= FSFE Newsletter - May 2017 =
[ Read online: https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201705.el.html ]
== Daniel Pocock is the new Fellowship representative ==
>From 10 to 24 April 2017 the FSFE ran the ninth annual vote for a
Fellowship representative [1] to represent the FSFE's community and
Fellowship in the FSFE's General Assembly [2]. The General Assembly
consists of members of the FSFE e.V. and is FSFE's legal body. It is
responsible for strategic planning, budgeting, agenda-setting,
exonerating, and the electing and recalling of the Executive Council and
the Financial Officer. And the winner of this year's election is ...
Daniel Pocock! [3]
Daniel Pocock [4] came first from seven candidates who ran for office,
with a self-description inside our wiki page for the Fellowship
Elections 2017 [5] and by participating in public hustings [6].
Unfortunately two different dates were announced for the hustings, but
the log-file is available online for everyone who missed it.
The FSFE would like to thank Nicolas Dietrich, former Fellowship
representative, for his contributions during the last two years and
welcomes Daniel Pocock as a new representative. Please find Daniel's
personal conclusions in his own blog [7].
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Help us grow and make a difference in 2017
https://fsfe.org/join/nl2017-05 [8]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
== What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE ==
- From 26 to 28 April, the FSFE's annual Free Software Legal and
Licensing workshop (LLW) [9] took place in Barcelona, Spain. This year
we gathered 120 legal experts from all over the world to share their
knowledge and experience with each other in a 3-day event that
encompassed more than 35 presentations on numerous legal issues, from
open data [10] to tooling, software patents and existing challenges
for Free Software licensing [11].
- Armijn Hemel and Shane Coughlan, members of the FSFE Legal Team,
published a guide [12] for startups, small businesses, and engineers
on "Practical GPL compliance" [13]. The guide is designed to demystify
GPL compliance and to facilitate the work of compliance engineers on a
practical level.
- North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populated state, is having
general elections on 14 May 2017. The FSFE joined a "coalition of Free
knowledge" which has developed for the first time a "Digital-o-Mat"
[14]. The "Digital-o-Mat" is a tool to help those voters who are
concerned about digital rights and freedoms, to decide about which
party to vote for during these elections. Eight questions guide users
to choose their own preferences on important topics about digital
society - for example questions about the use of Free Software, Open
Data or Open Educational Resources. After filling them out, users will
see which party matches best with their own preferences and they can
additionally browse detailed explanations on the party's positions
regarding each topic. The interface for North-Rhine Westphalia is in
German, the underlying Software [15] however is Free Software and free
to adopt for other purposes.
- On the FSFE's Planet [16], we had an interesting dialogue popping up
between our executive director Jonas Öberg who argues that sometimes
you can use proprietary software to further free and open source
software [17] although you should be aware about the risk of
backfiring. And Daniel Pocock, our new Fellowship representative,
answered with "the risk of proprietary software" [18] and that "no
deal might be better than a bad deal", meaning that if you cannot
achieve something with Free Software you should consider just doing
without it.
- Paul Hänsch, one of the FSFE's system administrators, organised the
very first physical wiki caretakers meeting [19]. The wiki caretakers
are a team of volunteers [20] who help to organise information inside
the wiki and make it easy for others to contribute.
- Monitoring shows [21] that in the last semester nine Italian Regions
have reduced advertisement of proprietary PDF readers on their
website, and that one Region has increased its support for Free
Software PDF readers [22].
- The FSFE's executive director Jonas Öberg, blogs about "a new
understanding of non-profit management" and uses this new
understanding to analyse the FSFE's characteristics [23] in the uses
of technocracy, hierarchy, innovation and direction-orientation. Jonas
closes his analytics with some thoughts about the way he would like to
see the FSFE evolving.
- The FSFE was present with booths at the Linke Medien Akademie [24] in
Berlin/Germany, at the 16th Augsburger Linux Info Tag in
Augsburg/Germany, FOSS North in Göteborg/Sweden and Linuxtage in
Graz/Austria.
== Help us improve our newsletter ==
If you see some news you think should be included, forward it to us. If
you'd like to share any thoughts, send them to us. The address is as
always newsletter(a)fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks to all the volunteers [25], supporters [26] and donors [27] who
make our work possible.
Your editors, Erik Albers, Polina Malaja FSFE
--
Free Software Foundation Europe <https://fsfe.org>
FSFE News <https://fsfe.org/news/news.en.rss>
Upcoming FSFE Events <https://fsfe.org/events/events.en.rss>
Fellowship Blog Aggregation <https://planet.fsfe.org/en/rss20.xml>
Free Software Discussions <https://fsfe.org/contact/community.en.html>
1: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017
2: http://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/GA
3: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170425-01
4: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017#Daniel_Po…
5: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017
6: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017#Hustings
7: https://danielpocock.com/fsfe-fellowship-representative-and-upcoming-events
8: https://fsfe.org/join/nl2017-05
9: https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/legal-conference.en.html
10: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/721540/7831c0949927d665/
11: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/721458/be70cd561648d22f/
12: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/linux-foundation-and-free-software-…
13: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/research/practical-gpl-compliance
14: https://www.digital-o-mat.de/
15: https://github.com/dsstio/digital-o-mat
16: http://planet.fsfe.org/
17: http://blog.jonasoberg.net/using-proprietary-software-for-freedom/
18: https://danielpocock.com/risks-of-using-proprietary-software
19: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/WikiCaretakers/Hackathon2017
20: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/WikiCaretakers
21: https://www.taringamberini.com/en/blog/fsfe/adoption-of-free-software-pdf-r…
22: https://pdfreaders.org/
23: http://blog.jonasoberg.net/towards-a-new-understanding-of-non-profit-manage…
24: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Events/2017/LiMA
25: https://fsfe.org/contribute/contribute
26: http://fellowship.fsfe.org/join
27: https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus