Re: obedience and control (was: ....)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 03/05/2019 12:35, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Christian,
> 
> I am also not directly involved in this, but I think legal action  (snip)
> 
> (snip) For example, anyone who wants to can file a GDPR violation with their 
> local data protection officer.
> 


Thanks to Florian and Carmen for bringing up the threats of legal
action, just at Matthias did in private emails last year.

Anybody who wants to go legal can just print this form, sign it and post it:

https://fsfellowship.eu/assets/2019-data-breach-bundle.pdf




Last time I checked, there is no GDPR army outside my door, no attack
helicopters outside my window and I had no problem sleeping last night.

These threats are intended to maintain obedience from everybody, you, me
and every volunteer.  Maybe some people won't take FSFE seriously any
more after all these threats.

Here is the data protection office in Berlin, where FSFE is based:
https://www.datenschutz-berlin.de/ueber-uns/kontakt/

We are a community and we are Free to communicate with each other as we
please.  This trailer makes it clear, are you a prisoner or a guard?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0250258/

If the threat culture bothers you, feel free to unsubscribe[1] or send a
resignation to priv...@fsfe.org

Thank you to the people who already denounced the threat culture and
sent me messages of support.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/options/discussion
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Request for Clarifications

[Daniel Pocock]

On 06/05/2019 17:01, Eike Rathke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Saturday, 2019-05-04 15:41:26 +0200, Diogo Constantino wrote:
> 
> To: discuss...@lists.fsfellowship.eu, discussion@lists.fsfe.org
> 
>> [...]
> 
> Interesting how that mail did not make it to Pocock's list, where every
> mail now is manually approved.. or discarded..
> 


Given that over 90% of people are subscribed to both lists, the censors
have to work extra hard to try and guess which mails the other censors
will accept and then discard them to avoid any user receiving the same
mail on both lists.

Happy Censoring,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: external request to leave the Discussion mailing list

[Daniel Pocock]

On 06/05/2019 13:48, Stephane Ascoet wrote:
> Le 06/05/2019 à 12:50, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>> So what you write appears to be rather defamatory and offensive but also
>> a bit ridiculous.  Just the type of thing that other people from FSFE
>> have been doing with private gossip emails.
>>
>> Naturally, lists.fsfe.org allows offensive messages like yours to get
>> through the censorship regime but then they will probably block replies
>> like mine, hence the reason we have a new home for the fellowship list
>> at https://fsfellowship.eu
>>
>> Anybody who wants to unsubscribe willi before he sends more defamation
>> can click the confirmation link he willingly shared with us:
> 
> Hi Daniel, please stop all of this. I didn't know who was right or wrong
> until last week, now, thanks to your childish behavior, I know.

Reality check: I did stop, I resigned from FSFE in September last year.

Other people kept this going in various ways.  Another derivative of
this mess even evolved at Christmas.

It is always the same pattern too: they spread gossip in private while
pretending to be victims in public

Just out of interest, why does one person have to be right and the other
person wrong?  Many real world situations are far more complicated than
that.

Calling out censorship, smear campaigns and other forms of oppression is
hardly childish, it is the duty of responsible citizens.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: external request to leave the Discussion mailing list

[Daniel Pocock]

On 06/05/2019 07:00, willi uebelherr wrote:
> 
> Dear friends,
> 
> the same i got in the fsf-de-maillist with the same IP adress
> 91.64.208.89 (Vodafone '91.64.0.0 - 91.64.255.255'). But in this time, i
> live in Asuncion in Paraguay and here in the hostal they have a Tigo
> Paraguay account. In the email header, you can see the IP space.
> 
> I am shure it has to do with the fsfellowship.eu-maillist from Daniel
> Pocock. I don't know, who act on this criminal way.
> 

I am sure anybody using that ISP in Germany can open this web page:

https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/options/discussion

cut and paste willi.uebelh...@riseup.net into the form

and click "unsubscribe" and you will get another email too.

So what you write appears to be rather defamatory and offensive but also
a bit ridiculous.  Just the type of thing that other people from FSFE
have been doing with private gossip emails.

Naturally, lists.fsfe.org allows offensive messages like yours to get
through the censorship regime but then they will probably block replies
like mine, hence the reason we have a new home for the fellowship list
at https://fsfellowship.eu

Anybody who wants to unsubscribe willi before he sends more defamation
can click the confirmation link he willingly shared with us:

>> 
>> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/confirm/discussion/adf393441b8e1196aa9cc3ac5a91cae2e13d6b2d
>>



___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

resigning as Fellowship representative

[Daniel Pocock]

(I would kindly request that my signed resignation be forwarded
unaltered to all registered fellows/supporters not on the mailing lists.)


Dear fellows,

Given the decline of the Fellowship and FSFE's migration of fellows into
a supporter program, I no longer feel that there is any further benefit
that a representative can offer to fellows.

With recent blogs, I've made a final effort to fulfill my obligations to
keep you informed. I hope fellows have a better understanding of who we
are and can engage directly with FSFE without a representative. Fellows
who want to remain engaged with FSFE are encouraged to work through your
local groups and coordinators as active participation is the best way to
keep an organization on track.

This resignation is not a response to any other recent events. From a
logical perspective, if the Fellowship is going to evolve out of a
situation like this, it is in the hands of local leaders and fellowship
groups, it is no longer a task for a single representative.

There are many positive experiences I've had working with people in the
FSFE community and I am also very grateful to FSFE for those instances
where I have been supported in activities for free software.

Going forward, leaving this role will also free up time and resources
for other free software projects that I am engaged in.

I'd like to thank all those of you who trusted me to represent you and
supported me in this role during such a challenging time for the Fellowship.

Sincerely,

Daniel Pocock

FSFE Fellowship Representative



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: improving the tone of discussion in FSFE

[Daniel Pocock]

On 11/09/18 11:04, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> Am Montag 10 September 2018 20:08:23 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
> [..]
>> One of the worst things about leadership mistakes is 
>> that people emulate them.  
> [..]
>> most recently Bernhard, putting my name into the subject line of an email[2]
>> reply.  Everything spiralled downwards from there 
> 
> from my perspective it is fine to put a name in an email subject.

Putting a name in the subject has no relation to the topic under
discussion.  It appears to be personal, it appears to be a reprisal for
expressing an opinion and so it violates the code of conduct.

As I also pointed out, it drew other people into similarly questionable
behaviour, do you really want to trigger such things on the mailing lists?

> to read about it again here. Please respect if others do not share your view 
> on the importance of some of these topics, like if a name on a motion is 
> formatted or spelled correctly.

A single typo is a mistake.

Persistently using somebody's first name in that context is really out
of place and not something that happens by accident.  It appears to be
condescending, disrespectful and personal.

It doesn't matter if some people don't care or if most people don't even
look at the minutes: the people who do care would be easily satisfied by
a quick edit of the document.  I suspect that quick edit of the document
would have consumed far less time and energy than replying to my email.


> 
>> It is essential to show respect for volunteers when something goes wrong 
>> in their life and they have to miss an event.
> 
> I agree about this.
> What we disgree about seems to be 
> if respect has been shown, I think it was and is shown.
> This is why I am writing this email, I'm taking some time to give you my 
> perspective and feelings.
> 
>> Reminding people about such things in such an ugly way is a guaranteed 
>> way to poison relationships. 
> 
> There is a direct relation to your criticim of the structures of FSFE.
> People explained to you how you could have made your voice heard and how to 
> exercise your power in the e.V. . At some occasions you have not done it. If 
> you afterwards in public criticise the people in FSFE for not honoring your 
> input, I believe you leave others no choice than to point out where you have 
> not used some opportunities (that have been there even if you were unable to 
> attend some meetings). This does not speculate about why you were not able to 
> do so. It is not unrespectful in my eyes. Instead it shows what others cannot 
> understand the difference between the missed opportunities and your public 
> demands.

You said you "agree", but then you go on to behave in the same
inappropriate manner.  When you write "not used some opportunities", I
feel you are implying I had a choice to be there.  It was not a choice.
This perception that I chose not to come appears to be fuelling a lot of
the antagonism that arises whenever it is mentioned.  Some comments even
imply that I was negligent or mischievous in not attending.

You simply can't say that to any volunteer, or to an employee, no
matter what the situation.  As soon as you question somebody like that,
they lose respect for you and they lose motivation.  There is no benefit
to be gained by making such allegations either.


> but we can declare us incompatible

When Trump was elected, many people felt incompatible.  People quit jobs
in Washington, some people moved to Canada.  Even his own staff are
quitting, somebody quits almost every week but Trump always stays.  That
is the nature of democracy.  If you don't like the person who is
elected, you can go do other things in FSFE or free software or even go
to Canada for a year but hounding that person to resign is just bullying.

It is incredibly immature.

All serious organizations have elections and the people who get elected,
even if they are from different parties, have to work together.

FSFE's biggest problem right now is the collapse[3] in
Fellowship/supporters, the more time people waste in blame games and
trying to overturn the elections, the more Fellows are gone.  And they
are not just missing a meeting, they are probably gone for good.

You complain to me for raising issues like this, but you should thank me
for having the patience to do so.  Hundreds of people just quit without
saying anything.  Maybe they felt incompatible with FSFE leadership?

Regards,

Daniel


3. https://danielpocock.com/who-were-the-fsfe-fellowship

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

improving the tone of discussion in FSFE

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

I've been in discussion with a few people trying to troubleshoot the
root cause of problems in recent discussions.

From my perspective, there are a couple of things that have really
undermined my confidence in the community and keep things at a frosty level.

The way that Matthias has used my first name in the minutes[1] of the
previous GA meeting.  Normally the full name of the person proposing a
motion is presented in a regular font and placed under the motion, but I
feel that putting my first name in the titles is intended to attract
vilification.  The minutes look unprofessional and bring the
organization into disrepute.  I'd kindly request that Matthias corrects
the minutes.  For example, the motions should look like this:

   Title of motion

   Text of motion.
   Proposed by: D. Pocock


One of the worst things about leadership mistakes is that people emulate
them.  Subsequent to the way the president has prepared the minutes,
other members of the community have emulated this behaviour, most
recently Bernhard, putting my name into the subject line of an email[2]
reply.  Everything spiralled downwards from there with somebody else
changing the subject to "Bernhard lectures".  All those emails can be
traced directly back to the way the minutes were prepared and I feel
that Matthias needs to apologize.

There have been frequent, almost always disparaging references to
missing the 2017 meeting.  This has usually happened in private but came
up again in Reinhard's post[3] just last week.  It is essential to show
respect for volunteers when something goes wrong in their life and they
have to miss an event.  Reminding people about such things in such an
ugly way is a guaranteed way to poison relationships.  Furthermore, no
volunteer should feel pressure to disclose the reason they had to miss a
meeting or change their plans.  I'd request that Matthias clarify where
these comments originate from, for example, did the chair of the meeting
say something disparaging or fail to stop disparaging discussions about
the absence?  Why does the chair not intervene to maintain respect for
volunteers in such instances?

Notice that these things also happen in private discussions and I feel
that some of what is now appearing in public is a reflection of that.

I sincerely hope that the president will clear these things up on behalf
of the organization.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/minutes/minutes-2017-10-15.en.pdf
2. https://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/2018-September/012543.html
3. https://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/2018-August/012473.html
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: selective censorship (aka some words from your list-admins)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 05/09/18 16:49, Erik Albers wrote:

> The list administration would like to help bring back a good tone and
> discussion culture by moderating the discussion if necessary and for now we
> set new subscriptions to the list on moderation.
>

The most offensive accusations made on the list today were not from new
subscribers, they appear to be made by a GA member from Germany, in fact
former country coordinator for Germany.  Out of your respect for your
request for being friendly, I'll avoid repeating his name again.

One of those posts is so offensive and inaccurate that I would kindly
request that if you are willing to censor new subscribers, you also
censor that GA member by removing his post from the public archive.

I would also request that you escalate that particular post to the CARE
team.

The root cause of all this appears to be the executive's decision to
attack the fellowship representative with an ultimately unsuccessful
motion to prematurely terminate his membership of FSFE e.V.  I remain of
the opinion that the resignation of the president may be more effective
in helping the community move on from that than tweaking moderation
settings.

Regards,

Daniel

FSFE Fellowship Representative
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Nacht der langen Messer on discussion@ (Re: what makes a good president and chairperson?)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 05/09/18 08:42, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> Am Dienstag 04 September 2018 23:22:33 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> are you trying to change/misrepresent the intention of
>> somebody else's email?
> 
> please read the exchange again and look at the quotes,
> I was asking what ostend...@gmail.com meant by quoting from an HTML mail by 
> matthias.ha...@zoho.eu.
> 
> BTW: as both email addresses have no direct hits on an internet search 
> engine, 
> they strongly support your points and they have similiarities in writing 
> styles, I'm just asking you directly: What is your connection to these email 
> addresses?
> 

Putting my name in the subject line suggests you are just a big bully
and don't really care how anybody answers that question because you've
already assumed everybody who doesn't agree with you is in a conspiracy.

I assume everybody else in the community is a fellow and if they are new
I warmly welcome them to the community, whether I agree with them or not.

I previously asked about giving the fellowship representatives a list of
fellows so we can verify when a communication is from somebody in the
fellowship.  I also asked about having a PGP keyring for fellows,
similar to that used for Debian Developers.  Both ideas were rejected
with reasons about privacy.

If FSFE prioritizes privacy and then you complain because you
can't identify somebody posting a message from a possible alias, isn't
that hypocrisy?

Putting my name in the subject line, background searches on people,
accusing people of a "connection", character assassinations, changing
people's words and another heavy-handed message you sent attacking me in
another sub-thread: it all reeks of bullying and comes with a strong
odour of censorship, you continue to help prove the concerns I raised at
the outset.

Maybe other people are afraid to speak up or using aliases because they
don't want to suffer the same intimidation and character assassination?
Chilling.

Regards,

Daniel

FSFE Fellowship Representative






___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: using abuse to avoid serious issues on discussion@ (Re: what makes a good president and chairperson?)

[Daniel Pocock]

Bernhard,

A private message sent to the GA list just yesterday contradicts what
you said.  Would you like to republish all the GA mails in public or
would you prefer to simply acknowledge you were wrong and withdraw
everything you said?

What is really sinister about your attack on me is that you weren't even
replying to something I said and the strong point in Matthias H's
message was not about me at all.

Matthias was linking your concerns about "identity abuse" to the FSF /
FSFE question.  It is extraordinary to see how far people will go to
avoid questions about that, you went into this horrible and unjustified
tirade against me, makes me feel like I took a bullet for RMS.

Regards,

Daniel

FSFE Fellowship Representative

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: what makes a good president and chairperson?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 04/09/18 10:06, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Montag 03 September 2018 22:12:28 schrieb Stefan Uygur:
>> Pretty much it
>> Can't say l disagree.
> 
> thanks for quoting the HTML email.
> Can you say to which you agree with in particular?
> Carsten's statement that we believes that everything is basically fine?


Bernhard, are you trying to change/misrepresent the intention of
somebody else's email?

> 
>>> Funny question but how did a little posse in Berlin trying to a-- f---
>>> the absent fellowship rep benefit free software?
> 
> Daniel had several potential ways to make sure his opinion and vote would 
> have 
> been represented. He had chosen to not pursue any of them. There also is a 
> second fellowship representative. And the change voted upon there was already 
> in planning before Daniel became to have a fellowship seat. He knows all this 
> and could not convince others about his ways of working over several months 
> and now does not accept what a majority has concluded and goes public here. 
> It is yours do judge the discussion of course.
>

Now you are misrepresenting me

As I wrote[1] in February, I actually support the idea of replacing the
fellowship elections with a better system.

The meeting in May voted on two motions though.  The first motion
abolished any future election for a representative.

The second motion included a very aggressive and ultimately toxic option
to immediately end the last remaining fellowship representative's
membership of the association.  It was tucked away on the last page of a
9 page document where not all members noticed it.  To put it bluntly,
that motion is like somebody spitting in my face and then expecting me
to respond politely.  It implies that volunteers, like myself, are
disposable and deserve little respect.

The president should have anticipated that it would be hard for people
to work together in a friendly manner after such a vote and that is one
of several reasons the call for his resignation is far from a trivial issue.

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://danielpocock.com/our-future-relationship-with-fsfe-2018

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: what makes a good president and chairperson?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 04/09/18 09:54, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> Am Montag 03 September 2018 19:04:25 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> The ideal president or chairperson needs to be somebody who can unite
>> staff, volunteers, fellows, supporters, donors and external parties.  To
>> chair meetings, lead effectively and gain respect when representing FSFE
>> publicly, they need to be above the controversial politics we have seen
>> recently and acceptable to everybody.
> 
> and how do you find such an ideal person?
> 

In most organizations, they let any member of the community nominate for
the position and then all the people can vote.  An election.


>> The president doesn't have to be staff, it could be a volunteer too, we
>> have over 1,500 people in the community and I'm sure there are many good
>> candidates there.
> 
> Our anchor person has much to do, a volunteer wouldn't have enough time on 
> her 
> hands to do the job. 
> 

The key responsibilities are to prepare for the annual meetings and
chair those meetings.

Everything else is optional or could be delegated to staff or other
volunteers.  Remember the days before email?  Somebody
could be on various committees and boards and if they stayed home one
night they wouldn't hear about any of them.

Perpetuating the current burden on the president only guarantees that
nobody else will apply to be in the role, perpetuating the culture that
people are complaining about.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: what makes a good president and chairperson? (was: supporting our fellowship representative)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 30/08/18 10:17, Erik Albers wrote:
>
> And Matthias currently has full support by the staffers.


The ideal president or chairperson needs to be somebody who can unite
staff, volunteers, fellows, supporters, donors and external parties.  To
chair meetings, lead effectively and gain respect when representing FSFE
publicly, they need to be above the controversial politics we have seen
recently and acceptable to everybody.

The president doesn't have to be staff, it could be a volunteer too, we
have over 1,500 people in the community and I'm sure there are many good
candidates there.

Matthias could continue to lead the staff in the Executive Director
role, given Jonas' recent news that he is vacating that role?  Could
this be the most constructive way to move forward and close the chapter
on the recent politics?

Maybe a dramatic change of leader could also be a good alternative to
the endless discussions about diversity.  By making it a position for a
volunteer, more people might apply for it.

