Fellowship elections participation

[Erik Albers]

Hi André,

On 25.04.2017 17:13, André Ockers wrote:
> Op dinsdag 25 april 2017 13:00:51 schreef Erik Albers:
>> However, former elections with only one (!) candidate and without reminders
>> and no public hustings (2016 and 2014) have had more participation ...
>>
>> Why is this? Please help us to understand what FSFE can do to make the
>> electiosn more appealing or raise participation?
>> Or help us to understand what was the reason that this year there was such a
>> low amount of participation?
> 
> I can only speak for myself.
> Earlier there was talk that FSFE made the decision that in the course of this 
> year, the Fellowship is going to be ended, and we'll all just be supporters. I 
> almost did not vote because of this, but in the end I did, just to let my 
> voice heard.

thank you very much for your feedback. Unfortunately, it seems that there is
some communication issue about the fellowship -> supporter change.

We have been hearing couple of times in the past that "Fellowship" is a word
that is hard to understand from the outside and people do not intuitively
understand that a "Fellow" of FSFE is someone who is supporting the FSFE. Many
people actually understood it the other way round, that a Fellow must be
someone who is supported by the FSFE. This is mainly due to academic speech,
where a "Fellow" uses to be someone who is financially supported by a research
or educational institution to facilitate his studies.

When we are now transforming our language from Fellow to Supporter, this is
only a name change, not more. All future supporters will keep the benefits of
a Fellow.

In this sense, the name "Fellowship elections" this year seemed to be kind of
anachronistic to this decision. But as the name of our community election is
written into the constitution it will need a rewriting of our constitution to
reflect this change. This, however, was not possible in time for the 2017
elections.

Best regards,
   Erik

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Erik Albers | Free Software Foundation Europe
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