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 _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
