Shouldn't we try to give a boost to the PMPC campaign?

[Matthias Kirschner]

Hello Carsten,

* Carsten Agger [2017-12-13 11:21 +0100]:
> One thing that might help ever so little ...
> 
> 
> Several of my colleagues signed the letter.
> 
> My company wanted to support the project officially, including a
> donation of money, and desired to have its logo listed among the
> "supporting organizations".
> 
> However, these can only be non-profits/civil society organizations, so
> we couldn't be listed as official supporters (and our CEO kept his money).

That's sad to hear that this prevented your CEO from supporting the
activity with a donation. Companies which wanted to sign the letter
should have received an e-mail from us in which we appreciated their
interest but told them that we can only concentrate on non-profit
organisations at first. We also highlighted that in the future there
might be opportunity for companies to sign, and that we would love them
to inform their employees and joining us as a donor to support the
activity.

If you CEO wants to reconsider (or others here want to make a one time
donation), here the link:
https://fsfe.org/fellowship/ams/donate.php?ams=donate

Quick background for this decision is:

* We were very tight on the timing. So we concentrated on getting
  support by well known organisations in our field on the EU level or EU
  members states.
* We already had problems to keep up adding other organisations, because
  a lot of smaller organisations (e.g. Linux User Groups) wanted to sign
  and at the moment there is still too much manual work involved in
  this. 
* We did not want to add companies and give visibility to a few very
  fast ones.
* When the media and the general public is checking the website we
  considered it more important that they recognise the signatures and
  that they can mobilise many people to sign, instead of having more org
  signatures. 

I can understand that for-profit companies are not NGOs, but why not
have a section with "supporting companies"? If many signed up, it would
also make a statement that actual companies working within the economy
etc. support this motion.

We received requests by some companies, but the amount would not have
been impressive to add to the website. 

But for the future we have the following ideas:
* We plan to have different categories (local, national, international
  organisations/companies/public administrations) so we can display the
  signing organisations differently on the website, or when we contact
  politicians in certain areas. 
* It should become less time consuming to add new org/company signatures
  to the website, that way we can have more small groups to sign up,
  too.
* For companies: it would be good to have companies who publicly support
  it, so we can also show this to politicians. But most likely we would
  first have a certain amount of companies from different areas and
  sizes. We will also still need to discuss how and if to have them on
  the website, or if we will mainly list them when contacting
  politicians. 
* More public administrations: we did not approach any until now, but
  the City of Barcelona heard about it and signed the open letter, and
  yesterday a local authority from Germany asked how to sign.

Hope that helps to understand the reasoning. 

Best Regards,
Matthias

-- 
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290
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Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner)  -  Weblog (k7r.eu/blog.html)