Regards,

Daniel


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: who has time for the GA?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 30/08/18 14:49, Nikos Roussos wrote:
>> This brings me back to the original question then: democracy.  Annual
>> elections and allowing all the community to participate can provide
>> regular renewal.  When somebody doesn't have the time any more, either
>> they don't run for re-election or the community will help them depart by
>> voting for an alternative candidate.  Changing the tools and arbitrarily
>> expelling people are a crazy alternative to something as easy to
>> understand as democracy.
> I understand that this may be your expectation, but this hardly true for any 
> non-profit organization out there. You have a very specific view on how FSFE 
> should operate democratically, but that doesn't mean that this is the only 
> way, or even that democracy is the only way to run an organization.
>
> I have been (and still am) member/supporter of various non-profit 
> organizations and none of these apply the kind of democracy you envision. 
> Rightfully so, in my opinion. As an example, I'm a member of EFF but there is 
> no democratic way for me to be elected in the Board of Directors, or 
> participate in their private strategic meetings. Same applies for FSF (US).

There is a big difference: those other groups didn't promise people
democracy, membership and representation.  FSFE did.

> So in practice, what you do, is that you set your personal expectations as an 
> objective high bar of how FSFE should operate and then you criticize the fact 
> that the organization fails to meet your standards. Maybe you should consider 
> the possibility that the organization doesn't want to or should meet these 
> standards.


I'm not trying to impose something new, I'm simply asking for FSFE to
follow through with the previous commitments about democracy.

As an elected representative, would I be doing my job correctly if I
didn't object to the sudden cancellation of the elections?

This discussion about abolishing elections appeared in my inbox almost
immediately after I was elected to the role.  Personally, it made me
feel like I was not completely welcome in the GA from the outset and it
also felt like the whole community and other candidates had been fooled
by the process of nominations, campaigns and voting.

On more than one occasion, I've been told that I should be conscious
about how much money people donate and my communications to fellows are
subject to censorship.  It makes me feel like the whole image of
elections and representation are not up to the basic standards that
people would reasonably expect.  You suggest that I'm setting a "high
bar" but for most people in this community, a democracy with censorship
of the representatives doesn't even reach the low bar.

So if people find my attitude to the situation to be very blunt, that is
where it comes from.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: application for FSFE e.V. membership and resignation

[Daniel Pocock]

On 28/08/18 09:01, Harald Welte wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> I have been watching your rants on FSFE list and in other places for
> a significant amount of time.  Like others, I do believe your intentions
> are good, but your tone and behaviour is not constructive at all.
> Actually, I think you're damaging/discrediting your own position by
> the agressive tone.

If the abusive termination of somebody's membership by underhanded means
doesn't deserve a firm response, what does?

I would be just as outraged if any other member was subjected to similar
tactics by FSFE's executive and as fellowship representative, I would be
speaking up in their defence.


> What you are conveying with this kind of messages (to me) is that you
> feel personally injured and that you'd like to get as much attention
> to that.

No, it is not about attention.  As somebody else commented, that looks
like another attempt at character assassination.

I simply feel that I have an obligation to the people who I agreed to
represented to tell the truth about the organization, for better or
worse.  If all I wanted was attention I would have sent the email (or a
blog) a lot earlier but I deferred doing so in the hope that there would
be some sign of reform.

How come we never hear anybody suggesting that Tank Man was a selfish
attention seeker?


> I don't have as much insight into the activities of the FSFE e.V. or
> into the fellowship to comment in extensive details on the facts.
> However, I've been involved with Free Software for more than two decades
> now, and consider myself as a friend and supporter of the FSFE without
> ever having had any formal role or title in it, or ever being a member.
>
> As a side note, to put things into some perspective: To me, from the
> very beginning of the fellowship establishment, it was always *very*
> clear that being a fellow is not equal to being a voting member of the
> legal entity (e.V.).  This model is quite commonly used in German
> e.V.'s, so no surprise at all.

As the "E" in FSFE is for Europe and many members are outside Germany,
that may not be obvious to many of the people who have come into contact
with FSFE.

Original posts about the fellowship do talk about it being a class of
membership and words like "join" have frequently been used.

At least one article[1] in Linux Magazine talks about fellows having a
vote at the GA after 12 months.  It is remarkable to look at the way
fellows are described there and in this post[2] and then read Erik's
recent post[3] suggesting fellows are no more than another corporate
donor who didn't deserve elections any more.

However, that is only one aspect of the issue.

> What I am missing in your communication and related threads is the clear
> evidence that a reasonable number of "fellows" are actually supporting
> your position in these arguments.  Without the clear support from at
> least a number of fellows, I think your argument is moot.

One other fact that is not made public anywhere is that
membership/fellowship numbers started dropping at the end of last year. 
We are talking about hundreds of people who stopped participating in the
program, that is a fact.  I don't know if those people sent a reason and
if they didn't, we can only guess: was it because the change from
"fellow" to "supporter" feels like a downgrade?  Did some of them see
the motion passed at the annual general meeting (October) to begin the
process of removing elections?  I suspect the former has had more impact
than the latter.

Many people agree that there is a lot of good work being done at FSFE
and that is why people are frustrated about the governance issues, every
time there is some change (e.g. renaming fellows to supporters,
cancelling elections, ...) a few more people silently quit.  This is
another reason why it is important for serious public discussion to
start, the previous discussions about these things all happened in a bubble.

Instead of choosing to stop supporting FSFE, I would encourage people to
come to Berlin on 7 October for the annual general meeting[4] and ask to
be accepted as equal members.

Regards,

Daniel


1.
http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/index.php/layout/set/print/Online/News/Free-Fellowships-at-FSFE
2. https://fsfe.org/news/2008/news-20081210-01.en.html
3. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
4.
https://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20180827/ae43734e/attachment-0001.pdf

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: who has time for the GA?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 29/08/18 10:22, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Am 2018-08-29 um 11:05 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> If you don't have time to meet people personally, it is inevitable there
>> will be some misunderstandings in electronic communications, especially
>> for those trying to squeeze too many things into their life.
> ... says the person who didn't attend any of the two General Assemblies
> he was invited to, because, well, he had no time.
>
> Yes, I do fully agree that a lot of misunderstandings, name-calling,
> mud-throwing and wasted time could have been avoided if only you had
> tried to talk to people (in person or by email) before making complaints
> or accusations in the public.

Do you notice how in my own message, I made significant effort to avoid
being personal: instead of a focus on Bernhard's situation, I draw upon
a mixed set of examples from multiple people.  But I didn't want to
emphasize other people personally, so I left out their names.  The focus
of my message was clearly the practical problems with people having a
"life term" in the GA.

Your reply does the complete opposite: not only is it very personal, it
is also inaccurate, misleading, insulting and disparaging.  For example,
everybody knows I had already planned to go to the Balkans before the
last-minute GA meeting was hastily arranged to avoid the elections.  But
I don't want to focus on that or myself, I want to bring back the two
issues I raised:

- this type of thing (and your message is a great example) seems to be
happening a lot with electronic communications.  It also seems to happen
far more frequently on the private mailing lists, that is one of the
reason I'm using public channels.  So you actually help demonstrate what
I wrote and I thank you for doing so as I didn't want to start picking
out examples like this that were sent privately on the GA list

- what do you think about the general issue of the "life term" in the
GA?  How do we avoid the organization becoming stale and ensure the
people with the most energy and time to commit are able to get properly
engaged in governance, attend meetings, propose motions or nominate for
office?

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: please be excellent to each other (Re: application for FSFE e.V. membership and resignati)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 29/08/18 15:46, Max Mehl wrote:
> # Erik Albers [2018-08-29 11:22 +0200]:
>> 3) most important: the vast majority of the FSFE members voted for another
>>motion. A motion to  keep you in office for the whole 2 year-term!
>>
>> Everybody can read this in the offical minutes:
>>
>>  "The current Fellowship representatives' membership ends as soon as
>>  the constitutional change is successfully registered, or 2 years after
>>  their election, whichever comes later."
> It is noteworthy that this was the least restrictive option the GA has
> voted for. It also allows the second representative, Mirko, to stay
> longer than his 2-years term. So I cannot really understand the riot
> Daniel is trying to start here based on this option. The GA did not
> "stab you in the back". But I start to think that you are actually doing
> everything in your power to provoke GA members by poisoning the FSFE's
> discussion culture...

You mix up a few issues there

Mirko's term had already expired before the meeting (it expires on the
anniversary of election) so the motion couldn't extend his term.

Mirko is not a member any more.  He now has to apply for membership like
any other member of the community by sending a request to m...@fsfe.org
and asking for "membership in passing (provisional membership)", as Erik
encouraged people to do in the blog post in May.  People who want to
vote at the annual general meeting in Berlin on 7 October should
probably do that quite quickly now.

The failure to realize earlier that Mirko's membership had already
lapsed means that his vote and any proxies he carried were incorrectly
recorded in the minutes[1] of the meeting from May.  Is it possible that
this irregularity violates the legality of the constitutional change and
the elections will still have to go ahead now to appoint a replacement
for Mirko to attend the annual meeting in October?

Nonetheless, I never said the GA stabbed me in the back.  I said it
looks like an the person who constructed this motion, not the whole GA,
was trying to stab me in the back.  Think of it this way: putting this
option in the meeting invitation and asking people to come and vote on
it feels a lot like putting a gun to my head, holding it there for a
month and asking people to come and vote on whether to pull the
trigger.  How could any member of a community feel good in such
circumstances?  How could anybody still trust the people behind that
type of politics, even though the vote failed to give them what they
wanted?  Four people voted for that option, including at least one
member of the executive.

Let there be no doubt about it: despite the abstract way in which it is
written, the people who gave up their Saturday to attend the meeting and
the 4 people who voted for that option fully understood the impact it
would have, eliminating a democratically elected representative of the
community.  How do you think I was feeling that weekend, wondering what
was going on at the meeting in Berlin, waiting until several days later
before anybody even told me the outcome of the vote?

The minutes also note that one staff member asked for a secret ballot, I
make no assumptions about how she voted but this demonstrates that
having such politics in the GA creates a horrible situation for staff as
the staff also need to be able to work productively with all of us in
the community and not choose sides in political situations.  As the
president has put the staff in this awkward position, I feel it is
another reason for him to consider resigning.

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/minutes/minutes-2018-05-26.en.pdf

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: minimizing people's views (was: Merchandise production)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 27/08/18 12:49, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Dear Daniel,
>
> after reading your email twice, I still can't make any sense of it,
> unless it's just a rant by intention. Especially I can read neither an

Why minimizing other people's views with such disparaging comments?

Making comments like that, rather than trying to understand what other
people are getting at, is just putting petrol on the fire.


> application for membership from it, nor a resignation. Anyway, I'll

That makes me feel you didn't read the same email then.  It is not a
resignation, it is a call for the president's resignation.

> focus on the one item that falls in my responsibility as the former
> financial officer:
>
> Am 2018-08-27 um 13:19 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> People are asking how FSFE e.V. can raise[5] almost EUR 650,000 in one
>> year and spend barely EUR 37,000 on producing merchandise.
> I don't understand what exactly the question is: why FSFE didn't spend
> more on producing merchandise? Or why FSFE didn't spend less? Or what
> kind of merchandise we spent it on?
>
> Could you, or the other people who are asking that, please be more
> specific about that question?

The public financial report[5] groups all expenditure into just 6
high-level categories

For an organization committed to transparency, a lot more detail could
be provided there.  Doing so would not only stop speculation but may
actually encourage people to give more.

The budget circulated privately contains about 100 lines of data and I
could learn a lot more from studying that, so I feel that either the
whole thing should be made public or at least a bit more of the details,
for example, total commitments to permanent staff, total long term
commitments (leases, loan repayments), etc.

It would be good to publish some ratios, for example, the percentage of
total revenue that funds permanent staff and percentage of funds from
private vs corporate.

It would also be helpful to publish some comments about how the budget
really works: for example, if one or two of the big sponsors pulled out,
which area of expenditure would be cut?  Would somebody be sacked, would
a campaign be suspended?  These things help understand how much the
staff are subconsciously impacted by the corporate money.

Regards,

Daniel


5. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: please be excellent to each other (Re: application for FSFE e.V. membership and resignation)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 27/08/18 16:02, Erik Albers wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> I like to believe that your activities and communication are with good
> intention and you like to change things for the good. However, you should keep
> in mind that we are a organically grown organization with an established
> communication and community culture. And although we are in a process of
> change, the methods you use are currently maybe not the best approach to
> achieve your goals.
>
> In any case it would be helpful if you could to stick to our rules of
> communication and try to be excellent to each other.

When council included a motion in the agenda of the extraordinary
general meeting calling for the immediate termination of my membership,
that was not "being excellent to each other".

Council has unleashed this poison into the community and only the
president can drag us out of that by resigning.  Trying to shift the
blame onto me won't make any difference.  I have felt bad about this
organization ever since I saw that motion in the notice of meeting.  Any
way you look at it, it is bullying and abusive behaviour.


>
> On 27.08.2018 13:19, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> The notice of meeting for 2018 (attached)
> This message was sent internally to all (temporary) members of FSFE. It is not
> allowed on FSFE mailing lists to forward private notes without prior consent
> of the original author.
>

This looks like another attempt at censorship

How am I to communicate with the people who voted for me to represent
them?  Do I have to send documents through wikileaks instead of using
the mailing list?  Wouldn't that be absurd for an organization like FSFE?

The document in question is simply the invitation to our annual general
meeting and I would encourage everybody to attend a meeting like that. 
I'm a member of many other groups and they all gain legitimacy by
engaging as many people as possible in their annual meetings.  What has
FSFE got to hide and why?

> If you like to make a point about something having been discussed in a private
> channel, you can paraphrase the content but you are not allowed to forward it
> to one of FSFE's public mailing lists that is even publicly archived [1] and
> therewith available for everyone with an Internet access.
>
> Such an activity, I guess, is illegal in many jurisdictions as a potential
> invasion of privacy. Definitely it is forbidden on our lists.

Where is the private content in the notice of the meeting?  Everything
in the notice of meeting eventually appears in the minutes which are
published on the FSFE web site.

Please stop trying to scare people with censorship, the FSFE community
is not that gullible.



>
>
>> For example, you previously wrote in a private GA discussion that my
>> communications to fellows should be censored to ensure that
>> communications maximize donations (your comment in February: "people
>> might even stop to support us financially" if I write emails to the the
>> people who I am mandated to represent).  But that is nonsense: the role
>> of a representative is not to maximize donations, my role is to ensure
>> the money already given to you is being spent as well as possible.  For
>> trying to fulfil that role, you immediately set up an illegal conspiracy
>> to stab me in the back, publishing an internal censorship policy for
>> future communications and calling an extraordinary general meeting[4] on
>> a Saturday while I was out in Kosovo doing real free software activities
>> and voting on a motion tacked onto the end of the agenda to immediately
>> terminate my membership without cause.  It is never nice to write such
>> strong words, but in a case like this, fellows deserve to know the ugly
>> truth about FSFE Council's behaviour and as the elected representative I
>> would be negligent if I didn't blow the lid on this.  As the #MeToo
>> movement has demonstrated, sometimes it is necessary to call out
>> obnoxious behaviour to begin a process of reform.
>
> You are using very offensive language here that is against our code of 
> conduct:
>
>   "To foster tolerance, respect and hospitality in our community, we
>   agree not to engage in discriminatory, disparaging or offensive speech
>   or actions"
>
> Please refrain from doing so.


This looks like another attempt at censorship, this time trying to use
the code of conduct as justification.


>
>
>> Personally, I feel that my highest responsibility is to those who
>> elected me and gave me a mandate and I do not wish to be in a position
>> that puts me above the rest of the wider FSFE community 
> Then please consider your audience and as a representative of our community, I
> kindly ask you to help establish a friendly a

application for FSFE e.V. membership and resignation

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi Matthias,

I am writing to you directly, with CC to the FSFE community, as this is
the procedure for membership described[1] in the constitution of FSFE e.V.

I understand that previous Fellowship representatives have written to
you privately on this basis and been granted FSFE e.V. membership beyond
their two year term as a Fellowship representative.

FSFE e.V.'s recent decision to remove[2] the Fellowship and Fellowship
elections from the constitution creates a difficult situation for me. 
As a member of the Fellowship, elected by fellows, I have a
responsibility to the Fellowship.  As long as two or more people
consider themselves fellows, the Fellowship still exists as an
organization because that is the definition of a fellowship.  Removing
it from the constitution doesn't make it go away.

FSFE e.V.'s meeting in 2017 recognized (item 15 in the minutes[3]) that
contributors are not members and despite a split of the GA, it was
resolved to bring them in as members, yet nothing has been done to
implement this motion.  The notice of meeting for 2018 (attached)
suggests that out of 1,700 fellows, only one person has been proposed
for FSFE e.V. membership and I feel this makes a mockery of the motion
passed in 2017.

Last year's decision and the lack of effort to implement it further
emphasises the fact that fellows and volunteers are a separate group,
not being members.  You view us as a resource to be exploited rather
than equal participants.

As FSFE e.V. and the Fellowship are now separate bodies with no defined
relationship, there is clearly a conflict of interest for somebody
elected by one organization (the Fellowship) to be a member of another
organization (FSFE e.V.).  Therefore, I want to make it clear to
everybody that where my obligations to the Fellowship are not aligned
with obligations to the residual members of FSFE e.V., I will be putting
my obligation to fellows first as that is the only responsible thing an
elected representative can do.  Some members of FSFE e.V. have expressed
resentment about this situation but the fact is, fellows were promised
representation and they need good representation now more than ever.

For example, you previously wrote in a private GA discussion that my
communications to fellows should be censored to ensure that
communications maximize donations (your comment in February: "people
might even stop to support us financially" if I write emails to the the
people who I am mandated to represent).  But that is nonsense: the role
of a representative is not to maximize donations, my role is to ensure
the money already given to you is being spent as well as possible.  For
trying to fulfil that role, you immediately set up an illegal conspiracy
to stab me in the back, publishing an internal censorship policy for
future communications and calling an extraordinary general meeting[4] on
a Saturday while I was out in Kosovo doing real free software activities
and voting on a motion tacked onto the end of the agenda to immediately
terminate my membership without cause.  It is never nice to write such
strong words, but in a case like this, fellows deserve to know the ugly
truth about FSFE Council's behaviour and as the elected representative I
would be negligent if I didn't blow the lid on this.  As the #MeToo
movement has demonstrated, sometimes it is necessary to call out
obnoxious behaviour to begin a process of reform.

