Am Mittwoch 09 Oktober 2019 15:16:23 schrieb Paul Boddie: > I am sorry for the confusion here. In fact, I wasn't referring to the FSFE > with my remark
Thanks for clarifying. I think it is clear that FSFE volunteers have other professional lives and need to earn their living. Many of them are still related to Free Software and thus FSFE may report on their activities and these lists can be used to chat and talk about all Free Software activities. If someone mails here, it can be completely unrelated to FSFE itself. > Although I wasn't referring to the FSFE, I do wonder whether anyone else > feels that there are certain common themes involved. For instance, a lack > of transparency and a lack of responsiveness to genuine concerns. In my observation the FSFE tries to address all genuine concerns and does get a grade B ("good" over the average) on transparency compared to a large group of organisation and charities. We can and should improve. In addition our balances are checked by the tax office, we must use the money for our constitution. What we do *not have to do* is: * Bring in specific decision processes (e.g. ones that are too heavy) * Let everbody join * Record and publish everything that is said or written for our decision processes. Coming to opinions need protected spaces (even in governments), not everybody likes this, but the majority in FSFE and democracies in Europe do. Most of our supported - as I take it - do not want the FSFE to become an organisation that has elaborate public decision processes, they want us to to campaigns like "public money public code", support that Free Software can be written, used and people, organisations and government are educated about it. We also are a counter weight to commercial interest lobbying that serves interest of single individuals. > > The conference is mainly a meeting of the legal network, see > > https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/ln.en.html > > and we report on it each year. > The problem when reconciling this activity with an organisation seeking to > cultivate some kind of membership, community or broad support is in > convincing this latter group that such an activity, from which they are > largely excluded, is working in their interests and deserves to be part of > the same organisation. The people participating in the legal network are not necessarily members of FSFE (association and social group). FSFE provides a space for them to exchange, while at the same time FSFE can participate, which is a bit of influence. So we get a bit of influence without costs about what legal experts that have an interested in Free Software are talking about and what their organisations (if they represent them) are taking a focus in. To me this sounds like a good thing. > In other words, when told that the organisation has "got this" (meaning > that it is providing some kind of solution), the supporters can only assume > and trust that the outcomes will be beneficial to them. Or read the reports and look at other actions of FSFE close the the legal field, like: Router Freedom https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/ Rooting keeps your warranty https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/legal/flashingdevices.en.html > Meanwhile, other organisations with arguably less "democracy" > pursue such activities transparently and let their supporters know > what they have been saying and doing. Please make an example here. FSFE publishes more and more stuff over the years as far as I observe. (Because this is also a matter of bandwidth.) > The impression this leaves is that there is the VIP track, with all the > benefits and a degree of opacity within which conflicts of interest could > easily develop, and then there is the ordinary supporter track. The "VIP track" is called "volunteer". :) Go to one of the local meetings, help with a booth, join the social group FSFE and you see that you'll learn much more details about the many things that we do. https://fsfe.org/events/events.en.html Best Regards, Bernhard -- FSFE -- Founding Member Support our work for Free Software: blogs.fsfe.org/bernhard https://fsfe.org/donate | contribute
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