I think that more generally, this distinction makes no sense in the first place. Why is support from some organization better than support from a company?

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017, 11:22 Carsten Agger agger@modspil.dk wrote:

One thing that might help ever so little ...

Several of my colleagues signed the letter.

My company wanted to support the project officially, including a donation of money, and desired to have its logo listed among the "supporting organizations".

However, these can only be non-profits/civil society organizations, so we couldn't be listed as official supporters (and our CEO kept his money).

I can understand that for-profit companies are not NGOs, but why not have a section with "supporting companies"? If many signed up, it would also make a statement that actual companies working within the economy etc. support this motion.

Best

Carsten

On 12/11/2017 12:15 PM, Gergely Székely wrote:

Hi!

I worriedly watch the slowing down of the accumulation of the signatures of the Public Money Public Code open letter. I think this is a great campaign that should reach as much people as possible and the slowing down bellow 15k signatures sort of suggest that its spreading started fading way too soon.

Maybe we (FSFE volunteers, supporters, and members) should give the campaign an extra push. I'm pretty certain that the vast majority of people haven't even heard about the campaign yet.

Some ideas:

• Can't we know and get some celebrities of relatively famous guys

sympathizing with Free Software who may openly support the camping and attract others to join as supporters? I don't know Stephen Fry is very famous and I have seen him advertising Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre on youtube, Bryan Lunduke also have some fame and a regular youtube program on Free Software related stuff, and probably there are plenty of people who may worth a shot to ask...

• I also think it would be worth bringing the campaign to the streets.

A couple of volunteers could bring campaign stickers or flyers ( https://git.fsfe.org/gergely/PMPC_QR-code_flyers) and distribute them to the passers-by. (If you are [or know] someone in Budapest who would happily join me doing that please contact me. Unfortunately, I would feel embarrassed to do this alone... :-/)

• I think putting posters to bulletin boards in universities would

also be great. Lack of official posters link https://git.fsfe.org/gergely/PMPC_QR-code_flyers here too. I totally plan to do this with the linked QR-code flyers even alone but if you are in Budapest and happy to join please contact me as this is also more fun to do in pairs or in groups.

• I think the campaign should also be boosted on online platforms

(forums, blogs, social media, etc). I'm only on diaspora* there I think I did my part (maybe on diaspora* most of the active users are already reached)...

• I don't know if opening and keeping alive threads about the campaign

on 4chan /g/ is a good idea or not? but I can help in that... Also if you can recommend online platforms where I can help engaging in discussion about the campaign I'm happy to do so.

All in all: Keep spreading the message are way too many people to be reached!!!

What do you think?

Best, Gergely

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On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 01:41:23PM +0100, Paul Boddie wrote: ...

So, maybe letting companies support campaigns is good for transparency, even if it might give an impression of self-interest amongst those companies.

well, we already did that in the past [0].

the only question for me is: should we somehow group the copanies and the ngos together or not?

also: even the ngos each have their own motications to support a campaigns, the only question is, what their motivations are (for companies, the thoughts about finacial gains might be stronger...but htat is also not given)

regards, albert

[0] https://fsfe.org/activities/radiodirective/statement.en.html

Hello Carsten,

* Carsten Agger [2017-12-13 11:21 +0100]:

One thing that might help ever so little ...

Several of my colleagues signed the letter.

My company wanted to support the project officially, including a donation of money, and desired to have its logo listed among the "supporting organizations".

However, these can only be non-profits/civil society organizations, so we couldn't be listed as official supporters (and our CEO kept his money).

That's sad to hear that this prevented your CEO from supporting the activity with a donation. Companies which wanted to sign the letter should have received an e-mail from us in which we appreciated their interest but told them that we can only concentrate on non-profit organisations at first. We also highlighted that in the future there might be opportunity for companies to sign, and that we would love them to inform their employees and joining us as a donor to support the activity.

If you CEO wants to reconsider (or others here want to make a one time donation), here the link: https://fsfe.org/fellowship/ams/donate.php?ams=donate

Quick background for this decision is:

* We were very tight on the timing. So we concentrated on getting support by well known organisations in our field on the EU level or EU members states. * We already had problems to keep up adding other organisations, because a lot of smaller organisations (e.g. Linux User Groups) wanted to sign and at the moment there is still too much manual work involved in this. * We did not want to add companies and give visibility to a few very fast ones. * When the media and the general public is checking the website we considered it more important that they recognise the signatures and that they can mobilise many people to sign, instead of having more org signatures.

I can understand that for-profit companies are not NGOs, but why not have a section with "supporting companies"? If many signed up, it would also make a statement that actual companies working within the economy etc. support this motion.

We received requests by some companies, but the amount would not have been impressive to add to the website.

But for the future we have the following ideas: * We plan to have different categories (local, national, international organisations/companies/public administrations) so we can display the signing organisations differently on the website, or when we contact politicians in certain areas. * It should become less time consuming to add new org/company signatures to the website, that way we can have more small groups to sign up, too. * For companies: it would be good to have companies who publicly support it, so we can also show this to politicians. But most likely we would first have a certain amount of companies from different areas and sizes. We will also still need to discuss how and if to have them on the website, or if we will mainly list them when contacting politicians. * More public administrations: we did not approach any until now, but the City of Barcelona heard about it and signed the open letter, and yesterday a local authority from Germany asked how to sign.

Hope that helps to understand the reasoning.

Best Regards, Matthias