Hi everybody,
In the blog about fellowship elections being cancelled[1], the fellowship has been likened to a corporate donor. A similar comparison was made in the invitation to the extraordinary general assembly. On the transparency page[2], there is a link to donor information[3] where FSFE identifies the significant corporate donors, especially those who contribute more than 10% of the budget. The fellowship appears to contribute[4] about a third of the budget, more than any other single donor. That was almost EUR 190,000 in 2016 A single fellow also made a bequest of EUR 150,000 to FSFE and they were not identified publicly. Every corporate donor who contributes over 10% is named publicly. Does anybody feel that the same transparency principle should apply in cases such as bequests? Corporate donors (whether they are publicly listed or private companies) typically have to publish some information publicly, at a bare minimum, we can see in which country they are domiciled and who their directors are. I feel it is a good idea to publish more details about FSFE membership and fellowship. In comparison, while at RMLL, I was at the session about April where they announced that they have 4,000 members[5] and clarified that these are all full members of the association with a right to vote. FSFE currently publishes[6] the names of all legal members (GA members), there are 29. FSFE has not directly published statistics about the fellowship though, although the page[7] about the last elections showed there were 1,532 people eligible to vote. There is a weekly report circulated in the team mailing list that gives a membership breakdown by country. As fellowship representative, I feel that the information in this report is quite important for the fellowship at large. I also feel that it is important for other reasons: - giving volunteers transparency, the same details that GA and team are aware of - being consistent with the availability of information about the corporate donors (e.g. we can see where corporate donors are domiciled, so it is important to know where the fellows are predominantly domiciled) - as the "E" in FSFE is for Europe, I feel it is important to demonstrate the extent to which FSFE is engaged in each European country The dissemination of the fellowship statistics on the team mailing list stopped shortly after the extraordinary general assembly. I notice that the fellowship numbers had been increasing last year but in the last few months it has been decreasing. Personally, I suspect that two factors may be responsible: - the renaming of "fellow" to "supporter", many of the email templates and web pages only started using the new term in the last few months. I personally feel this is a downgrade, as a fellow is by definition a member of a fellowship while a supporter is a more external role. Other people may have had the same feeling and quit. - increasing awareness about the GA decision[8] in October to begin the process of abolishing elections There is also a report circulated each week about mailing list subscriptions. I notice in this report that there is a strong correlation between the number of fellows in each country and the number of mailing list users in each country. The blog[1] about removing the elections asserts that fellows are a "purely financial contributor" but if they are active in the mailing list and volunteering, I feel that statement does not adequately describe the fellowship and it is even more critical to have details on the transparency page and to ensure the GA meeting in October puts in place a new procedure for community members to vote. Regards, Daniel 1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html 2. https://fsfe.org/about/transparency-commitment.en.html 3. https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus.en.html 4. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html 5. https://www.april.org/association#Chiffres_cles 6. https://fsfe.org/about/team.en.html 7. http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_29119d29f759bbf8 8. https://danielpocock.com/our-future-relationship-with-fsfe-2018 _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
