Dear FSFE community,
as you might have already read in the news [1], FSFE is supporter of two current campaigns about the European Elections 2014. Both campaigns need your participation and your support.
= wepromise.eu = this is a camapaign by European Digital Rights (EDRi) in cooperation with various partners [2], among them FSFE. Politicians are asked to sign for "digital rights". Therefore, there is a Charter [3] with 10 points, among them Data protection, transparency, encryption and similar demands as well as the promise "I will support measures allowing or promoting widespread use of Free Software (Open Source Software). This includes government and public entities, in particular entities that receive funding from the EU budget. " What can you do? You can promise to just vote for a candidate that supports these digital rights. the more participate, the higher impact the campaign has. Politicians love to count votes and the more people state they will only vote for a candidate that signed this Charter, the more likely politicians sign the Charter.
= freesoftwarepact.eu = this is a campaign by April. In contrast to wepromise.eu this campaign directly addresses the use and the political importance of Free Software. Politicians are encouraged to sign a Free Software pact [4], with that they promise to further the use and distribution of Free Software and Open Standards in administrations and to only vote for laws and Directives that are in accordance with the need of Free Software. In addition, the participatory part in this campaign is somehow different than wepromise.eu: You cannot sign the campaign yourself, but the campaign needs you to contact politicians and candidates from your country and to persuade them to sign the pact. soon there will be translations of the pact available in other languages, by now there are a lot of drafts for proofreading in the wiki [5].
How do I know who are my candidates? You can find current politicians representing your country on europarl [6]. Lists about new and current candidates for your country you can best find on the homepages of your country's parties that run for the European elections.
I would be very happy to see a lot of you engaging in these campaigns. Every signature is worth two times: On one hand, with every candidate you contact, you make sure that there is one more politician who heard about the importance of Free Software for politics and the voting public. In addition, as FSFE we can use every signature to contact these politicians in the upcoming 5 years whenever there are critical polls about Directives that may harm the evolution of Free Software.
Thank you very much for you attention, Erik
[1] http://fsfe.org/news/2014/news-20140304-01.en.html [2] http://www.wepromise.eu/en/page/partners [3] http://www.wepromise.eu/en/page/charter [4] http://www.freesoftwarepact.eu/post/The-Free-Software-Pact [5] http://wiki.april.org/w/Free_software_pact:_list_of_tasks [6] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/map.html