People are asking how FSFE e.V. can raise[5] almost EUR 650,000 in one
year and spend barely EUR 37,000 on producing merchandise.  The public
pages about financial transparency don't give enough information to
answer that.

With well over half of the funds now coming from the corporate sector
and the two most senior staff enjoying lengthy periods of paternity
leave in 2018, people are also asking whether it is reasonable for
volunteers to contribute their time and personal funds at all.  There
are many organizations in the free software world who we can contribute
to and FSFE e.V. should not take us for granted.

Personally, I feel that my highest responsibility is to those who
elected me and gave me a mandate and I do not wish to be in a position
that puts me above the rest of the wider FSFE community by accepting a
"regular" membership of FSFE e.V. if other members of the Fellowship and
volunteers are excluded from the same membership.  In fact, I feel it
would constitute an act of betrayal for someone elected to represent the
community to suddenly transition to being a member of an elite,
unelected group before their term as representative had even finished.

Membership is critical for all members of our community because that
gives everybody the right to attend the annual meeting, to propose
motions for the agenda, to nominate for roles in council and to hold
council responsible to the whole community.  In other words, membership
is the only basis for good governance.

The constitution empowers you to grant all fellows and volunteers
membership 

Re: urgent: call for observers and community presence at annual meeting

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/07/18 18:48, André Ockers wrote:
> Dear Daniel and list,
>
> On 17-07-18 09:54, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> Note that people can also send requests[3] directly to the president,
>> m...@fsfe.org asking to become provisional member
> What are the obligations for members?
> Are members financially and/or juridically liable?


This is a question about the law of associations in Germany, as that is
where FSFE is registered

Financially, the constitution says fees are waived[1] based on the
efforts you contribute.  The wiki says the fee[2] is EUR 60 per year or
12 hours volunteering.  If you attend a monthly meeting you may qualify
on the volunteering basis.

Incorporation as an association in most countries gives protections to
the members from any financial or judicial consequences but only a
lawyer can give definite answers to that.

Being a member of a board or FSFE council may have more obligations and
risks but being an ordinary member is less demanding.

Regards,

Daniel



1. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/constitution.en.html#sec:membershipfees
2. http://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/GA


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

urgent: call for observers and community presence at annual meeting

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi everybody,

As the elections have been cancelled[1] and the fellows will not be able
to elect a new representative to attend the annual meeting this year, I
would like to raise the possibility that we make the meeting more open
than previous meetings, by having observers who can participate in the
discussions even if they are not yet respected equally.

Not only do we have the end of elections, but last year's meeting also
voted[2] to look at ways to empower the wider community in FSFE's
governance.  While the abolition of elections was rushed through an
extraordinary general meeting in May, I have not seen any hint of how
the new governance structure will be implemented and it is less than 3
months to the annual meeting.

I feel community involvement is vital for various reasons.

One of the most widely known quotes of the American revolution is James
Otis's "Taxation without representation is tyranny."

The FSFE fellows, supporters and community contribute time and money but
have no representation beyond myself and when my term as representative
expires, nobody will replace me.

As in the American Revolution, people can't wait for democracy to be
given to us on proper terms.  You need to be present at meetings like
this.  There is a limit to what I can do myself as your representative.

Council already circulated an email asking people to put 6+7 October in
their diary, a venue has not been announced but we have been told it
will be in Berlin.

There is significant time and cost involved for all GA members to travel
to the meeting so it appears to be in the best interests of the
organization to have any leaders from local groups or associated
organizations who want to attend at the same time and maximize
opportunities for discussion.

Having the community meeting last week separately from the annual
meeting in October appears to create fragmentation in the community and
I don't feel that having GA meetings that exclude the community is the
best way to spend fellows' money or motivate volunteers in the long term.

Note that people can also send requests[3] directly to the president,
m...@fsfe.org asking to become provisional members of the association and
receive an official invitation to the meeting.  As it is less than 3
months away now and it takes a few weeks to process these requests I
would suggest sending the email promptly.

Regards,

Daniel



1. https://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/2018-July/012420.html
2. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/minutes/minutes-2017-10-15.en.pdf
3.
https://fsfe.org/about/legal/constitution.en.html#SECTION0004


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: transparency about the fellowship

[Daniel Pocock]

On 10/07/18 09:19, Michael Kesper wrote:

> If you make your last will with a (for you, at least) substantial


Why do some people in this community thrive on personal put-downs and
insults?

When people make attacks like this on a representative it usually means
they are avoiding real answers.


On 10/07/18 12:53, Mirko Boehm wrote:
> +.
> 
>> On 10. Jul 2018, at 01:05, mray mailto:m...@mray.de>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> The snarky-ness on this entire ML starts being a burden to read.
>> Probably I represent more people than myself with that view.
>> Everybody, please be more excellent to each other.
>>
>>
>> I know you can :)
> 
> Yes, that would be wonderful. Maybe try to focus on issues where we can
> work together, and move things forward towards tangible results.
> 


What is not tangible about publishing the membership numbers?

Isn't an increase in transparency likely to help retain and grow
membership and isn't that a worthwhile tangible outcome too?

Isn't the type of person who makes a valuable contribution in a group
like FSFE likely to be the type of person who values transparency and
elections too?

Or does FSFE aspire to have "supporters" who just give money and don't
ask questions?

An association is fundamentally about the members.  Downgrading fellows
to supporters, minimizing the value of their contributions to FSFE (as
in the announcement[1]) and generally treating them like children by
having a separate membership class for the "adults" are all problems
that need to be addressed if the dwindling membership is going to be
resolved and other tangible outcomes achieved.

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: transparency about the fellowship

[Daniel Pocock]

On 09/07/18 21:31, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Am 2018-07-09 um 20:57 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> A single fellow also made a bequest of EUR 150,000 to FSFE and they were
>> not identified publicly.
> 
> Correction: We recieved a large sum out of an inheritance where the
> deceased explicitly wished to remain anonymous. We never claimed that
> this person was a Fellow, and to keep anonymity of the person intact, I
> will also not make any statement about whether or not the deceased was a
> Fellow.
> 


Would FSFE be willing to allow the elected fellowship representative to
know the facts about this person and see their written intentions?

>> 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?
> 
> We clarified this with "Initiative Transparente Zivilgesellschaft" whose
> rules we follow regarding transparency, and they confirmed that it is ok
> to follow the deceased's wish for anonymity.
> 
> Personally, I do not see a large risk of the deceased person trying to
> influence FSFE's policy in future.
> 

I think it may be useful in such cases for the fact this happened to be
in the list of top donors anyway, but with a statement there saying
"name withheld - bequest" and a brief note about how FSFE acts in such
cases.


>> The dissemination of the fellowship statistics on the team mailing list
>> stopped shortly after the extraordinary general assembly.
> 
> Huh? There hasn't been any change in this. The statistics is still sent
> each Sunday on 4:00 by a cron job.
> 
> For others reading here: the statistics shows the number of supporters
> by country and the development over the past months and years. It is
> sent to the "core team" mailing list so that people coordinating an
> activity can get feedback about the development of supporter numbers.
> 

Last email I saw was on 10 June, if it is a technical issue please let
me know


>> 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:
>>
>> [...]
> 
> Maybe it's the discussion currently happening on some public mailing
> lists which create the impression that FSFE is mainly busy with its own
> internals rather than doing actual work. It is unfortunate that such an
> impression comes up, because it does not match reality.
> 

Not discussing the issue runs the risk that things continue to slide.

I notice that our sister organization, the FSF, also produces an annual
report[1] with membership and supporter data.  They report having 9
board members with voting rights and 2000 volunteers.

Their report includes the amounts paid in some individual salaries and a
much more detailed budget.

The amortization report lists some of the hardware products they have
chosen.

In my role as representative, I'm keen to see a similar amount of detail
made available to FSFE's fellows and I wouldn't be performing my role
properly if I didn't ask questions like that.

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://www.fsf.org/about/financial
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

transparency about the fellowship

[Daniel Pocock]

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
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

minutes from Extraordinary General Meeting on 26 May 2018?

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi Matthias,

Can you please make sure the minutes of the EGM are available on the
minutes page[1] of the web site?

Some people have asked questions about this and I think it is important
that people have this information available at the community meeting.

Regards,

Daniel



1. https://fsfe.org/about/transparency-commitment.en.html
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: the questions you really want FSFE to answer

[Daniel Pocock]

On 15/06/18 18:28, Torsten Grote wrote:
> On 06/14/2018 07:25 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> There are currently no other elected representatives of the community in
>> the General Assembly
> 
> I am a bit surprised by this claim. What do you consider "the community"
> and do you think I am part of it?


The role itself is an institution, bigger than either you or I.

Your term finished, you applied for and were accepted as an ordinary
member of the General Assembly so you no longer occupy the role of a
representative.

That is not to question the involvement of ordinary GA members in the
community.  However, only the currently sitting representative(s) have
the responsibility and mandate that comes with a representative role.

Regards,

Daniel


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Public Money Public Code: a good policy for FSFE and other non-profits?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 16/06/18 15:29, Albert Dengg wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 09:50:42AM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> ...
>>
>> In this particular thread, another staff member, Erik, has written "I
>> propose you trust us that we use Free Software always and that this is
>> minimum 95%, including our phones, landlines, printers etc." and that
>> leaves open the question about the other 5%
> well, some if he already mentioned.
>>
>> I didn't try to write the motion with lots of little rules and things
>> because I was hoping people would approach the question maturely.  If
>> the motion is revised to focus on something like "staff computers" and
>> people reply that only the firmware is non-free but they don't tell us
>> they are using non-free apps on their personal mobile phones to do FSFE
>> stuff then they are not respecting the intention of the motion
> well...if they are their personal phone, we have little power to
> tell them what to do with them?
> 

An employer can't really intrude on an employee's personal device.

However, FSFE may be able to make rules about which personal
devices can be used for employment related activities, ban the devices
from the office or offer more suitable devices to staff.

In the case of messaging apps, the contact data, attachments or messages
themselves may contain data that is work related or falls under
legitimate FSFE policies.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Public Money Public Code: a good policy for FSFE and other non-profits?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 15/06/18 16:45, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Am 2018-06-15 um 12:12 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>>> No proprietary software runs on any of FSFE's servers in userspace, and
>>> of course all software developed by FSFE staff or by contractors paid by
>>> FSFE is free software.
>>>
>> So what is Jonas referring to in his blog[1]?
> 
> I don't know whether he refers to a specific case at all. I read his
> blog post as a general consideration, and I can't find any mention of
> FSFE in there.
> 
> If you want to know what he refers to, did you consider asking him?
> 
> I hope you don't want to tell us that this blog post is the foundation
> on which you base your complains that FSFE uses proprieatary software??


It is not just about Jonas' blog post.  Some communication apps like
Skype and Twitter have been mentioned in various places.

For example, on the team list, there is message
1498121148.fd6avqk03q...@vita.none and some other messages in that
thread.  It is not clear whether anybody has it on FSFE or private
devices or not at all.

In this particular thread, another staff member, Erik, has written "I
propose you trust us that we use Free Software always and that this is
minimum 95%, including our phones, landlines, printers etc." and that
leaves open the question about the other 5%

I didn't try to write the motion with lots of little rules and things
because I was hoping people would approach the question maturely.  If
the motion is revised to focus on something like "staff computers" and
people reply that only the firmware is non-free but they don't tell us
they are using non-free apps on their personal mobile phones to do FSFE
stuff then they are not respecting the intention of the motion

The motion should also apply to firmware.  Think about some of the
following:

- printer firmware: many modern network printers are automatically
phoning home to their manufacturer to report about usage and download
updates.

- IP phones on your desk: how do you know the microphone can't be
switched on remotely if it runs non-free firmware?  In fact, such
exploits are well known

Some organizations even generate these reports (or the skeleton of the
report) automatically, extracting a list of all known MAC addresses from
their switches and access points, installing management agents on every
host with a function to detect all installed binaries and also observing
all network connections and correlating them back to the respective
binaries.  Such data could be cross referenced with checksums of trusted
binaries and the data could be annotated on a wiki page.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Public Money Public Code: a good policy for FSFE and other non-profits?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 15/06/18 09:11, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Hi, Carsten!
> 
> Am 2018-06-14 um 12:06 schrieb Carsten Agger:
>> I'd limit the scope as such:
>>
>> * We're talking of the software used by *the association* as part of its
>> *operations*, i.e. not about the personal choices of employees or
>> volunteers in their spare time.
>>
>> * We're talking about software used by the organization in its *own*
>> operations - not that of vendors and other third parties (e.g.,
>> designers and accountants - if the designer prefers to use Gimp for
>> images that's fine, but they *are* a third party)
>>
>> * We're talking about *tools*, i.e. mostly userspace software. We should
>> include proprietary JavaScript - so using Twitter or Google is not
>> "using proprietary software" because the service is proprietary, but
>> because they use non-free JavaScript (I mention this to align with the
>> FSF's position). Anything proprietary installed on staff computers for
>> work purposes would be listed, e.g. Skype, if someone were using that
>> (which I have reasons to believe is not the case)
>>
>> * We're not talking about firmware.
> 
> That sounds like a reasonable scope to me, except for JavaScript, which
> I would regard debatable. And if I am not mistaken, apart from
> JavaScript, FSFE does not use any proprietary software within this
> scope. Actually I'm not even sure about JavaScript, since the services
> you mention might also run with JavaScript turned off.
> 
> No proprietary software runs on any of FSFE's servers in userspace, and
> of course all software developed by FSFE staff or by contractors paid by
> FSFE is free software.
> 

So what is Jonas referring to in his blog[1]?



> Anything further doesn't seem very reasonable to me: I would, for
> example, not want our volunteers to spend their time with documenting
> which web pages they visited where JavaScript was required.
> 

If it is part of any significant FSFE-related process it should be
documented in the process and then it should be obvious to any volunteer
who reviews the documentation.

If volunteers have non-free stuff that they use for unrelated purposes
then I don't expect that to fall under the scope of a motion passed in
FSFE's General Assembly.

On the other hand, I would contend that people who want to be in
leadership positions in the FSF / FSFE family would have a burning
desire to make such a list and work constructively to shorten it and
they wouldn't be able to sleep at night without doing this exercise.

Regards,

Daniel



1.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170620233433/http://blog.jonasoberg.net/using-proprietary-software-for-freedom/

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Public Money Public Code: a good policy for FSFE and other non-profits?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 15/06/18 10:49, Alessandro Rubini wrote:

>> To give Daniel credit, he did state that the text might be improved.
> 
> The text (the way it is worded), not the proposal. Exact wording again:
> 
>If you can see something wrong with the text of the motion, please
>help me improve it so it may be more likely to be accepted.
> 

[snip]

> 
> And it's not the first time I get on fire for similar reasons.
> Repeating over and over, not listening, wasting everybody's time in
> endless loops, flooding discussion with irrelevant nitpicking and
> theoretical problems...
> 

My blog explicitly asked people how the motion could be improved and I'm
listening for the responses from the community.

It is sad that a lot of the mails I see, rather than addressing the
issues, are one of the following:

- excuses why making this list is so hard that we can't even begin

- excuses why people can't have elections (other thread)

- attempts to twist my message into something else with negative emotive
language like "hall of shame"

- personal attacks on me or how well I perform my role as a representative

I hope other people won't be deterred from speaking up about how this
motion could be improved.  I already received some suggestions privately
and started drafting a new version of the motion.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: the questions you really want FSFE to answer

[Daniel Pocock]

On 15/06/18 00:13, Carmen Bianca Bakker wrote:
> Dear Daniel,
> 
> On ĵaŭ, 2018-06-14 at 22:37 +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>>> This statement could create the impression that Daniel Pocock was the
>>> one vote against the simplification of the membership procedure.
>>> However, this is not the case. Daniel Pocock did not participate in this
>>> vote, nor did he participate in the General Assembly altogether (neither
>>> personally nor by delegation).
>>>
>>
>> Some people may have chosen not to attend the meeting so that it
>> wouldn't achieve quorum.
> 
> That sounds unusually anti-democratic.  A staunch democrat votes.
> 
>> In my case, I actually went out to Albania and Kosovo for free software
>> events[1] while other FSFE GA members and staff were meeting in Berlin
>> to remove my position.
> 
> This sounds more than a little disingenuous.  It sounds like you are
> implying that the GA scarcely go to free software events and/or only
> had a meeting to vote on a single matter.  Both couldn't be further
> from the truth.
> 

The meeting minutes show that it only considered a single matter.


> I am certain that there is a better platform or way to address these
> disagreements than what looks like airing dirty laundry in public,
> though.  The CoC mandates that criticism be constructive, and claims
> like this...
> 
>> As the last[1] man standing for democracy in FSFE
> 
> ...don't look the part.
> 
> I assume you have good intentions, Daniel, and love free software every
> bit as much as the rest of us, so I want to ask you if your issues can
> be addressed with the same assumption of good intentions.
> 

As a representative, I also have to be honest with people

There are currently no other elected representatives of the community in
the General Assembly

While some people don't care about elections or proper membership, other
people do care about it so much that they stopped contributing and that
is a loss for everybody.

The constructive thing to do is get more people involved in the
discussion about what comes next rather than using a reference to the
CoC to censor how people discuss it.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: the questions you really want FSFE to answer

[Daniel Pocock]

On 14/06/18 23:48, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
> I try to post no more than once a day, for several reasons, but this is
> otrageous.
> 
>> Some people may have chosen not to attend the meeting so that it
>> wouldn't achieve quorum.
> 
> Such people may be polite enough to state that clearly in advance,
> since they were well aware the council were trying to find a suitable
> date for them.
> 
> The date (May 26th) was chosen in order to allow you, Daniel, to attend.
> Message-Id: <1524740237.bd97pi0uvf...@vita.none>
> 


The message you refer to doesn't contain any evidence that I was
actively contacted about the date, it suggests people guessed I would be
in OSCAL the weekend before and assumed, without contacting me, that I
would be available to attend an extraordinary general meeting in Berlin
on 26 May.



>> In my case, I actually went out to Albania and Kosovo for free software
>> events[1]
> 
> The event, OSCAL, was on the previous weekend. You did not state that
> you would stay in the area one week more, until after the date was
> decided.
> 

I am not FSFE staff, I am a volunteer, so I don't have to share my
travel plans for months in advance.


> There is no need to argue on these details in public. But I can't
> accept that you paint reality your way in order to play the
> mistreated and destroy trust within our community.
> 

I am not painting reality.

I feel that in this case you have simply seen the message you refer to
above and assumed some effort was made to contact me about the date.
While the message mentions my name, I confirm no attempt was made to
contact me about availability for that date.

