On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 00:29 +0200, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
There is a booth organisation Howto that Volker Dormeyer wrote at some point, I believe others have worked on this as well. So you would not have to reinvent the wheel, but you will need to do a bit of coordinative work.
I apologize for my ignorance, but I cannot seem to find the document you refer to. I assume it should exist in the svn repository?
I searched around and found it in an old e-mail. /Office/booth/fsfe_bv_faq.ps and fsfe_bv_faq.tex
But it is only in German :-/ I do not know if it also exists in English. I took Volker in CC.
If we start it again, we should do it on wiki.fsfe.org imho.
I found the document and it was not too difficult for me to read. I might even be able to translate it to English for the wiki, though some of the information should probably be updated.
What I really was after however, is a practical how-to for the organising of a booth. Where do I ask for volunteers to help? Should we register before we know whether we'll have volunteers? Should the funding be done by the local branch of FSFE (in this case, Hesa said it probably should)? What information material is available, and, presuming it exists in abundance, should it be included in the budget? How do we sign up new fellows analogue-wise?
Another relevant issue, one that the fsfe-bv-faq probably should include some words about, is the question of what I can or cannot say on behalf of the FSFE (as opposed to what I should say, which I think is rather clear). For instance, the ESF is largely about democratising society - how people can and should be involved in decisions that affect us all. This is more or less exactly what the FSFE is working for and I therefore thought about having a big banner at the booth stating that "Free Software is Democratic Software" or something similar. Am I free to do this? Am I also free to put the FSFE logo beneath a slogan that really hasn't been officially approved, but very likely would resonate positively among its members?
In this regard, I am also thinking about something Georg mentioned in his speech at the last FSCONS, where we were encouraged to prominently display our FSFE-membership when advocating digital freedom. To what extent can we do this? I am sure that the level common sense among our members is very high, but still wouldn't mind some guidelines on the issue. An example that springs to mind is the debate on legalising non-commercial file sharing, something that RMS has been very vocal about. Of course, I am not saying I would claim that the FSFE supports it, but rather wonder whether it would be regarded as problematic to use an FSFE-signature in such cases.
all the best, /Stian