Fellowship elections participation

[Daniel Pocock]

On 25/04/17 18:26, Erik Albers wrote:
> 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.
> 

I can understand the logic for moving away from the word fellow, but I
think the word "supporter" might not be ideal either.  One challenge
with the word "supporter" is that it implies supporters are on the
outside of the organization.

Is there a list of all the words that have been considered or links to
any discussions about this?

Regards,

Daniel