The real question is: why was this meeting held in May, in Berlin, where
only nine people could attend (mostly staff) and not during the
community meeting in July?  Then a lot more people, including me, could
have participated and the costs of having the meeting on 26 May would
have been avoided.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: the questions you really want FSFE to answer

[Daniel Pocock]

On 14/06/18 21:57, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Hi, all!
> 
> Just to avoid misunderstandings:
> 
> Am 2018-06-14 um 21:33 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> As the last[1] man standing for democracy in FSFE,[...]
>>
>> 1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
> 
> This statement could create the impression that Daniel Pocock was the
> one vote against the simplification of the membership procedure.
> However, this is not the case. Daniel Pocock did not participate in this
> vote, nor did he participate in the General Assembly altogether (neither
> personally nor by delegation).
> 

Some people may have chosen not to attend the meeting so that it
wouldn't achieve quorum.

In my case, I actually went out to Albania and Kosovo for free software
events[1] while other FSFE GA members and staff were meeting in Berlin
to remove my position.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://danielpocock.com/pmpc-for-fsfe-itself
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: the questions you really want FSFE to answer

[Daniel Pocock]

On 14/06/18 21:58, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> 
> Daniel Pocock  writes:
>> As the last[1] man standing for democracy in FSFE
> 
> Perhaps this is meant as a joke, but you usually do not make that clear
> in your writing, so I am assuming it is serious.  This is an incredibly
> insulting statement to many people within the FSFE.  You are supposed to
> also represent FSFE Supporters like me and others who you insult on a
> regular basis.  I appreciate how seriously you take your responsibility
> as a representative, but with your current communication style I have to
> say you do not represent me because I stand for civil communication, not
> for insults and attacks.

For me, active representatives asking difficult questions are an
essential part of a democracy.

I have no desire to join the executive council, become a staff member or
be president of FSFE, this is the role I chose to volunteer for and I am
naturally a bit disappointed that the rug was pulled out underneath me.

To make it clear, FSFE has a community with hundreds of long time
supporters/fellows/volunteers who have contributed time and money
regularly over many years but have:

- no right to petition for a general meeting

- no right to propose a motion in a general meeting

- no right to run for president

- and since May 2018, no right to vote (since the elections have just
been abolished)

In fact, the people affected by this change who previously had a right
to vote were not even sent the invitation to the meeting.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

the questions you really want FSFE to answer

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

As the last[1] man standing for democracy in FSFE, I propose to give a
report at the community meeting[2] at RMLL

It is important for me to understand the topics you want me to cover as
so many things have happened in free software and in FSFE in recent times.

Some of the things people already asked me about:

- the status of the fellowship and the membership status of fellows

- use of non-free software and cloud services in FSFE, deviating from
the philosophy that people associate with the FSF / FSFE family

- measuring both the impact and cost of campaigns, to see if we get
value for money (a high level view of expenditure is here[3])

What are the issues you would like me to address?  Please feel free to
email me privately or publicly.  If I don't have answers immediately I
would seek to get them for you as I prepare my report.  Without your
support and feedback, I don't have a mandate to pursue these issues on
your behalf so if you have any concerns, please reply.

Regards,

Daniel

FSFE Fellowship Representative




1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
2. https://wiki.fsfe.org/Events/LSMandCommunityMeeting2018
3. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Constructive measures to help people communicate freely

[Daniel Pocock]

On 26/03/18 22:40, Paul Boddie wrote:
> On Monday 26. March 2018 20.16.03 Daniel Pocock wrote:
>>
>> That is not a good summary of who the plugin is for or how it will help
>> them
> 
> Sorry to misrepresent it, but it has previously been framed as "breaking bad 
> habits", which is a little different from helping people comply with 
> organisational policy.
> 

You wrote "telling people that they are bad", but I only said the habits
are bad, not the people.

If I say a habit is bad, I am not saying the person is bad.  Everybody
has some bad habits but that doesn't mean everybody is bad.


> [...]
> 
>> We also need to go beyond technology: remind people that they don't need
>> any of these things (whether proprietary or free) to live their lives.
>> The human race evolved for millions of years without smartphone apps.
> 
> True enough. I don't even have a smartphone. And when I inevitably get one, I 
> imagine that I will only use it beyond traditional phone activities for 
> things 
> like navigation: something which migrated into the phone device profile as 
> such devices became able to successfully integrate such functions.
> 

Even dumb phones are surprisingly good at monitoring you.  The phone
number alone is a powerful mechanism for joining the dots.  SMS
"authentication" is not about security at all, it is about linking you
to all your other online accounts, credit records, online job searches, etc.

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

Re: Constructive measures to help people communicate freely

[Daniel Pocock]

On 25/03/18 18:08, Paul Boddie wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> There has been a lot said recently about Facebook, Google, and other entities 
> that facilitate online communication through services that have hidden 
> impacts 
> on people's freedoms. But as I noted before, it is more constructive to focus 
> on how we in the Free Software community can help others communicate using 
> more respectful tools and services.
> 
> This isn't just in the context of recent discussions about Mozilla and 
> Facebook: I also mentioned it when Daniel suggested a plugin to remind people 
> about how their use of proprietary, exploitative services might be impacting 
> their freedom and those of others. While I understand what the motives are 
> for 
> doing something like this, telling people that they are bad only really 
> appeals to people who like punishing themselves or who admit to weakness and 
> want someone else to apply the discipline.
> 

That is not a good summary of who the plugin is for or how it will help them

- who it is for: anybody, whether they know about free software or not.
The user would be able to specify their level of understanding and the
plugin behavior would be optimized for them.  E.g. if the user says "I
work in a free software company and I have to avoid proprietary services
to comply with policy", the plugin might be quite strict but if they say
"I want to gradually take back control" it will behave more softly.

- how it will help: it will NOT be telling people they are "bad".  Even
people with the best intentions struggle to overcome bad habits.  There
is significant research in neuroscience to show why that is hard, it is
not just a choice or lazyness.  When a young driver learns the habits of
correct driving, they almost always start with a driving instructor.
Imagine the chaos on the roads if nobody ever had a driving instructor:
that is what exists online today.  The plugin can try and take a role
like the driving instructor, giving positive help.


> Now, it is often the case that any negative message is accompanied by a 
> positive one. One might suggest a range of alternatives that are better for 
> people. So, people have already suggested that the FSFE and the community in 
> general promote things like Diaspora, GNU Social, Mastodon, or whatever. But 
> I 
> don't think this goes far enough.
> 

We also need to go beyond technology: remind people that they don't need
any of these things (whether proprietary or free) to live their lives.
The human race evolved for millions of years without smartphone apps.

When I tell people I don't have any social media accounts and I'm happy
about it, they feel more enthusiastic too.  But if I tell them that I
don't have facebook and then they were to see me on Twitter then the
message would be undermined.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
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

seeking co-mentors for GSoC projects

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

I've listed a number of projects[1] for GSoC this year under Debian.

Most involve Python, some are Mozilla extensions (JavaScript)

Several of them involve themes discussed in FSFE recently, for example,
developing a social calendar or extending a browser plugin to help
people with free software habits (e.g. recommending alternatives to
sites like Doodle)

Not every mentor needs to be a developer: it is sufficient to be able to
provide students with some guidance about how to interact with the
community, discussing weekly goals and testing their work.

If we don't have enough mentors then it is unlikely all of these
projects would go ahead this year.

If you are interested, please feel free to reply privately or through
the debian-outreach list[2]

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2018/Projects
2. https://lists.debian.org/debian-outreach
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: free/open technology for home heating systems

[Daniel Pocock]

On 22/01/18 12:59, David Rabel wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> I'm not sure if I understand perfectly what you are looking for.
> 
> I know there is (was?) a group called osdomotics, mainly from austria,
> aiming to push forward home automation solutions built on free/open
> technology. http://osdwiki.open-entry.com/doku.php/:en:start
> 
> We built a heating control based on free components, you may want to
> have a look at it: https://noresoft.com/heating_control_en.html
> Unfortunately it never got further than that prototype.
> 

Thanks for that feedback

Do solutions like this work with any boiler, or is it necessary to
select a boiler with a specific interface to support such devices?

I looked at several of the links in replies on this thread and couldn't
find any recommendations for choosing a boiler or checking compatibility.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: subdomains for testing things

[Daniel Pocock]

On 08/02/18 17:51, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> 
> Daniel Pocock <dan...@pocock.pro> writes:
>> How does using a domain with the word "test" in it somewhere create more
>> work?
> 
> At some point, a service is at least supposed to go into production, so
> at that point, configuration files need to change, DNS records need to
> change, and links to the old subdomain break unless you set up
> forwarding in the server.  That may not sound like a lot, but it is
> additional work.
> 

In many organizations, they keep the test instance running after it goes
into production and they use the test instance to test new versions of
the code before production upgrades.

So that extra work increases quality and decreases downtime.

> 
>> What about the possibility that people using the service by mistake
>> creates more work too?
> 
> That is a good point.  There is a simpler solution to this, though.  We
> can either add a "test" to the logo of the page or add a description
> that describes the test nature or perhaps both.
>


That is also a great idea

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 23/01/18 21:24, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Stephane,
> 
> 
> Stephane Ascoet <stephane.asc...@univ-paris1.fr> writes:
>> Le 29/01/2018 à 09:53, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>>> You can simultaneously solve your problems with public transport and
>>> finding a date by purchasing a motorbike.
>>
>> Hi, I can't believe how much you're trying to find even the silliest
>> answers to avoid seeing reality, especially here at FSFE!!!
> 
> I am pretty sure Daniel was joking here.  I don't think he believes that
> motorbikes actually get you dates.
> 


Do you have a motorbike?
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: subdomains for testing things

[Daniel Pocock]

On 08/02/18 11:02, Max Mehl wrote:
> # Daniel Pocock [2018-02-08 11:00 +0100]:
>> There is a distinction between people volunteering to maintain a service
>> and the association choosing to rely on a service.
>>
>> This is particularly important in cases where two services do something
>> similar (e.g. Discourse acts as an alternative to the existing Mailman
>> service).  If half the group uses one service and half the group uses
>> the other, you split the organization or you double the amount of effort
>> required to community.  Metcalfe's law[1] comes to mind.
>
> I have to disagree in this case, with the positive experiences from the
> Git service [^1] in mind. Neither Discourse nor Gitea are/were
> officially planned to act as a replacement for any service.
> Git was something a few community members have wished for, and Björn and
> me just set it up. We were happy that it didn't entail any huge

Git is designed from the ground up as a distributed tool so that is
vastly different.  I would love to see a mailing list alternative that
uses a distributed architecture like Git as a back-end (although it
would still be up to the group to decide on using it)

Each project that uses Git can do so without impacting other projects.

Communication tools (Mailman, Discourse, XMPP) are a special case though
because everybody needs to use them.


> bureaucrazy [sic], we were able to make some tests right away, and to
> invite some people to give us feedback. That way we experienced that
> Gitea can also act as a replacement for SVN in the future and fits
> nicely in some workflows of our organisation. To make it official, we
> just had to announce it, no domain change, no votes of huge groups.
>
> Discourse could work similarly. It has been set up by a group of
> volunteers and we gave them a free hand. Later it might serve as a
> communication platform for a specific campaign or activity, and if we
> will make good experiences, other groups and parts of the organisation
> might think about picking it up for their activities, potentially now as
> an "official" service. There is no need that we *now* think about
> replacing the GA mailing list.
>


But it is not that simple.  If you start using it for a campaign, you
are either
a) forcing everybody who interacts the campaign to use it too, or
b) isolating the campaign from the rest of the community.

Neither is ideal.

Consider the impact by Metcalfe's Law, imagine we have 200 volunteers
using a single communication tool for all campaigns:

Value = 200^2 = 40,000

Now imagine if you have 150 volunteers using email and 50 using Discourse:

Value = 150^2 + 50^2 = 25,000

What Metcalfe's Law is telling us is that an organization committed to a
single platform is stronger than an organization that spreads itself
over different platforms.  It works either way: even if 150 volunteers
switch to Discourse and only 50 remain on email, the organization is
still weaker.

Note that in this example, I'm ignoring all the other differences
between the platforms (e.g. forums like Discourse are more prone to
censorship and tampering) and only focusing on the strength of the network.

It is also worth remembering that FSFE needs to communicate with people
beyond the community: once again the global email network has a value
with Metcalfe's Law, but each forum instance is like a little island.



> In my experience, bureaucracy frustrates volunteers for very good
> reasons. Let them define a subdomain name, let them hack around, give
> them some freedom – if such a service ever is ready for
> organisation-wide usage, we can still think about the details. But
> devaluate their service by putting a "test" in the domain name would
> demotivate me as a service maintainer and user at the same time.
>

In fact, we have a similar thing in Debian: any Debian Developer can set
up subdomains under debian.net almost instantly but only officially
supported things go under debian.org.  This strategy has been very
successful and is well understood in the Debian community.

Something can only migrate from debian.net to debian.org if there is
widespread consensus about it.

It is about the community consciously deciding which direction to go and
also being willing to support something even if the volunteers who
started it drop out.


> And, once again, your proposal solves a non-problem in my opinion.
> hellekin found harsh words to express his feelings, but his problem
> wasn't that the service implied to be official but that he didn't know
> about it.
>

Well, I hope my calculation with Metcalfe's Law helps people understand
why it is a problem, at least when we talk about communication tools.

> Best,
> Max
>
>
> [^1]: git.fsfe.org
>

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: subdomains for testing things (was: forums, mailing lists and other tools)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 08/02/18 08:27, Max Mehl wrote:
> # hellekin [2018-02-01 11:05 +0100]:
>> On Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 07:26:42AM +0100, Florian Snow wrote:
>>>
>>> This may have been mentioned before, but there is a Discourse instance
>>> at community.fsfe.org.
>>
>> Hmmm, no there is not, only a broken page. Anyway, if it existed when
>> I proposed my services last year, nobody mentioned it. If it is more
>> recent I find it surprising and upsetting that I have to learn it from
>> the general discussion list. FSFE's community outreach has been, in my
>> experience, suboptimal -- a cool-down euphemism for catastrophic.
>
> The Discourse instance, which I think I've explained multiple times on
> this list, has been set up by volunteers. It is still in a testing
> status so it's rather senseless for the FSFE to promote it.
>
> Of course you are invited to help them [^1] and help the FSFE and its
> community to try new communication tools.
>
> Best,
> Max
>
> [^1]: https://git.fsfe.org/fsfe-system-hackers/community
>

Could we have a dedicated sub-domain for anything like this that is
running as a test?

Using a domain like "community.fsfe.org" runs the risk that it is
perceived as or used as if it were a supported service.

Renaming it to community.test.fsfe.org or community.fsfe-test.org or
something similar would be a good idea.

Furthermore, management of the subdomains for testing (call it "lab
support") could be delegated to a wider group than management of the
main fsfe.org domain (if we consider that to be "production support")

Regards,

Daniel


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Apply for membership and meet us at FOSDEM

[Daniel Pocock]

On 05/02/18 18:01, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Am 2018-02-05 um 14:58 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> - the German laws for non-profits (this was mentioned on another list)
>> allow donors to specify that their donation or ongoing contributions be
>> used for capital purposes.  So any fellow/supporter can write an email
>> to cont...@fsfe.org and declare that all or a percentage of their
>> donations are for investment / capital reserves and that money can't be
>> spent on operating expenses or campaigns.
> you misunderstood this:
>
> A donor can indicate that her donation *may* be used to build up a
> capital reserve, and unless she does so, the donation has to be used
> "immediately" (which in generally accepted interpretation of the law
> translates to "not later than in the fiscal year following the donation)
> for constitutional purposes.
>
> A donor can not *require* a donation to be held as a capital reserve,
> and it would be unlogical if this was possible, because it would mean
> that the recipient of the donation does not have the power of disposal
> over the donated amount.
>
> In practice, asking for donations for building up a capital reserve is
> done in specific cases, for example to accumulate the required capital
> for a larger investment (think of a football club wanting to renovate
> the sports stadium in 5 years).
>
> I hope this makes it clearer.

Thanks for clarifying that

Somebody could still require the donation to be used for capital reserve
in various ways though: in a will, when leaving a bequest, they can
simply write that if the money is not accepted with this condition then
it goes to some other beneficiary.  The executor of the will would then
ask FSFE to confirm it will be used for capital purposes.  e.g. somebody
could write "I give 50% of my estate to my wife, 33% to my children, EUR
25,000 to FSFE for the purpose of capital investment and anything
remaining goes to my cat".  The executor of the will would contact FSFE
and if the condition was not accepted by council, the EUR 25,000 would
go to the cat.

Donors/supporters could make similar requests to FSFE in any other
circumstances too: if the organization rejects the condition, the donor
doesn't send the money.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Apply for membership and meet us at FOSDEM

[Daniel Pocock]

On 05/02/18 13:09, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Carsten,
>
>
> Carsten Agger  writes:
>> Of course Google could not have a voice in the GA - they're a
>> proprietary software company and by definition are not committed to
>> the values of free software.
> To make this clear:  I am not advocating for companies getting a voice,
> but what you are describing is not clear from Daniel's proposition.  If
> financial contribution equals the right to vote for a representative in
> the GA, then I am not sure how it would be justified to exclude some
> financial contributions from that right.

There are many points related to that:

- some non-profits do accept corporate members, with or without voting
rights

- some non-profits allow donors to give to specific campaigns: so a
corporate could "vote" for the Public Money Public Code campaign by
making a donation that is only for that campaign.  FSFE could choose to
reject the donation if that condition is not acceptable.  Nonetheless,
each campaign could include an admin overhead cost that helps keep the
lights on in the office, so corporates could not avoid contributing to
essential operational costs.

- in businesses, it is normal for votes at the AGM to be based on
financial shareholding, a shareholder with more shares gets more votes. 
In some countries I think non-profits can choose that model too.  It is
complicated when mixing the votes of volunteers with the votes of
financial donors though so this would be unlikely in FSFE.

- the German laws for non-profits (this was mentioned on another list)
allow donors to specify that their donation or ongoing contributions be
used for capital purposes.  So any fellow/supporter can write an email
to cont...@fsfe.org and declare that all or a percentage of their
donations are for investment / capital reserves and that money can't be
spent on operating expenses or campaigns.  This might be very relevant
for people leaving a bequest to FSFE who want the money to have a
long-term impact and not be spent on one campaign.

