out there who invest their thought, time, effort, energy, resources, and possibly even money into producing work under the GPL? Do they deserve to have some kind of separate membership/recognition?
One possible refinement is to implement the steps below:
Basic membership: the would-be member pays the FSF(E) money for nothing but maybe an occasional newsletter and the right to boast about their support for Free Software. This is generic to many charities out there.
Next, you (damn well ought to) offer something for those who write/actively support Free Software, "Developer Membership" or whatever. Since these people are already giving time, I see no reason why you should necessarily expect money from them. At the risk of sounding like a Slashdot poster, demanding money for Free Software Foundation membership sucks. Lots of dot-com people are currently unemployed and in any case couldn't afford it.
If you want to give away lifetime membership of the FSFE for writing the next Killer App, then you can think up yet another form of membership, which maybe would bear more actual weight as a 'qualification'. 'FSFE fellow...'
Then there's actual FSFE member status which frankly is so small you could dismiss it as experimental error, and probably it should stay that way for the very reasons João gave ;-)
As a separate issue, I should add that asking for membership dues requires that you are very careful with the money you receive.
Em
// OLDSIG "All bad art is the result of good intentions." - Oscar Wilde
/* START NEWSIG */ Processor: (n.) a device for converting sense to nonsense at the speed of electricity, or (rarely) the reverse. - Tonkin's First Computer Dictionary