Structure of FSFE

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:05:27 +0200
 || Stefano Maffulli <stef at zoomata.com> wrote: 

 sm> more employees, 3 offices in 3 different countries to manage, new
 sm> projects financed by EU (which require high bureaucracy), new
 sm> division (FTF), the problems with the IT department (server
 sm> crashes and slowness of fsfe.org), the resignation of the Head of
 sm> Office ... you name it.

Yes, all these things (and more) are part of our daily life.

And yes, an organisation that has grown as rapidly as FSFE will find
itself with some challenges as a result of its success. But this has
never been different -- FSFE has undergone various adaptation cycles
in its history, and this one is no different.

In fact, we are in the process of reworking our communication
structures internally, and adding a little more formalisation to some
processes that have become unwieldy. But we also do not want to over-
adapt, as our lean structure is closely related to our efficiency of
making use of the funds we have.

When I see your list above, most of these issues are either already
solved or in the process of being solved. For example:

Werner Koch, FSFE's last Head of Office, who only accepted the task as
an interim position because noone else stepped up did an amazing job
at organising our office in Düsseldorf. He did such a good job that
the office is now working extremely efficiently, well and reliable. It
provides a very solid basis for the work of Jonas and myself and we
have very few requests for direct coordinative work.

That office by the way is also seminal in taking care of the EU
bureaucracy, which also our interns are partially helping us with --
and so far we have managed to minimise its impact.

The office in Zürich is likewise running smoothly, and the Freedom
Task Force that is located in it is still young but already one of our
most successful projects. It is extremely well-coordinated and getting
its work done professionally at a very fast pace. When I get status
reports, there is indeed very little for me to improve.

I don't know much about the office in Gothenburg, but as offices are
concerned, it seems to be running smoothly from what I can see. Same
goes for Ciaran's office in Brussels. But since they only need to
organise themselves, that is not so surprising.

System administration has been identified some months ago as Jonas and
myself as one of our bottlenecks, yes, and we have been discussion
various strategies on how to address this -- the recent additions to
our system-hackers@ are part of that.

Solving this and also taking care of the hunger for power of the
Fellowship site are issues that we are dealing with at the moment.

Likewise for the other internal restructurings that are ongoing, and
have been for some time. Much of that will be formalised during the
next general assembly which we are currently in the process of
planning.

Yes, there are -- and always will be -- things to improve.

But I don't think that the decision of not giving 2k EUR to a third
party (which triggered this discussion) was one of them.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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