So there are many ways that people can "direct" or influence the the
organization's activities without having annual elections or fellowship
representatives.  I think it is worthwhile to put a process in place to
explore all these things.  Is it possible that giving people more
choices and more control may increase the amount they are willing to donate?

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: who is a member?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 02/02/18 17:48, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> As far as I remember, the form said "Join the Fellowship" and explained that 
> this was a financial contribution.


If you go to https://fsfe.org and click "Become a supporter" it still
shows the same form with the title "Join the FSFE"

The word contribution is very generic.  In my view, the word itself
doesn't strongly imply membership, but the act of giving money does give
many people the feeling that they are a member.

Regards,

Daniel

***
*
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Apply for membership and meet us at FOSDEM

[Daniel Pocock]

On 01/02/18 20:14, Max Mehl wrote:
> Disclaimer: I am an FSFE employee.
>
> # Daniel Pocock [2018-02-01 18:16 +0100]:
>> On 01/02/18 17:16, Florian Snow wrote:
>>> Werner Koch <w...@gnupg.org> writes:
>>>> I personally see a lot of problems that employees of the FSFE are also
>>>> members _and_ that they make up a large part of the membership.
>>> Would you care to elaborate a little bit on this point?  I am curious
>>> about it.
>>
>> It is quite simple to explain:
>>
>> - the funds from fellowship/supporters pay the salaries and other major
>> expenses (over 50% of the budget comes from fellowship/supporter
>> donations)
>
> Ok, so people working and caring for the FSFE have no right to
> contribute to the organisation's mid- and long-term strategy? Do you
> want to keep out input from people working day-to-day for the FSFE? Do
> you see a threat in them being members?
>

I never said that.  Staff do have a role but it has to be balanced with
the financial supporters and volunteers, that is all.  I'm not calling
for a coup or something like that.

> Please keep in mind that there's no automatism for employees to become
> GA members. They have to apply and convince the GA of their motivation
> just like any other person.
>
>> - but the fellowship/supporters only have 2 votes in the GA (and none
>> after the change), although some GA members are also
>> fellowship/supporter members too
>
> The current system has many more flaws, for example that the Fellowship
> representatives don't represent the non-paying volunteers, and that the

I completely agree with finding a way to give volunteers more
representation at the highest levels of decision making in FSFE.

> voter turnout often is below 20%. That's why we discuss better solutions
> to grant membership to interested people but this process needs time. So
> as many others wrote here: no need to rush things. If procedures for
> becoming a member change (this is still not decided), they will be more
> open and transparent.
>
> Best,
> Max
>

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Apply for membership and meet us at FOSDEM

[Daniel Pocock]

On 01/02/18 17:16, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Werner,
>
>
> Werner Koch  writes:
>> I personally see a lot of problems that employees of the FSFE are also
>> members _and_ that they make up a large part of the membership.
> Would you care to elaborate a little bit on this point?  I am curious
> about it.


It is quite simple to explain:

- the funds from fellowship/supporters pay the salaries and other major
expenses (over 50% of the budget comes from fellowship/supporter donations)

- but the fellowship/supporters only have 2 votes in the GA (and none
after the change), although some GA members are also
fellowship/supporter members too


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

our future relationship with FSFE (public discussion)

[Daniel Pocock]

(This was sent to each member of the FSFE community, I'm re-posting it
here for those who would like to discuss it publicly or those who don't
receive it due to filtering problems.  Apologies to those who receive it
twice)


Dear FSFE Community,

I'm writing to you today as one of your elected fellowship
representatives rather than to convey my own views, which you may have
already encountered in my blog[1] or mailing list discussions.

The recent meeting of the General Assembly (GA) decided that the annual
elections will be abolished but this change has not yet been ratified in
the constitution.

Personally, I support an overhaul of FSFE's democratic processes and the
bulk of the reasons for this change are quite valid.  One of the reasons
proposed for the change, the suggestion that the election was a
popularity contest, is an argument I don't agree with: the same argument
could be used to abolish elections anywhere.

One point that came up in discussions about the elections is that people
don't need to wait for the elections to be considered for GA membership.
 Matthias Kirschner, our president, has emphasized this to me personally
as well, he looks at each new request with an open mind and forwards it
to all of the GA for discussion.  According to our constitution[2],
anybody can write to the president at any time and request to join the
GA.  In practice, the president and the existing GA members will
probably need to have seen some of your activities in one of the FSFE
teams or local groups before accepting you as a member.  I want to
encourage people to become familiar with the GA membership process[3]
and discuss it within their teams and local groups and think about
whether you or anybody you know may be a good candidate.

According to the minutes[4] of the last GA meeting, several new members
were already accepted this way in the last year.  It is particularly
important for the organization to increase diversity in the GA at this time.

The response rate for the last fellowship election was lower than in
previous years and there is also concern that emails don't reach
everybody thanks to spam filters or the Google Promotions tab (if you
use gmail).  If you had problems receiving emails about the last
election, please consider sharing that feedback on the discussion list.

Understanding where the organization will go beyond the extinction of
the fellowship representative is critical.  The Identity review process,
championed by Jonas Oberg and Kristi Progri, is actively looking at
these questions.  Please contact Kristi[5] if you wish to participate
and look out for updates about this process in emails and Planet[6]
FSFE.  Kristi will be at FOSDEM[7] this weekend if you want to speak to
her personally.

I'll be at FOSDEM this weekend and would welcome the opportunity to meet
with you personally.  I will be visiting many different parts of FOSDEM
at different times, including the FSFE booth, the Debian booth, the
real-time lounge (K-building) and the Real-Time Communications (RTC)
dev-room[8] on Sunday, where I'm giving a talk.  Many other members of
the FSFE community will also be present, if you don't know where to
start, simply come to the FSFE booth.  The next European event I visit
after FOSDEM will potentially be OSCAL[9] in Tirana, it is in May and I
would highly recommend this event for anybody who doesn't regularly
travel to events outside their own region.

Changing the world begins with the change we make ourselves.  If you
only do one thing for free software this year and you are not sure what
it is going to be, then I would recommend this: visit an event that you
never visited before, in a city or country you never visited before.  It
doesn't necessarily have to be a free software or IT event.  In 2017 I
attended OSCAL[9] in Tirana and the Digital-Born Media Carnival[9] in
Kotor for the first time.  You can ask FSFE to send you some free
stickers and posters (online request[11] with optional donation) to give
to the new friends you meet on your travels.  Change starts with each of
us doing something new or different and I hope our paths may cross in
one of these places.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://danielpocock.com
2. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/legal.en.html
3. https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/GA
4. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/minutes/minutes-2017-10-15.en.pdf
5. https://kristiprogri.com/2017/09/20/fsfe-identity-process/
6. http://planet.fsfe.org/
7. https://fosdem.org/
8. https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/real_time_communications/
9. https://oscal.openlabs.cc
10.
http://www.shareconference.net/en/defense/digital-born-adventures-kotor-and-lessons-carnival
11. https://fsfe.org/promo

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Apply for membership now!

[Daniel Pocock]

On 31/01/18 23:39, Cornelia S. wrote:
> I have learnt the FSFE is abolishing their community representatives in
> their board (remember the Linux Foundation?)
> You should apply to become voting member of the FSFE, to change this.
> All you need an e-mail to m...@fsfe.org  and say that
> you apply.
> Please do it now! Copy me/list if you have done it, so we see who
> applies. I wil apply after FOSDEM.
> 



Are you referring to this process?

http://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/GA
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 29/01/18 09:41, Stephane Ascoet wrote:
> Le 28/01/2018 à 13:00, Andreas Nilsson a écrit :
>> Just my two cents.
> 
> Hi, telle me where is the paradise you're living in


You can simultaneously solve your problems with public transport and
finding a date by purchasing a motorbike.

Sadly, most modern bikes have ride-by-wire, which means using non-free
software.  Older bikes may be safer choices.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: impact of Gmail's "promotions" tab on free software communities

[Daniel Pocock]

On 25/01/18 13:38, Mat Witts wrote:
> It doesn't seem to me to be a great strategy to single out gmail when
> Microsoft's hotmail/live/outlook mailservers regularly fail to notify
> recipients that they have not delivered mail under the rule that
> 'Deliverability to Outlook.com is based on your reputation'. Mailserver
> admins are then encouraged to sign up for a microsoft account to help
> microsoft generate up to date metrics on mailservers. I am sure other
> major proprietary systems take similar 'closed-world' assumptions about
> transporting email?
> 
> https://postmaster.live.com/snds/

It is interesting that you raise the hotmail example

There are several cases where people told me this particularly bad
behaviour, together with some specific example of how it impacted them,
was enough to make them give up on hotmail but in each case they had
migrated to gmail.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

impact of Gmail's "promotions" tab on free software communities

[Daniel Pocock]

There was a discussion in one community recently about essential emails
not reaching new contributors because they get stuck in the Gmail
"promotions" tab.

This is quite concerning, for example, when Debian sends out the yearly
announcement for DebConf travel grants / bursaries, if only the regular
participants receive that email it undermines renewal and diversity in
the organization.

It is even worse if sending people an email that their talk proposal or
travel grant is accepted and they don't see that email.

I have a few questions about this:

- are other communities who operate mailing lists or send announcements
noticing a similar problem, for example, announcements not reaching
people or lower participation in email discussions?

- are people noticing it in their capacity as Gmail users / recipients
of email?

- are people consciously talking about the problem in other communities?

- given the high percentage of people using Gmail, would it be
reasonable to take countermeasures, for example, when somebody registers
for an event, refusing to let them use a gmail address and giving them a
link to a page with more details about the problem?

- is there any particularly good web page we can point people to
explaining the Gmail problem and giving them a concise list of
alternatives so they can migrate quickly?

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

free/open technology for home heating systems

[Daniel Pocock]

There are government grants in Ireland for heating controls, I put more
details on my blog[1].

Is anybody aware of technology for this purpose that is running free
software and interfaces with free/open standards?

Can this be achieved using a custom solution with Raspberry Pi or
similar devices running free software?

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://danielpocock.com/keeping-an-irish-home-warm-and-free
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

While there has been a lot of discussion with a focus on Discourse's use
of JavaScript, I'd really like to hear feedback from other community
members about the high-level issues, such as those raised in my reply below.

One of the original suggestions was to have a series of face-to-face
discussions about this - maybe that could happen at FOSDEM or Kamailio
World[2], Berlin, in May, where there will be a lot of real-time
communication developers present, it is close to FSFE's office[3] and
just before MiniDebConf Hamburg[4]?

On a side note, would anybody like to volunteer for an FSFE booth or
talk at either of those events?  Kamailio World CFP closes 10 February.


On 17/01/18 08:33, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> 
> On 16/01/18 16:29, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
>> I don't know if packaging the JS into Debian would be enough. If I
>> recall correctly, Discourse depends on client-side JS, so the issues are
>> more immediate in the client-side where the client is the one more
>> vulnerable.
>>
>> There are other things that I didn't have time nor knowledge to check
>> yet, like if Discourse has progressive enhancement.
>>
> 
> In any case, the original intention of this thread was to look at the
> impact these tools have on the way organizations evolve and achieve
> meaningful goals, especially free software organizations or those
> organizations who ask for help from free software experts.
> 
> Many people in the street would cite facebook as an example of a good
> communications tool and some people even use facebook groups to run
> their organizations.  But do those organizations achieve anything?  Or
> do they just attract narcissists or even worse, sap the energy of good
> volunteers who may have been able to make a more meaningful contribution
> if they hadn't got stuck in this tool?
> 
> Just looking at this thread, we already have an example of the "tool",
> which is email, impacting the discussion as Adonay brought up the
> possibility of a CC to system-hackers.  In the other thread about the
> model for local groups, Max suggested moving the discussion to another
> list: once again, the tool (email) is impacting the discussion.
> 
> People tell me that with Discourse, we could @mention somebody from the
> system hackers or coordinators groups: but in just about every Discourse
> community that I know of, there are a core group of people who get most
> of the mentions and answering all of the mentions is just as impossible
> as answering everything in their email inboxes.
> 
> Bug trackers take this a step further: they allow issues to be
> prioritized so that developers may only look at two or three bugs each
> week.  Could a similar strategy be used in a tool like Discourse, for
> example, to prioritize which mentions somebody really needs to look at
> or to give the community feedback?
> 
> Another good thing about bug trackers is that they let you see the
> backlog of things to do and in a company, that might be used to justify
> hiring more developers.  With tools like Discourse, there isn't really a
> lot of automatic reporting to highlight which individuals or teams are
> overloaded, people just get frustrated that they are not getting answers
> or whatever.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 1.
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/17/facebook-dark-side-study-aggressive-narcissism
> 

2. https://www.kamailioworld.com/k06/
3. https://fsfe.org/contact/contact.en.html
4. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2018/MiniDebConfHamburg

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/01/18 13:10, Carsten Agger wrote:
> 
> 
> On 01/18/2018 12:45 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
>> If an organization like FSFE wants to know that the software,
>> dependencies and build tools are all really free software then the
>> "shortcut" to take is to use a Debian package because then you know
>> somebody has checked all those things.
>>
>>
> Discourse is under GPL v.2. Is there really a reason to doubt that it's
> truly free software?
> 


I don't want to comment on Discourse in particular because I haven't
checked it but many of the other web applications I've looked at offer a
similar free software license for the top-level project but when you
scratch under the surface you find at least one dependency or build tool
that is not free software.

For example, JSHint chose a free license (MIT) but because they copied a
file from JSLint they ran into trouble:

https://github.com/jshint/jshint/issues/1234

When I started looking at HOMER (GNU Affero v3), I found one bad library:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/homer-discuss/Q-oWrHLTTBU/AaBTAax8DwAJ

So if you can't find every web application in Debian, that is probably a
good thing: it means Debian is saving you time by giving you a shortlist
of web applications that have already been checked and can be supported.

For any web application, even if everything in the stack is free
software, do FSFE volunteers have time to check it every time they take
a container directly from the developers of a project?  Or would you
prefer to save your time and rely on a distribution that does those checks?

One other thing I should have mentioned when Discourse mailing list mode
was mentioned: it is not really like a mailing list, it is more like
alpha/beta quality compared to real mailing lists.  It also obfuscates
the email addresses so people can't communicate privately or use PGP.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/01/18 12:14, Carsten Agger wrote:

> 2. However, I find containers to be black magic. How can you trust them
> to be 100% free software if you don't build them yourself? I honestly
> don't know if Debian's packaging model is a perfect fit for distributing
> JavaScript, which is, I suppose, why people have come up with npm etc.

I don't think it is about whether Debian's model is perfect or not

Rather, it is about people taking one or more of the following shortcuts:

- they want to use build tools that don't exist in Debian because they
are not free software (e.g. jslint, jshint)

- they want to use other JavaScript libraries that are not free software

- they don't want to spend time on little things like creating a proper
install directory for their files because they just hack on them in
their web server directory

- maybe they don't even release or version their code because they just
hack on it as they please

- they like to cut and paste bits of JavaScript from other sites without
checking the license

If an organization like FSFE wants to know that the software,
dependencies and build tools are all really free software then the
"shortcut" to take is to use a Debian package because then you know
somebody has checked all those things.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: breaking bad habits like Doodle and Facebook with, plugins?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/01/18 11:30, Mat Witts wrote:
>> [...]
>> help people avoid visiting or linking to things like Facebook, Meetup, 
>> Twitter and Doodle?
>> [...]
> 
>> As well as blocking, does it give the user any encouragement to use
> alternatives?
> 
>> is there a way a plugin could reward people for doing the right thing?  
>> Rewards are more effective at bringing about change than criticism.
> 
> The anxiety and zeal around the adoption (or failure to adopt Free software) 
> among some programmers in the FS movement is I think a problem worthy of a 
> discussion itself since it seems to resemble the problems with 
> over-protective parenting. In Robin Norwood's 'Women Who Love Too Much' 
> (1985) we see:
> 
> 'In Praising and encouraging are very close to pushing, and when you do that 
> you are trying again to take control of his life. Think about why you are 
> lauding something he’s done. Is it to help raise his self-esteem? That's 
> manipulation. Is it so he will continue whatever behavior you're praising? 
> That's manipulation. Is it so that he'll know how proud you are of him? That 
> can be burden for him to carry. Let him develop his own pride from his own 
> accomplishments.'
> 
> There is, in short a similar potential for culture problems in the FS 
> movement which is about manipulation, control and influence over the lives of 
> computer users.
> 

Every time somebody posts a Doodle link on a mailing list somebody else
jumps on them for not using free software.

Many of these people actually want to promote free software but they are
making innocent mistakes.  They might choose to use a particular plugin
because they want to avoid making those mistakes again.  A plugin might
tell them their email includes a Doodle link before they click "Send".

If people choose to install the plugin and they already agree with the
objectives of the plugin, I wouldn't regard that as manipulation.


> My complaint then, is what I would describe as the 'FUNDAMENTALISTS 
> COMPLAINT' as in MOZERT V. HAWKINS.
>  
> Discussions about software freedom don't always result in freedom for the 
> user in the same way that the local school board in Hawkins County, Tennessee 
> in this case ended up being charged with denigrating a families religious 
> views.
> 
> This type of complaint in the context of software is that an individuals or 
> corporate's right to develop proprietary software is being 'drowned out' or 
> 'silenced' by all this talk of software freedom.
> 
> The argument is advanced by showing how exposure to free software either by 
> blocking non-free, not providing non-free alternatives actually goes against 
> the free exercise of computers users freedom to use proprietary software 
> through denigrating it either from technical, moral, political, social, 
> economic or philosophical perspectives. 
> 
> It seems timely to issue a reminder that all computer users must be allowed 
> to opt out of Free Software too, to avoid the charge of contradiction or 
> hypocrisy?
> 
> Making Free Software mandatory for all and to victimize users who refuse to 
> participate in Free Software is not only contradictory but will only 
> marginalize users we are trying to educate.
> 
> Facebook users are not seeking to impose their ideas on the FS movement and 
> generally do not have a problem with FS in principle or in practice.
> 
> These objections are at the heart of the Free Software movement and it's 
> important to keep in mind that Free Software will only grow if computer users 
> are exposed to it without being asked to give up proprietary software 
> entirely.
> 
> It's astonishing that the possibility of the ideal predicated on the complete 
> annihilation of proprietary software is so prevalent and is misinforming so 
> many FS activists.
> 
> It seems to me we should pay attention to the gains we have already made and 
> concentrate on those, and worry less about facebook users and the like and 
> trying to 'convert' them to a particularly disagreeable form of software 
> freedom which is more about computer user manipulation than computer user 
> freedom?
> 

Once again, people would choose to install the plugin.  Of course,
organizations could make it mandatory for their staff to use the plugin
but otherwise people are free to choose the plugins they install.

