Summary of July Brussels meeting

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

There were six people at the July 10th meeting in Brussels.  From my notes,
the main things we discussed were:

* People thought the idea of quarterly, Sunday afternoon meetings was good.

* Making a repository of arguments for free software advocates broken down
  by context (school or government or small company or charity) and also by
  mindset (talking to businesses, free culture folk, politicians).  This
  will probably be worked on after the technical work is finished on
  improving the fsfe.org site.

* Should we have a single Belgian meeting or two regional meetings.  Having
  meetings in people's first language, instead of English, might increase
  participation.  On the other hand, location becomes quite complicated.
  Flanders doesn't have a centre (Gent? Antwerp?).  Namur is kinda central
  in Wallonia, but it's over an hour from Brussels by train.

* We talked about related topics such as OpenStreetMap and OpenMoko.

* We talked about the internal structure of FSFE.  I think this came up
  because we were discussing the soon-to-be-announced closer relationship
  between the Fellowship and FSFE.

* Ways of making the Fellowship more affordable, without reducing the
  financial support it provides for FSFE.  Such as adding a box to the
  sign-up form so that Fellows can choose to pay double their Fellowship fee
  and thus "sponsor" someone else who wants to become a Fellow but thinks
  the price is too high.

And other topics people raised.  In general it was a relaxed night, just
talking about recent free software news.  I think it was quite good to meet
people in person, so I hope to see people again on August 7th.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan, +32 477 36 44 19, http://ciaran.compsoc.com/

Support free software, join FSFE's Fellowship: http://fsfe.org

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