Hello,

At FSCONS we reflected over how FSFE is performing from the Finnish team point of view. My biggest concern is:

*We ain't getting more Fellows at the moment* ..but we need them!

Fellows provide political weight, membership payments and some of them even become active contributors. We have been around 900 Fellows for about a year now. Of the European population maybe 50 % use Free Software. We should have at least 0,001 % of them as our Fellows. If you take into account Russia and Turkey, the population base is 831 million people and and of those 0,001 % would be 831 000 Fellows.

Maybe you wonder how can we reach these people? Actually, we already do. The FSFE.org website had 871 161 visits between Jan-Oct 2010[1]. We have been running Google Adwords with a link text "Join the Fellowship" that has been clicked 40 000 times in the same time span.

Please make the FSFE.org page efficient in telling about the important things we do (ACTA, patents, standards, open document day, pdfreaders etc.)

Please think about the Fellowship joining process from the general publics point of view. Please design a proper one page simple join form. Please implement a system for monthly fees or some other possibility for lower Fellowship payments.

Your reaction might be that this is a lot of work and you don't have the resources. Actually Andreas and Sam have already fixed most of the issues about the website. Check out the great work they've done[2] and please let them renew the website as soon as possible.

[1] https://stats.fsfe.org/awstats.pl?config=fsfe [2] http://fsfe.sny.no/index.en.html