If people do make the decision they want the help of such a plugin then
it is important to make the plugin as useful as possible for them.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/01/18 10:38, Mirko Boehm wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>> On 18. Jan 2018, at 10:28, Daniel Pocock <dan...@pocock.pro
>> <mailto:dan...@pocock.pro>> wrote:
>>
>>> The client-side Javascript to me is not a
>>> relevant issue anymore since JS is an open standard and browsers are
>>> sandboxed these days.
>>>
>>
>>
>> There is an issue:
>> a) if the JavaScript is distributed as minified blobs and we can't
>> rebuild it easily from source,
>> b) if a large application makes heavy use of things like the NPM
>> repository for its build process
> 
> Accepted. I always assume that software like Discourse is compliant with
> FOSS licenses, where minified JS code is not “the corresponding source
> code”. That is usually a choice, though - most packages have a minified
> and a non-minified source URL. Developers tend to ship with links to the
> minified version because that is the norm and loads faster. 
> For a Debian packager, this is understandably a problem. We will
> probably run Discourse out of a container shipped by the project, not a
> package, so does that still apply to us?
> 

The real questions:

- can you trust a container to be available in the future the same
extent that you can trust a package in a stable Linux distribution?

- can you trust upstream developers to ensure they never put anything
non-free into their container images or does somebody have time to
verify the contents of those images on every update?

When you take something from an official package, it has usually been
looked at by a second set of eyes already.  If you cut that step out
then how long is it before non-free stuff creeps in?

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: breaking bad habits like Doodle and Facebook with plugins?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 17/01/18 18:20, André Ockers wrote:
> Dear Daniel and list,
> 
> Op woensdag 17 januari 2018 11:56:21 schreef Daniel Pocock:
>> Nasty things like Doodle, Meetup and Facebook keep popping up throughout
>> FSFE and the wider free software community.  Even when we discuss them,
>> it is not long before they pop up again.
>>
>> When people are exposed to this elsewhere, all the time, it is not so
>> hard to understand how the FS message is being drowned out.  Our own way
>> of dealing with these challenges may also include some bad communication
>> habits, undermining the effectiveness of our responses.
>>
>> One thing that comes to mind: are there browser plugins and Thunderbird
>> email plugins that can help people avoid visiting or linking to things
>> like Facebook, Meetup, Twitter and Doodle?  
> 
> With the uMatrix plugin I can enable/disable connections to websites, also 
> when they are backdoor third party to another website. So you can disable the 
> connections to e.g. FB and that works on all their websites and their 
> business 
> partners. It works on IceCat, possibly also on IceDove and Firefox.
> 

As well as blocking, does it give the user any encouragement to use
alternatives?

Another thing that comes to mind after reading that book: is there a way
a plugin could reward people for doing the right thing?  Rewards are
more effective at bringing about change than criticism.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

breaking bad habits like Doodle and Facebook with plugins?

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

Habits are a tough thing to break, this is obvious if you know a smoker.

I've heard many anecdotes about habits but I never really understood any
of the psychology or neuroscience about habits until I recently read the
book "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg (Random House, 2013)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/202855/the-power-of-habit-by-charles-duhigg/9780812981605

Nasty things like Doodle, Meetup and Facebook keep popping up throughout
FSFE and the wider free software community.  Even when we discuss them,
it is not long before they pop up again.

When people are exposed to this elsewhere, all the time, it is not so
hard to understand how the FS message is being drowned out.  Our own way
of dealing with these challenges may also include some bad communication
habits, undermining the effectiveness of our responses.

One thing that comes to mind: are there browser plugins and Thunderbird
email plugins that can help people avoid visiting or linking to things
like Facebook, Meetup, Twitter and Doodle?  I'm not talking about giving
electric shocks through the keyboard, maybe just a popup alert would be
enough.  This could be a far more effective way of helping members of
the community improve their habits and it can step in just at the moment
when they really need it.  The reality is, many people don't
deliberately do these things and they would change with just a little
bit of help.

The book includes an appendix on "using these ideas" and this would
provide an excellent recipe for designing or optimizing such a plugin or
app.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 16/01/18 16:29, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> I don't know if packaging the JS into Debian would be enough. If I
> recall correctly, Discourse depends on client-side JS, so the issues are
> more immediate in the client-side where the client is the one more
> vulnerable.
> 
> There are other things that I didn't have time nor knowledge to check
> yet, like if Discourse has progressive enhancement.
> 

In any case, the original intention of this thread was to look at the
impact these tools have on the way organizations evolve and achieve
meaningful goals, especially free software organizations or those
organizations who ask for help from free software experts.

Many people in the street would cite facebook as an example of a good
communications tool and some people even use facebook groups to run
their organizations.  But do those organizations achieve anything?  Or
do they just attract narcissists or even worse, sap the energy of good
volunteers who may have been able to make a more meaningful contribution
if they hadn't got stuck in this tool?

Just looking at this thread, we already have an example of the "tool",
which is email, impacting the discussion as Adonay brought up the
possibility of a CC to system-hackers.  In the other thread about the
model for local groups, Max suggested moving the discussion to another
list: once again, the tool (email) is impacting the discussion.

People tell me that with Discourse, we could @mention somebody from the
system hackers or coordinators groups: but in just about every Discourse
community that I know of, there are a core group of people who get most
of the mentions and answering all of the mentions is just as impossible
as answering everything in their email inboxes.

Bug trackers take this a step further: they allow issues to be
prioritized so that developers may only look at two or three bugs each
week.  Could a similar strategy be used in a tool like Discourse, for
example, to prioritize which mentions somebody really needs to look at
or to give the community feedback?

Another good thing about bug trackers is that they let you see the
backlog of things to do and in a company, that might be used to justify
hiring more developers.  With tools like Discourse, there isn't really a
lot of automatic reporting to highlight which individuals or teams are
overloaded, people just get frustrated that they are not getting answers
or whatever.

Regards,

Daniel




1.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/17/facebook-dark-side-study-aggressive-narcissism
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 15/01/18 20:45, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> What about upgrading to new Mailman version?
> 
> If I recall correctly, it has forum-like functions and keeps the mailing
> list functions too.
> 
> Discourse is somewhat overwork as we would have to patch various parts
> of it to either remove JS or free/libreate it.
> 
> Also, see [1].
> 
> [1] 
> 


Thanks for all that feedback

Would packaging the Discourse JavaScript into Debian satisfy those concerns?

Is there enough interest in this topic to start building a wiki page
about it?

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

model for local groups

[Daniel Pocock]

We've received a lot of positive responses to an email sent to community
members in Suisse Romande recently.

Unlike big metropolitan areas like Berlin, the population of Suisse
Romande and the FSFE community there is divided between many smaller
cities like Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg and Neuchatel.

The model adopted in bigger cities involves having a monthly meeting in
the same place every month.  This is a good model when there is a
critical mass in the same city but I'm concerned it doesn't apply as
easily to the situation in Suisse Romande.  There may be other regions
like this, such as the north west[1] of England.

Another pattern that I notice is that people involved in FSFE are also
involved in other local groups, for example, two people who replied to
the email are also members of the local Debian.ch group and I also met
several of the people at RHL'18 today as they are involved in
Swisslinux.  This raises issues of duplication, for example, some people
may receive duplicates of emails sent to different mailing lists while
other people may not receive any copies of some announcements.  These
questions are highlighted by the decision today to dissolve the
association GULL and encourage members to join forces with Swisslinux.org.

One technical approach to a situation like this: encourage local FSFE
community members to collaborate through a dedicated FSFE section on the
Swisslinux forum rather than having a dedicated FSFE mailing list?  This
could reduce duplication and increase exposure to other people in the
region.

An organizational solution that comes to mind: having a monthly free
software meeting, same day of the month, same place, but with different
organizations so that the meeting has critical mass.

Note that neither Swisslinux or GULL is currently listed[2] as an
associated organisation either, maybe it is worth reaching out to
Swisslinux?

Have these issues been discussed in other regions before?

Regards,

Daniel


1. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27971552
2. https://fsfe.org/associates/

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

One issue arising out of the Swisslinux/GULL situation is the question
of communication tools.

Swisslinux has been operating with a forum while GULL was using a
mailing list.  Representatives from both groups are now talking about
how to join forces and merge these communities.

I've also observed questions like this raised within FSFE, we currently
have a lot of mailing lists but there are some people who want to try
something like Discourse.

Both technologies have benefits and disadvantages.

One idea I've put forward at RHL'18 today is that it may be useful to
have a series of events over the next 12 months, maybe piggy-backed on
bigger events, to discuss the way organizations choose their
communications tools.

One of the big questions is for organizations to define their goals.  If
their goals are clear then the choice of tool may be easier and even
obvious.  Choosing a tool because it is popular or because it is the
only thing the sysadmin is willing to support doesn't always result in
the best choice for achieving goals.

Would the FSFE community be interested in collaborating on an event or
process to study these questions?

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: "Joining" vs "becoming a supporter"

[Daniel Pocock]

On 01/12/17 13:20, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
> * Daniel Pocock [2017-12-01 11:32 +0100]:
>> Another idea that was raised: keep the "Join" buttons and the "Join"
>> page, but make it very clear on the page what people can do, e.g. give
>> them boxes they can tick:
>>
>> [ ]   I want to become a financial supporter but not voting member
>> [ ]   I want to volunteer
>> [ ]   I want to apply for a job or internship
>> [ ]   I want to attend meetings in my town
>> [ ]   I want to become a voting member
> 
> Do you mean something like https://fsfe.org/contribute/ ? (We had the
> idea in the past to also have a longer list of todo items people could
> easily help with, and had an "activity" issues tracker for some time.)
> 

The main page of fsfe.org has "Become a supporter"

Maybe the button could say "Contribute" with a link to that page instead?

The button currently links here:

https://fsfe.org/fellowship/ams/join.php?ams=join

and that page has "join" in the URL and it doesn't provide any link to
the /contribute page


Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: "Joining" vs "becoming a supporter"

[Daniel Pocock]

On 30/11/17 16:26, Gergely Székely wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I think it was not a good idea at all to change the "Join the ..." to
> "Become a supporter".
> 


Asking people to join means they should have an equal status.  The
current constitution doesn't treat all members equally (a GA member has
a different legal status than a fellowship member, supporter or volunteer).

Using the word "Join", therefore, is unhelpful and some people may even
feel deceived.


> My point is that "being a member" of something (even if just an
> associate one) suggests a much stronger bound than being just a
> "supporter".  So I think using phrases as "Join the FSFE", "become a(n
> associate) member" etc is way more compelling for most of the people.
> 
> In my view "supporter" is someone outside of the circle while
> "any-kind-of member" is someone who is inside of the circle. So I do
> believe demoting "fellowship members" to mere "supporters" made this
> status too cold and less compelling.
> 
> I think FSF is doing this much better. If you visit fsf.org this time of
> the year you immediately run into a very encouraging and inviting banner
> about joining them.
> 

What is the legal status of joining FSF?  Is every member equal, every
member can vote at the annual meeting?


> I really miss this inviting spirit from fsfe.org.
> (Also, why is no similar banner on fsfe.org in the last two months of
> every year?)
> 

Facebook invites people to join.  Is it good for them?  Of course not.
Appearing friendly while having no integrity is a common business model
though.

> I think recruiting members and encouraging people to donate is important.
> So it worth making extra efforts to doing it right.
> 
> What do you think?


A motion passed at the recent GA meeting aims to change the way people
can become members in future:


15. Proposal to reform FSFE's governance structure
Proposal:
 FSFE will reform it’s organisational structure to accommodate a wider
base of membership, and separate between membership and the governing
organs. To achieve that, FSFE will prepare and propose the necessary
changes to the bylaws for adoption at the 2018 general assembly. FSFE
will prepare and implement the vetting and acceptance of the existing
contributor base into the organisation as members. FSFE will prepare and
implement the first board elections to be held at the 2018 or a later
general assembly. These tasks will be carried out by the executive
director and president in cooperation with the current GA.


Result: 10 for, 5 against, 8 abstentions



After that is completed it will hopefully be safe to use the word "Join"
again without any ambiguity.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: an FSFE hackathon?

[Daniel Pocock]

This might be a good topic for discussion at the community meeting this
weekend.

On 25/08/17 13:53, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Has there ever been an FSFE hackathon?
> 
> How would people feel about having such an event, or even a few small
> hackathons in parallel?
> 
> Are there tasks that would be useful to FSFE and can be completed in one
> or two days, either by an individual or small teams?
> 
> Would anybody have ideas about obtaining prizes, t-shirts or other
> support for hackathon participants?
> 
> Hackathons can be particularly useful for potential Outreachy and GSoC
> interns to become familiar with the free software community and also for
> them to complete small pieces of code that help mentors identify which
> candidates to shortlist.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> ___
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
> 
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: "joining" the FSFE

[Daniel Pocock]

On 02/10/17 14:13, Cornelia.sulzbach wrote:
> This is shameful! There ist no reason to not let everyone become a
> member. I have read today. I have read a lot, and it is clear the FSF
> should be ashamed of themselves. I am glad there are people like you
> Daniel who can change this! Just read:
>
>   https://www.fsf.org/associate/
>
> It's all about giving money to the FSF. Never once are listed any
> benefits of being able to vote!

FSF and FSFE are different organizations and applying to join one
doesn't make you a member of the other.

Comparing the membership procedures of each organization and proposing
how they should evolve in the future is welcome.  If you want that to
involve the FSF members as well, or if you are an FSF member, then
please also raise this on one of the FSF mailing lists and feel free to
invite FSF people to comment here too (and vice versa)

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

"joining" the FSFE

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

Whenever I'm discussing FSFE with people at an event, somebody
inevitably asks me about the joining process or what it means to be an
FSFE member.

There has actually been some ambiguity about this.  The main page of the
web site has a "Join the FSFE" button, it is very prominent.

It links to a page where "join" is in the URL:

https://fsfe.org/fellowship/ams/join.php?ams=join

and the title says "Join the FSFE"

Anybody who has ever joined any other organization before is going to
assume that after following these links and completing the form they are
an equal member of the organization.

In practice, the organization has different groups:

- the GA members (the first group) being the only members of the legal
body, the "Join" page doesn't give any instructions for people to pursue
this type of membership nor does it tell people that they are not
becoming voting members

- The "Join" links on the web site should probably say "Become a donor"
because that is what they are about, asking people to become regular
donors (this is the second group)

- people can also be a volunteer (the third group), without being either
a legal (voting) member or a donor, the join link doesn't actually give
people any information about how to do this

I've tried to raise this in the GA a few times but the "Join the FSFE"
button remains prominent on the web site and I feel this undermines the
organization in the eyes of the wider community and also challenges the
relationship between the organization and those people who have already
engaged with us.

I proposed a motion for the GA meeting to finally resolve this, give us
clarity in the future and hopefully putting the issue behind us in a way
that will gain respect and confidence from anybody who "joined" and
subsequently became disillusioned about it.

Would anybody like to comment on this topic, share their experience with
the joining process or comment on your impression of the buttons and
text currently in use?


Proposed motion:
The GA recognizes that the widespread use of the word "Join" on the FSFE
web site may have caused many fellows and volunteers to believe their
payment made them a member of the incorporated association.  The GA
resolves that a notice should be published on the web site clarifying
the situation, the notice should be sent to everybody who completed the
form to "Join the FSFE" and any future communication, through the web
site or other marketing materials should make it unambiguous whether
people are being solicited to join the incorporated association,
volunteer their time or become a financial supporter and also making
them aware of the alternative roles they can have in the organization.



Regards,

Daniel


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

improving fellowship communication (GA motion)

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

Since being elected as one of the fellowship representatives, I've been
looking at various ways to perform this role effectively.

For people who joined FSFE through the FSFE fellowship program, the
fellowship representatives are the most senior elected representatives
designated in the FSFE constitution[1] and therefore it would appear
logical to me that as the representatives, we would be the ones trusted
to make decisions about communication with our constituency.  In
practice, however, this is not the case and people in various parts of
the organization (this was discussed in the GA list) have expressed
various concerns (e.g. data protection laws, member expectations) for
not empowering the fellowship representatives to communicate directly
with the people who voted for us.  The original request I sent to the GA
is at the bottom of this email.

Personally, I felt these concerns demonstrated a lack of trust and
confidence in the fellowship representatives and in fact even a lack of
trust and confidence in humanity to organize ourselves democratically. 
Having served in various representative roles in the past where
membership lists were always available to me I actually felt somewhat
insulted by these responses and uncertain about whether the fellowship
representative role is meant to be only an illusion of representation
rather than an active representative.

I put forward a motion for the GA meeting to address this for the
future.  To maximize the possibility of achieving consensus at the GA
meeting (motions are not usually voted on), the motion is not
retrospective and does not attempt to clarify the current status of
membership data under privacy laws or whatever else, it is only about
avoiding further ambiguity in the future.

To ensure the GA can understand how people feel, it would be interesting
to get opinions from the community:

- when you join an organization such as FSFE and you provide personal
data such as your name and email address, do you expect that office
holders and elected representatives would have some access to this data
in performing their roles?

- do you feel it is reasonable for people who are in a position of trust
to have some discretion in how they use the data as long as they do so
in the best interests of the organization, it's mission and it's
members?  Or do you believe the organization should strive to obfuscate
the data so that even office holders can't read it and put systems in
place so communications are sent out to members through an opaque process?

- what are the practices you have seen in other community organizations
in the free software space and can we learn anything from them in
developing best practice?


Proposed motion:
The GA recognizes the stark difference between the way FSFE coordinates
contributor data and other organizations are doing things.  FSFE
supporter data is only available to Reinhard, Jones, system-hackers(?),
ISP staff and third-parties involved in payment processing.  The GA
resolves to let supporters choose to be a "silent" supporter who simply
donates and expects nothing in return and contributors who choose to
volunteer and are identifiable to other contributors through a PGP
keyring, directory or other means.  Where somebody chooses to be in the
former category, their personal data will remain under a somewhat
default data protection regime (need-to-know access only) whereas if
they choose to be in the latter category, they will be informed that a
less stringent data protection policy is in effect.  Where somebody in
the latter category (contributor) provides information that is only
required to process a donation (credit card billing address, payment
card details, etc), that information will remain under strict privacy
controls.

