FSFE Newsletter - May 2017

press at fsfe.org press at fsfe.org
Mon May 15 13:49:24 CEST 2017


 = FSFE Newsletter - May 2017 =

[ Read online: https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201705.sv.html ]

 == Daniel Pocock is the new Fellowship representative ==

>From 10 to 24 April 2017 the FSFE ran the ninth annual vote for a
Fellowship representative [1] to represent the FSFE's community and
Fellowship in the FSFE's General Assembly [2]. The General Assembly
consists of members of the FSFE e.V. and is FSFE's legal body. It is
responsible for strategic planning, budgeting, agenda-setting,
exonerating, and the electing and recalling of the Executive Council and
the Financial Officer. And the winner of this year's election is ...
Daniel Pocock! [3]

Daniel Pocock [4] came first from seven candidates who ran for office,
with a self-description inside our wiki page for the Fellowship
Elections 2017 [5] and by participating in public hustings [6].
Unfortunately two different dates were announced for the hustings, but
the log-file is available online for everyone who missed it.

The FSFE would like to thank Nicolas Dietrich, former Fellowship
representative, for his contributions during the last two years and
welcomes Daniel Pocock as a new representative. Please find Daniel's
personal conclusions in his own blog [7].

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Help us grow and make a difference in 2017
https://fsfe.org/join/nl2017-05 [8]

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 == What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE ==

- From 26 to 28 April, the FSFE's annual Free Software Legal and
  Licensing workshop (LLW) [9] took place in Barcelona, Spain. This year
  we gathered 120 legal experts from all over the world to share their
  knowledge and experience with each other in a 3-day event that
  encompassed more than 35 presentations on numerous legal issues, from
  open data [10] to tooling, software patents and existing challenges
  for Free Software licensing [11].

- Armijn Hemel and Shane Coughlan, members of the FSFE Legal Team,
  published a guide [12] for startups, small businesses, and engineers
  on "Practical GPL compliance" [13]. The guide is designed to demystify
  GPL compliance and to facilitate the work of compliance engineers on a
  practical level.

- North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populated state, is having
  general elections on 14 May 2017. The FSFE joined a "coalition of Free
  knowledge" which has developed for the first time a "Digital-o-Mat"
  [14]. The "Digital-o-Mat" is a tool to help those voters who are
  concerned about digital rights and freedoms, to decide about which
  party to vote for during these elections. Eight questions guide users
  to choose their own preferences on important topics about digital
  society - for example questions about the use of Free Software, Open
  Data or Open Educational Resources. After filling them out, users will
  see which party matches best with their own preferences and they can
  additionally browse detailed explanations on the party's positions
  regarding each topic. The interface for North-Rhine Westphalia is in
  German, the underlying Software [15] however is Free Software and free
  to adopt for other purposes.

- On the FSFE's Planet [16], we had an interesting dialogue popping up
  between our executive director Jonas Öberg who argues that sometimes
  you can use proprietary software to further free and open source
  software [17] although you should be aware about the risk of
  backfiring. And Daniel Pocock, our new Fellowship representative,
  answered with "the risk of proprietary software" [18] and that "no
  deal might be better than a bad deal", meaning that if you cannot
  achieve something with Free Software you should consider just doing
  without it.

- Paul Hänsch, one of the FSFE's system administrators, organised the
  very first physical wiki caretakers meeting [19]. The wiki caretakers
  are a team of volunteers [20] who help to organise information inside
  the wiki and make it easy for others to contribute.

- Monitoring shows [21] that in the last semester nine Italian Regions
  have reduced advertisement of proprietary PDF readers on their
  website, and that one Region has increased its support for Free
  Software PDF readers [22].

- The FSFE's executive director Jonas Öberg, blogs about "a new
  understanding of non-profit management" and uses this new
  understanding to analyse the FSFE's characteristics [23] in the uses
  of technocracy, hierarchy, innovation and direction-orientation. Jonas
  closes his analytics with some thoughts about the way he would like to
  see the FSFE evolving.

- The FSFE was present with booths at the Linke Medien Akademie [24] in
  Berlin/Germany, at the 16th Augsburger Linux Info Tag in
  Augsburg/Germany, FOSS North in Göteborg/Sweden and Linuxtage in
  Graz/Austria.

 == Help us improve our newsletter ==

If you see some news you think should be included, forward it to us. If
you'd like to share any thoughts, send them to us. The address is as
always newsletter at fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks to all the volunteers [25], supporters [26] and donors [27] who
make our work possible.

Your editors, Erik Albers, Polina Malaja FSFE

-- 
Free Software Foundation Europe <https://fsfe.org>
FSFE News <https://fsfe.org/news/news.en.rss>
Upcoming FSFE Events <https://fsfe.org/events/events.en.rss>
Fellowship Blog Aggregation <https://planet.fsfe.org/en/rss20.xml>
Free Software Discussions <https://fsfe.org/contact/community.en.html>

  1: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017
  2: http://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/GA
  3: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170425-01
  4: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017#Daniel_Pocock
  5: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017
  6: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Election/FellowshipElection_2017#Hustings
  7: https://danielpocock.com/fsfe-fellowship-representative-and-upcoming-events
  8: https://fsfe.org/join/nl2017-05
  9: https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/legal-conference.en.html
 10: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/721540/7831c0949927d665/
 11: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/721458/be70cd561648d22f/
 12: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/linux-foundation-and-free-software-foundation-europe-introduce-resources-to-support-open-source-software-license-identification-and-compliance-300444721.html
 13: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/research/practical-gpl-compliance
 14: https://www.digital-o-mat.de/
 15: https://github.com/dsstio/digital-o-mat
 16: http://planet.fsfe.org/
 17: http://blog.jonasoberg.net/using-proprietary-software-for-freedom/
 18: https://danielpocock.com/risks-of-using-proprietary-software
 19: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/WikiCaretakers/Hackathon2017
 20: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/WikiCaretakers
 21: https://www.taringamberini.com/en/blog/fsfe/adoption-of-free-software-pdf-readers-in-italian-regional-public-administrations-fourth-monitoring/
 22: https://pdfreaders.org/
 23: http://blog.jonasoberg.net/towards-a-new-understanding-of-non-profit-management/
 24: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Events/2017/LiMA
 25: https://fsfe.org/contribute/contribute
 26: http://fellowship.fsfe.org/join
 27: https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus


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