Background to this motion: In Debian, for example, all trusted
contributors are identified in a publicly distributed PGP keyring and
many more contributors are identified through resources like
contributors.debian.org and the Ultimate Debian Database.  Many people
feel that a de-centralized organization like this is more appropriate
for robustness and for empowering volunteers.


Regards,

Daniel


1. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/constitution.en.html



 Forwarded Message 
Subject:improving fellowship communication
Date:   Mon, 14 Aug 2017 10:53:27 +0200
From:   Daniel Pocock <dan...@pocock.pro>
To: g...@fsfeurope.org



Hi all,

As I've been elected as a fellowship representative, I feel it is important

a) to know who I am representing

b) to be able to communicate with them directly

I've asked Erik if he could provide contact details for the fellowship
and he stated that data protection prevents this and requires all
communication to go through Reinhard.

It is standard practice for just about any other elected representative
to have this basic data.  For example, when I was elected as employee
representative on a pension committee, I was given a 

Re: community feedback on GA meeting agenda?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 28/09/17 14:06, Jonas Oberg wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
>> Notice that in that proposal, the word "remove" is the only possibility
>> in the first sentence and the word "remove" is the leading option in the
>> second sentence.
> So we can ask Matthias to rephrase that perhaps. It's factually true
> some members have proposed to remove the Fellowship seats. Other's have
> stated they would like to see an update of the wording to reflect
> reality. And yet others have expressed a wish to review the structure
> as part of altering the Fellowship seats.
>
> Since this really is intended as a yes/no point, I do think Matthias
> might rephrase that to clarify the intent. (This is the official agenda,
> during which most topics should have a clear yes/no option).
>
> We will need to discuss structural questions as well, but I don't believe
> there's support from the members to do that now. As you know, we're
> currently in a process to review and renew our committment to our
> organisational identity and self perception.  When we decided to engage
> in that work, we also made a timeline for when certain discussions can
> reasonably happen.
>
> Discussions around reviewing our organisational structure is on that
> timeline, and the thinking is to work towards having those at the
> end of 2018 and into 2019. The process of working through the structure
> is a significant committment, and will take time. I don't envision us
> doing that with taking less than a year for it.
>
> Having a renewed comittment to an organisational identity prior to this
> is one of the keys to making sure we can succesfully discuss the
> structure.
>

A simple way forward, changing it to a yes/no question, may be asking
the GA to vote on the motion "The constitution is amended to rename the
Fellowship Representative to Community Representative"

Would anybody else like to propose a name other than "Community
Representative"?

Everything else in this topic could be deferred, unless somebody wants
to formally propose a motion to remove the position.

Regards,

Daniel


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

separate GA and community meetings

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

There are upcoming meetings of the GA (October) and FSFE community
(November)

I want to raise the question of why these happen separately.

For example, the GA weekend only includes a brief formal meeting of GA
members, the last time this happened, it took just 15 minutes[1].  The
rest of the time is spent, as described on the wiki[2], as "a strategic
weekend in which the long term strategy for Free Software is discussed".

How do people in the GA and wider community feel about this topic?

Would it be better to have a wider range of community members present
around the formal GA meeting in future years, or is it better to have
separate events?

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://fsfe.org/about/legal/legal.en.html
2. http://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/GA
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: FSFE in Outreachy?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 01/09/17 07:52, Carmen Bianca Bakker wrote:
> Re-posting the below, which ended up on the wrong mailing list:
>
> Hi,
>
> I don't know if it's okay if I add my five cents (adjusted for
> inflation), but I'm reasonably well-read on this and adjacent topics, as
> well as included in the list of minorities that would be sponsored under
> the Outreachy program.
>
> But I am unequivocally against such programs, on the simple grounds that
> it tries to combat discrimination _through_ discrimination, which is
> about as silly to me as trying to achieve world peace through war.  It
> generates envy/antipathy in individuals from groups that are excluded
> from the given list of minorities, and it generates imposter syndrome in
> those who are, because they might only be hired/accepted because of
> their status as minority, rather than excelling in their skillset.

In this particular case, Outreachy, many of the people who are not
eligible for Outreachy can already apply to GSoC and be accepted there.

So what Outreachy is doing in this case is simply making a lot of noise
to attract women to apply for internships that are very similar to GSoC

It could be argued that Outreachy should simply direct those applicants
to apply to GSoC though

In numbers: there are usually around 50 women selected in each
Outreachy, while there were over 1,300 people, including women, selected
in the current round of GSoC.

We also have many cases where a woman applies to Outreachy but we
encourage her to duplicate her application in GSoC so she can be funded
with Google's program.  In these cases, when the woman is selected in
GSoC, it is because her application is competitive with the male
applicants and she deserves to be selected on merit.  Yet we would not
have met some of these applicants without the publicity created by
Outreachy.

Some of the points made by Karen Sandler in her talk at DebConf address
your concerns too:

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/debian-outreachy.vp8.webm

> I would be very against getting involved in this program, though I know
> that the FSFE currently practises positive discrmination selection
> standards for its internship program:
>
>> We want more women to be involved in Free Software. That's why we will
>> give preference to applications from suitably qualified female
>> candidates.
> from https://fsfe.org/contribute/internship.en.html
>
> I'd personally be a little bit disappointed if this carried any
> significance in my being selected as intern, because I do believe that I
> can hold my own with my unique skillset.
>
> On Thursday, 31 August 2017 13:43:59 CEST Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> Increasing diversity could also help avoid situations like this in
>> future.
> I don't know if there is any evidence to suggest this.  Where there are
> humans, things sometimes go awry.  Having a more ethnically/sexually
> diverse cast of humans doesn't change that.
>
> Be that as it may, I don't aim to change any hearts or minds.  I just
> wanted to add my couple of cents.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
>
>
> ___
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 26/07/17 01:28, Guido Arnold wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 03:10:59PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> On 25/07/17 14:56, Max Mehl wrote:
>>> # Daniel Pocock [2017-07-25 14:37 +0200]:
>>>> What is the value of 1000 new followers though?
>>>>
>>>> Are people actually switching to free software, or are the followers,
>>>> shares and likes more like monopoly money which is never converted into
>>>> anything tangible?
> ...
>>> And yes, just because a user is following us on Twitter this doesn't
>>> mean that she'll instantly start using Free Software. But thanks to us,
>>> now she may know that FS exists. It's a first step in educating the
>>> public which we otherwise couldn't make.
> +1
>
> Years passed between the moment I heard about FS until I purchased my
> first GNU/Linux distribution. If that person I spoke to did surveys
> two weeks, six months and a year after we spoke for 3 minutes, he
> could have concluded that talking to strangers about FS at parties is
> not worth the effort even though he had 100% success at last.
>
>> I remain concerned about defining the reason we want or need these
>> followers and then measuring whether that objective is being met.
> We don't need these followers per se, we need to raise awareness. If
> we have a few among these followers who can reach a broad audience,
> we'll gain. Bear in mind that we feed GNUSocial _anyway_ which is then
> mirrored to Diaspora [1] and Twitter (and possibly others). So the
> feeding alone comes at no cost.
>
> I share your desire for measurable outcomes, but getting just halfway
> usable data (take my example above) would exceed the effort FSFE
> staffers currently spend to maintain the Twitter account. 
>
> If the little time that is spent leads to one or two journalists
> interested in the topic and getting aware of FSFE's existence per
> year, I'd see it already as a benefit. 
>
> Now on the con side: how do we measure the harm our presence on
> Twitter and Facebook causes? How many (potential) supporters turn
> their back/stop their donation when they learn that FSFE maintains
> these accounts? 

Metcalfe's law is a helpful way to measure that.

I could also use your own example: maybe there is no harm measured 2
weeks, 6 months or a year after somebody sees FSFE on facebook, but at
some point it will bite us.

> I acknowledge that there is a harm and know that these people exist. I
> know one personally.
>
> Though I guess metrics are even harder to get [2] than in the case 
> mentioned above.
>
> But even if we had resilient numbers, how would we insert them into
> the equation? 
>
> Those turning their back to FSFE because of its presence on Twitter
> will remain FS advocates regardless, won't they?
>
> FSFE is a vehicle to promote Free Software. Somewhat like a legal
> hack to collect money/resources for the cause of Software Freedom.  
>
> FSFE as an organisation may lose, but the community of Free Software
> advocates won't get smaller. 
>
> Best,
>
> Guido
>
>
> [1] BTW: I don't see GNUSocial and Diaspora as "mass surveillance",
> but I'd call them social media.
> [2] Let's try. To those who spoke against FSFE's presence on Twitter
> in this thread who own a Twitter account: How likely is it that
> you compose a tweet on your own versus the likelihood of
> retweeting a post from FSFE's account when you see it in your
> timeline?
>
>
>
> ___
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: FSFE financial transparency

[Daniel Pocock]

On 14/08/17 15:04, Jonas Oberg wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
>> It is already public in the report[1] on the fellowship elections.
> 
> Yes, you may be able to find occasional references to it and numbers which
> you may infer from other information given.
> 
>> Then it will be much easier for fellows to understand if those are
>> subsidised by the fellowship donations or if those things are self
>> supporting.
> 
> I'm not sure I would like this to develop into a direction where our
> activities must be self supporting. FSFE supporters contribute to all
> our activities: our legal work, our policy work, as well as the work
> of local FSFE groups, and so on. 
> 
> Each activity is also engaged in because it's important for Free Software,
> not because we expect to make money from it. We don't expect any activity
> to cover its own costs, though some of them do, and more so. We probably
> receive more funding due to our legal work than it costs us, but that
> doesn't mean we should focus on that and do less policy work where the
> opposite may be true, for instance.
> 


Maybe you could provide the detailed figures to the GA and the public
statements could provide some notices indicating which activities are
self supporting.  In a way, a self-supporting activity is a bit like a
donor.

I'm not against the idea of subsidizing worthwhile activities for the
greater benefit of free software, but it would be helpful to give
fellows transparency about such decisions.  It may actually provide an
incentive for people to contribute more.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: FSFE financial transparency

[Daniel Pocock]

On 14/08/17 12:00, Jonas Oberg wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
>> Is there a strong reason not to publish that?
> 
> When we started reporting the number internally, the question was about
> the benefit of reporting this with some feeling that publishing the (then
> low) number of fellows would deter people from joining. That was in 2005
> though, and we have a few more supporters today. :-)
> 
> Still though, since this was discuss in the European Core Team, I believe
> you can also raise this issue in the core team.
> 

It is already public in the report[1] on the fellowship elections.


>> As fellowship representative, I'm keen to see how the top donors relate
>> to the fellowship contributions: which group is donating more, or is it
>> equal for example?
> 
> That's information I don't have easily, but you can ask Reinhard or Ulrike
> about this once they're back from vacation.
> 
>> Could you provide a better breakdown of "Paid services"?
> 
> Again, I would need to defer to Reinhard and Ulrike. I could probably find
> some information by digging into the actual accounting files, but it would
> be much easier for Reinhard to provide an indication of this when he's back.
> 
>> However, if somebody makes a payment that is directly connected with
>> participation in the summit, the legal network or the Legal & Licensing
>> Workshop, is that money counted as part of the regular donations too?
> 
> That's counted as a regular donation, yes.

It would be very useful to start counting that separately and also
report separately on the costs of each of those activities.

Then it will be much easier for fellows to understand if those are
subsidised by the fellowship donations or if those things are self
supporting.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/2017-April/011474.html
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

negative campaigning?

[Daniel Pocock]

This was raised by Jonas in the thread about proprietary software, but
it is a completely different topic, so I'm starting this thread about
it: "we also don't do negative campaigning overall. We tell people they
should use Free Software; we don't tell them what software they should
not be using."

The reality is, many sites and software vendors deceive users with a
promise of security.  E.g. when a user accesses Gmail, they see the
padlock icon in their browser, so doesn't that mean Gmail is secure?  If
Gmail is secure and free software is secure, the user may ask why make
the effort to change to free software?

Is it negative to say, for example, "Debian doesn't send 10,000
telemetry reports per day" and hope the user realizes we are comparing
to Microsoft Windows 10?

If I was in somebody's house and I saw their kitchen had caught fire,
should I avoid talking about it because it is a negative topic and they
might feel bad?  Or should I warn somebody?

What about a hidden risk that most people can't see, for example, if you
were an official who knew about the contamination[1] in the water in
Flint, Michigan, should you keep your mouth shut?  Or would people thank
you for sharing negative information?

It would be really interesting to hear perspectives people have about
how to introduce threats without appearing to be negative.  For example,
what narrative do we need to use to give proprietary software the same
urgency as a burning kitchen or contaminated water?

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 26/07/17 10:53, Max Mehl wrote:
> Hi Jonas,
> 
> # Jonas Oberg [2017-07-26 10:37 +0200]:
>>>  Some services are Free Software unfriendly and harm your privacy.
>>
>> Are there any services we list which don't work with Free Software? If
>> so,
>> I think it's best to state that:
>>
>>   Some services don't work with Free Software or harm your privacy.
>>
>> If all services we list can be connected to with Free Software, then we
>> might well just shorten it to:
>>
>>   Some services harm your privacy.
> 
> Good point but not easy to answer. All services can be viewed with a
> Free Software browser but e.g. Facebook tries to convince you of
> downloading the non-free Messenger app (you cannot even write FB
> messages on your mobile browser anymore IIRC). LibreJS may also warn its
> users with most of these services' sites. Is this already Free Software
> unfriendly?
> 


This is also a question of narrative: such behaviour has traditionally
been viewed as social engineering[1] for the purpose of a privilege
escalation[2] attack.

There is debate[3] in the Mozilla bug tracker about sites behaving like
this, could you submit the Facebook example there?

Regards,

Daniel



1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_escalation
3. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1375427
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 25/07/17 14:19, Max Mehl wrote:
> # Paul Boddie [2017-07-25 12:58 +0200]:
>> On Tuesday 25. July 2017 11.41.48 Max Mehl wrote:
>>>
>>> I would love to live in a world where we could abolish all proprietary
>>> tools. But unfortunately the carefully dosed usage of some proprietary
>>> networks is important for us to fulfil our mission [1]. Especially
>>> Twitter is more or less the only channel for us to connect with many
>>> journalists and politicians at short notice.
>>
>> So what is the arrangement here, exactly? I'm guessing that most
>> journalists and politicians don't "follow" FSFE on Twitter, so the way
>> it must work is that the FSFE presence must "#" something that those
>> people might be tracking or "@" those people directly.
> 
> You'd be surprised! Actually, the account has quite interesting
> followers. Among the 8940 are 56 "verified" accounts belonging mostly to
> journalists, organisations, and politicians with a huge follower base. I
> wasn't able to filter out other highly interesting followers who are not
> "verified" but I'm sure our messages on this network are well heard.
> 
> For example, our yearly "I love Free Software" campaign [1] attracts
> ~1000 new followers each time, many of them not aware of Free Software
> before – and I would say the majority of them subscribes to our messages
> because of retweets by other "influential" Twitter users.
> 
> Again, I don't appreciate the importance Twitter has gained in public
> communications. But as Jonas said: apart from PR intensive events like
> ILoveFS we're not investing huge amounts of resources into these
> networks, so I think it's a fair compromise.
> 

What is the value of 1000 new followers though?

Are people actually switching to free software, or are the followers,
shares and likes more like monopoly money which is never converted into
anything tangible?

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 24 July 2017 15:05:51 CEST, Adonay Felipe Nogueira  
wrote:
>Indeed.
>
>I also agree with this.
>
>As a subject for another topic, here are other analogies that don't
>quite work as we'd expect:
>
>- "Non-free software is like slavery". However, it isn't, because the
> user still has the ultimate choice of not using the non-free software,
>  no matter how much the switch will cost.
>
>- "Software is absolutely equal to cooking recipe". However this
>doesn't
>  work because who/what "consumes" the software is the computer, and it
>  does so blindly (without questioning). Besides, when "consumed" there
>  is no loss of that particular copy of the software, that is, that
>  particular copy will still exist.



I often tell people that Skype is like a sausage, you wouldn't eat it if you 
knew what was inside.



___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 24 July 2017 14:33:04 CEST, Nikos Roussos <comzer...@fsfe.org> wrote:
>
>
>On July 24, 2017 2:24:31 PM GMT+02:00, Daniel Pocock
><dan...@pocock.pro> wrote:
>>On 24/07/17 14:18, Reinhard Müller wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Am 2017-07-24 um 14:14 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>>>> Why don't we go through all the messages in this thread and replace
>>the
>>>> words "social media" with "mass surveillance"?
>>> an interesting point.
>>>
>>> Should FSFE, for example, refuse to present itself at locations
>where
>>> surveillance cameras are present?
>>
>>A better analogy: locations that serve you free drinks as long as you
>>take off all your clothes and sit in front of the surveillance camera
>
>And that's why analogies are rarely useful. You get to a conclusion
>than doesn't make sense if you transfer it back to the initial context.
>


But interchanging the words "social media" and "mass surveillance" is not an 
analogy, it is more like a synonym or a question of narrative.


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 23/07/17 09:03, Evaggelos Balaskas wrote:
> Social media are now part of our life (I am not debating if they
> should or not), but diminish them to cat videos is a strong opinion.
> 90% of email is SPAM, should we stop using email? Lots of people have
> their email to a proprietary platform. Should we stop talk to them?
> Should we only talk to people who have similar ideas with us?
>

Actually, I have been thinking very seriously about blocking all email
from gmail.com

I could put a line in the postfix server config /etc/postfix/access


gmail.comREJECTGoogle's privacy policy is abusive and
unacceptable to the recipient.  See https://some.site


and then anybody trying to contact me from gmail would see that message
and hopefully use another email account to contact me.


> I believe that we should be reaching out to people that have different
> ideas from us and making arguments, discussions, talks on how free
> software and the culture that comes with is the only way for our
> society to be a better place for everyone.
>
> To make a point -plz bare with me for a moment- when everyone inside a
> group is telling each other that free software is awesome and we have
> to be a role model, my argument is to whom? To each other? How can we
> reach people from outside this utopian group?
>

Last weekend I went to the Digital-born Media Carnival[1] organized by
the SHARE Foundation[2] where I participated in some workshops, gave a
talk and led a practical session on privacy with TAILS[3].  The vast
majority of people there were not from this group, they were a mix of
journalists, lawyers, policy makers and researchers.  Many of those I
spoke to were previously unaware of the free software concept and even
unaware that they have choices about technology, many younger people
have simply grown up doing what they see everybody else doing, without
thinking about it.  That is why I feel it is so important that
organizations like FSFE shows leadership.

Whenever I told somebody I'm not on Facebook or LinkedIn, this
immediately provided an opportunity for discussion.

Regards,

Daniel

1. http://www.shareconference.net/carnival/
2. http://sharedefense.org/
3. https://tails.boum.org/


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

dual FSF and FSFE membership

[Daniel Pocock]

(this was also queried on the FSF LibrePlanet list[1])

Does either organization (FSF or FSFE) have a position on dual
membership, being a member of both organizations?

Was this contemplated when the relationship between the two
organizations originated?

Has there been any discussion about a reduced membership fee or offering
a single joining procedure for people to join both organizations in one
go?  For example, on the membership form for one organization, people
could tick a box to join the other at the same time for some additional
fee that is potentially less than the outright fee for the other
organization.




1.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2017-07/msg00011.html
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Ethical phones

[Daniel Pocock]

On 17/07/17 20:51, Decarraig wrote:
> I have been following various discussions on andr...@lists.fsfe.org and I am 
> wondering if FSFE has any policy on ethical issues with mobile phones e.g. 
> Conflict mining, cobalt mining etc ?

When we start to see ethical cigarettes and honest politicians, you will
know ethical phones are not far away
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 06/07/17 17:28, Erik Albers wrote:

> I think you get the point. Metrics in the real world are pretty hard to
> interpret. However, like it or not, metrics in the digital sphere and on
> (proprietary) social media platforms seem easier to access and to make
> connections. For example when our president shares our new merchandise product
> and it got 500 shares and sold out in 24h. Or when someone did share our
> nocloud-sticker with a link to our order-page on reddit [1] and we got in 48h
> nearly as much orders as in the rest of the year, then we can clearly see an
> impact we made (or someone else made) in 5 minutes.
> 

Metrics based on purchases, votes (not surveys/polls) or number of
people in a meeting/talk are definitely a lot more meaningful than
clicks, hits or likes.

When I nominated for the fellowship representative position[1] on the
GA, I wrote two blogs, participated in the IRC session and used no
social media.


> Please, do not get me wrong. This shall not favor online activity above
> offline-activity. I am a big supporter of offline-activities and I assume them
> to be very important for our message, community and cooperation. I mainly
> wanted to make a point about the complexity of numbers, data, impact,
> assumptions and so on to avoid too simple assumptions.
> 

Thanks for clearing that up.  Maybe we need to have a dedicated thread
about offline activities, how FSFE can support them, how to reach out to
people who we don't normally encounter at hacker events?

Regards,

Daniel



1. http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_29119d29f759bbf8
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Fwd: [libreplanet-discuss] cataloguing free software events globally and locally

[Daniel Pocock]

On 28/06/17 09:45, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
> * Daniel Pocock [2017-06-28 09:19 +0200]:
> 
>> I recently posted this on LibrePlanet and in response people shared
>> various resources[10] tracking events.  Are there any more examples
>> people could share?
> 
> I assume you mean mainly Free Software events, right? (Because meanwhile
> the FSFE is also present at non-software events with booths.)
> 

That is an interesting point.  There is no reason not to use the same
technology and databases to catalogue non-IT related events where free
software communities have a presence.  Whatever technical solutions we
develop and use for this would ideally work for any type of event.

> I would add https://lwn.net/Calendar/ and for speakers (or those who
> want to become speakers) https://lwn.net/Calendar/Monthly/cfp/
> 

CFP is a very good point to.  It would actually be really interesting to
try and build a system that presents registration deadlines and CFPs as
tasks (VTODO objects with deadlines) in iCalendar feed so that if people
see something they want to do, they can import it into their task list
with a click.


> What's also missing in German, but not limited to German events
> http://www.pro-linux.de/kalender/index1.html
> 
> I just remembered http://grical.org/ but I don't know how active it is
> anymore.
> (I heard from an organisation that they are currently planing to create
> a new aggregator for events about surveillance, privacy, Free Software,
> Open Hardware, etc. in Germany.)
> 

Thanks for suggesting these too.

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Fwd: [libreplanet-discuss] cataloguing free software events globally and locally

[Daniel Pocock]

I recently posted this on LibrePlanet and in response people shared
various resources[10] tracking events.  Are there any more examples
people could share?


People can reply here or if you want to reply on that thread and you
subscribe there this link should work:

mailto:libreplanet-disc...@libreplanet.org?In-Reply-To=70dd5890-9cb3-d683-fa95-793e990b2069%40pocock.pro=%5Blibreplanet-discuss%5D%20cataloguing%20free%20software%20events%20globally%20and%20locally


Regards,

Daniel


10.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2017-06/msg00051.html


 Forwarded Message 
Subject: [libreplanet-discuss] cataloguing free software events globally
and locally
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2017 22:19:50 +0200
From: Daniel Pocock <dan...@pocock.pro>
To: LibrePlanet Discuss <libreplanet-disc...@libreplanet.org>



One of the biggest concerns people have about leaving platforms like
Facebook and Meetup is that they fear they will miss out on events.  I
just put up another blog[1] about this topic in fact.

What tools do we have for sharing data about events in other ways?

For example, are there any free software tools that make it easy to send
birthday invitations using iCalendar (.ics) email attachments and is
this an option for mainstream use?

For larger or more public events, what could be done to gather and
distribute data effectively in iCalendar HTTP feeds, similar to the way
that Planet software aggregates and distributes RSS?  If we could use
such techniques effectively for events in the free software world (and
the IT industry in general), it would provide a useful model for other
communities.

I recently used search engines to try and find out about events and
dragged up a bunch of sites, some local, some international:

http://freie-termine.ch/
https://www.ch-open.ch/events/aktuelle-events/
http://www.ossroadmap.ch/
https://fsfe.org/events/events.en.html
https://opensource.com/resources/conferences-and-events-monthly?month=2017-07
https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-na
https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-apac
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events?rd=FedoraEvents

but clearly there are far more events out there, just in the free
software world, that don't appear in any of these sites.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://danielpocock.com/how-did-the-world-ever-work-without-facebook

___
libreplanet-discuss mailing list
libreplanet-disc...@libreplanet.org
https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 22/06/17 20:51, Mirko Boehm - FSFE wrote:
> Hi everybody!
> 
>> On 21. Jun 2017, at 17:20, Federico Bruni <f...@inventati.org
>> <mailto:f...@inventati.org>> wrote:
>>
>> Il giorno mer 21 giu 2017 alle 16:47, Daniel Pocock <dan...@pocock.pro
>> <mailto:dan...@pocock.pro>> ha scritto:
>>> - systems like facebook are made by the establishment, for the
>>> establishment. Zuckerberg is a regular at Bilderberg these days. This
>>> brings me to the age old question: can you change the system by using
>>> the rules the system gives you? People like the Bolsheviks and Gandhi
>>> didn't exactly think so.
>>
>> This reminds me a recent discussion I had with a quite popular blogger
>> here in Italy. He wrote a blog post complaining that Youtube automatic
>> filters put his video under "restricted mode"¹. The video is about a
>> "controverse" and hot topic in Italy in the last months, but the
>> content itself is far from being dangerous or controversial at all.
>>
>> I commented that we cannot expect real free speech in a walled garden
>> and these events should encourage video bloggers to start using
>> alternative platforms. He replied that there's no big audience in
>> alternative platforms, so he cannot migrate until an alternative
>> platform reaches the "critical mass".
>> Well, true but nothing will change if everyone, especially opinion
>> leaders, adopts this mindset. It's a complicated matter.
> 
> It appears to me as if we conduct this discussion based on what we wish
> the world would be, instead of based on what the present world is like.
> In the perfect world, everybody would be using free software, and
> everybody would know that it is about freedom, not free beer.
> 

Does a man who is overweight lose weight by continuing to eat donuts?

Or does he lose weight by going to the gym and acting like the man he
wants to become?


> There would however not be a need for FSFE in this scenario. Our mission
> is to advocate software freedom. On one hand this means protecting the
> freedoms we already have, which targets mainly those already using free
> software. These we may well reach on GNUsocial. Or via an RSS feed. On
> the other hand, it means educating people and lobbying to politicians
> that do not use free software, and do not yet understand the need for
> software freedom. These we won’t reach on free platforms, by definition.
> 

But why do you think we would reach them on Facebook or other
proprietary platforms?  Where is the data to back that up?  How much
time is put in to it, how much time do people look at those platforms
and how many other messages are they bombarded with during that time?

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Is it acceptable to use proprietary software (platforms) to promote software freedom?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 21/06/17 12:22, Erik Albers wrote:

> Now I would be interested what you think? Do you think that - although the use
> of proprietary platforms is ethically not supportable - the chances of
> convincing new people to use and further Free Software are worth the 
> punishment?
> Or do you think that our message should not occur on platforms like Facebook
> or Twitter at all, because it contradicts our efforts in getting people to use
> decentralized services, run with Free Software and therefore potentially harm
> us in the long run?
> 

I feel there are a whole range of questions and topics that arise.

You mention efforts to get people to use decentralized services.  One
trap that arises in these discussions is that people believe it is a
choice between Facebook vs some other technology.  The reality is that
before facebook, many movements succeeded in the real world through
grass roots campaigns and word of mouth and that still works just as
well today, maybe even better.  A booth in a local market, church fair
or library, one-on-one discussions with leaders in the local community,
asking questions at a town hall meeting are all real-world examples.

When comparing to facebook, etc, these are some of the other things that
come to mind:

- how much time is spent getting messages into the platform, maintaining
buddy lists, updating privacy settings every time they change?

- do we have the ability to control where replies go, e.g. getting
people to respond on an email list, or does the platform insist that we
use their mailboxes and built-in communications channels?  Do they make
it impossible to disable their internal messaging tools, meaning we end
up losing more time every day checking for replies in every platform?

- how many people actually see what is posted on facebook, if it is not
buried under all the other content on the platform, including paid
advertising, cat photos and baby photos from the friends who actually
use the platform?  If somebody only looks once per week, is the
probability they see a post from FSFE even close to 1 in 100?

- are the people who take an hour out of every day to browse facebook
really the people we want to influence?  Is it better to look for
channels that reach more busy and influential people?

- is the "viral" campaign just a myth or an improbable outcome like
winning the lottery?  Do the majority of campaigns on social media put
in more effort than the reward they get back?

- will users who want to use facebook copy our content to the platform
anyway, making it unnecessary for FSFE to directly post things there?

- if FSFE has an official presence on those platforms, are we endorsing
them?  What impact does that have on our credibility?

- systems like facebook are made by the establishment, for the
establishment.  Zuckerberg is a regular at Bilderberg these days.  This
brings me to the age old question: can you change the system by using
the rules the system gives you?  People like the Bolsheviks and Gandhi
didn't exactly think so.

Regards,

Daniel

___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

anybody going to TÜBIX (Tübingen statt), near Stuttgart?

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi,

Is anybody going to TÜBIX on 24 June?

Regards,

Daniel


1. http://www.tuebix.org/
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Please help us spread the word on Roundcube Next

[Daniel Pocock]

On 06/06/15 12:13, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:

> Direct link for your convenience:
> 
> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/roundcube-next--2/x/4658765#/story


I
> 
notice XMPP chat and WebRTC are mentioned in the list of 10
features: can you confirm if the WebRTC calling feature (#4) will use
XMPP and interoperate with standalone XMPP clients like the standard
Jitsi desktop client?

Or will your XMPP support use SIP or something non-standard behind the
scenes?

Which other projects will you use behind the scenes (for example, will
you use Prosody as the XMPP server) and how much work will be
upstreamed to those projects?

Will smaller organizations be able to install Roundcube Next as a
standard Debian package (or suite of packages) on their own server?

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

UK to "end" encryption?

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

There is speculation in the UK press that the government there will take
further steps[1] against encryption, using the Manchester bombing as an
excuse.

"Government officials appear to have briefed newspapers that they will
put many of the most invasive parts of the relatively new Investigatory
Powers Act into effect after the bombing at Manchester Arena."

I wonder what this will mean for developers of free software who pass
through British airports with software like Tor on their devices?

Regards,

Daniel


1.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/manchester-attack-internet-crackdown-theresa-may-privacy-security-government-suicide-bomb-a7753191.html
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: accounting software used by FSFE and other associations

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/05/17 16:36, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Hi, Daniel!
> 
> Am 2017-05-18 um 16:25 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> Which accounting software is currently used by FSFE?
> 
> FSFE currently uses plain CSV files which are to a very large
> extent automatically filled from various sources like electronic
> bank account statements, reports from our credit card payment
> provider, and so on. All of that is very individually tailored to
> FSFE's needs.
> 
> At the end of the year, our tax consultant distills the legally
> required reports from these CSV files.
> 

Has FSFE developed any scripts that are used for:

- fetching data from public sites (like the bank)

- transforming/normalizing the data

- producing the reports (e.g. balance sheet) from time to time?

and could they be shared?

I wonder if people could use the CSV files to automatically populate
databases for the various free software solutions[1] and see them side
by side.

Are there any other free software tools used in the process, e.g. the
Firefox plugin ExportToCSV[2]?

Regards,

Daniel



1.
https://danielpocock.com/comparison-of-free-open-source-accounting-software
2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/export-to-csv/
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

accounting software used by FSFE and other associations

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi,

Which accounting software is currently used by FSFE?

Which solutions are other free software organizations using?

There is currently some discussion about choosing something for the Open
Labs hackerspace in Tirana[1]

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://forum.openlabs.cc/t/open-labs-hackerspace-accounting-software/341
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Open Agriculture / Free (as in Freedom) Food

[Daniel Pocock]

On 11/05/17 10:00, Carsten Agger wrote:
>
> That said, the ideas behind the food computer are interesting. It might
> be the most rational way to source some plants (rather than exploit
> vulnerable ecosystems and have them shipped across the globe), and in
> terms of sustainability it might be more rational than industrial farming.
>
> But I think it would be more of a supplement and that the majority of
> the food we eat should be produced by natural methods, following the
> permaculture principle of rebuilding at least as many ressources as are
> consumed.

Thanks for raising the topic of permaculture.  I feel these things all
have a role to play too.  Some points about the role of the food computer:

- there will always be some countries who can't produce enough food
through purely natural processes due to size/population ratio (think of
Singapore) and people in those places will be attracted to solutions
like this

- it is great for educational and research purposes, especially in the
family home or in cities

- from a hacker/developer perspective, both permaculture and food
computers provide interesting problems to be solved and some software
development will help in both domains (reusable code libraries anybody?)



___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Open Agriculture / Free (as in Freedom) Food

[Daniel Pocock]

On 11/05/17 08:17, Antonello Lobianco (not reply) wrote:
> Hello, I didn't understand what is it all about... sorry to look rude,
> but could you provide a small document that introduce the topic? In
> general, I don't like/have the time to watch videos, and I can't judge
> from your email if it is interesting...
>

The video shows exactly what they are building, so it is probably quite
helpful.

I'm preparing a blog about the topic and that will give a more thorough
written explanation.

Briefly, their food computer is open hardware and free software for
growing plants like fruit and vegetables.

The motivation for this is to have a wider source of food.  The range of
products in a typical supermarket is not so wide, maybe 200 fruit and
vegetables.  The food computer can grow tens of thousands of different
things.

As well as diversity, the quality is much higher because the food is
fresh.  Even though it is grown in a machine, you have to remember that
food in a supermarket often spends months in cold storage and transport
networks, that is also explained in the video, Harper gives the example
that the average apple in a supermarket has spent 10 months in storage
since it was harvested.

Regards,

Daniel


___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: ideas for laptop selection

[Daniel Pocock]

On 02/05/17 16:54, Paul Boddie wrote:
> On Tuesday 2. May 2017 15.45.38 Evaggelos Balaskas wrote:
>> Here is my suggestion: pinebook
>>
>> https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707
> 
> Does that use the same Allwinner SoC as the Olimex laptop...?
> 
> https://olimex.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/fosdem-and-teres-i-update/
> 
> https://olimex.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/teres-i-do-it-yourself-open-source-
> hardware-and-software-hackers-friendly-laptop-is-complete/
> 
> The situation was apparently changing when I posted a comment on the second 
> article, but mainline, blob-free kernel support was not yet there. Or maybe 
> it 
> was, but the documentation doesn't get updated to reflect the current status:
> 
> http://linux-sunxi.org/A64
> 
> I guess the software is just one thing holding up the Olimex laptop, 
> particularly since they might be a bit more wary of bad publicity around 
> binary blobs and Allwinner's tendency to produce copyright-infringing 
> software 
> to demonstrate their products. So the software has to be done properly and to 
> a standard that most people will accept, which means that the Pine64 software 
> should be closely inspected for licence compliance.
> 
> Paul
> 
> P.S. There are hardware pages on the FSFE Wiki that should be documenting 
> these things.

Is this type of thing duplicated between FSFE, FSF, LibrePlanet and
other wikis?

Regards,

Daniel
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Re: Crowdfunding a NAS device that respects your freedom

[Daniel Pocock]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA256



On 02/05/17 13:57, Christian Pietsch wrote:
> Hi Daniel, hi all,
> 
> just two comments:
> 
> On Tue, May 02, 2017 at 01:41:03PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> On 02/05/17 12:21, Christian Pietsch wrote:
>>> https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1
> …
>> Positives: - free - can install own OS - 6 bays - fanless
>> 
>> Negatives: - no caddies - limited performance - I would prefer
>> something like the AL-514 based NAS boxes, Quad Core, 8GB max
>> RAM, 10GbE
> 
> I guess the GnuBee is just powerful enough to be a NAS and a
> streaming media server – not much more. If you are worried about
> NAS performance, you can look at the benchmarks: 
> https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1/updates/benchmarks
>
> 
> 
> If you want Intel inside, you also get Intel ME, the opposite of
> RYF. I hope you have all heard about this recently discovered bug
> in ME: 
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/01/intel_amt_me_vulnerability/
>
> 
The AL-514 is an ARM device, not Intel, so it shouldn't have that
problem.  However, it is competitive with some of the Intel devices
when it comes to features like 10GbE.


>> - no HDD noise damping
> 
> The guy who created the GnuBee wanted something to put his SSDs
> in. You can also use rotating HDDs, but they certainly make more
> noise.
> 
> Cheers, C:
> 
> 
> 
> ___ Discussion mailing
> list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org 
> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
> 
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2
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=aZqd
-END PGP SIGNATURE-
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion