Daniel Pocock came first from seven candidates who ran for office, with a self-description inside our wiki page for the Fellowship Elections 2017 and by participating in public hustings. Unfortunately two different dates were announced for the hustings, but the log-file is available online for everyone who missed it.
The FSFE would like to thank Nicolas Dietrich, former Fellowship representative, for his contributions during the last two years and welcomes Daniel Pocock as a new representative. Please find Daniel's personal conclusions in his own blog.Help us grow and make a difference in 2017 https://fsfe.org/join/nl2017-05
What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
Armijn Hemel and Shane Coughlan, members of the FSFE Legal Team, published a guide for #startups, small businesses, and engineers on "Practical GPL compliance". The guide is designed to demystify #GPL compliance and to facilitate the work of compliance engineers on a practical level.
North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populated state, is having general elections on 14 May 2017. The FSFE joined a "coalition of Free knowledge" which has developed for the first time a "Digital-o-Mat". The "Digital-o-Mat" is a tool to help those voters who are concerned about digital rights and freedoms, to decide about which party to vote for during these elections. Eight questions guide users to choose their own preferences on important topics about digital society - for example questions about the use of Free Software, Open Data or Open Educational Resources. After filling them out, users will see which party matches best with their own preferences and they can additionally browse detailed explanations on the party's positions regarding each topic. The interface for North-Rhine Westphalia is in German, the underlying Software however is Free Software and free to adopt for other purposes.
On the FSFE's Planet, we had an interesting dialogue popping up between our executive director Jonas Öberg who argues that sometimes you can use proprietary software to further free and open source software although you should be aware about the risk of backfiring. And Daniel Pocock, our new Fellowship representative, answered with "the risk of proprietary software" and that "no deal might be better than a bad deal", meaning that if you cannot achieve something with Free Software you should consider just doing without it.
Monitoring shows that in the last semester nine Italian Regions have reduced advertisement of proprietary #PDF readers on their website, and that one Region has increased its support for Free Software PDF readers.
The FSFE's executive director Jonas Öberg, blogs about "a new understanding of non-profit management" and uses this new understanding to analyse the FSFE's characteristics in the uses of technocracy, hierarchy, innovation and direction-orientation. Jonas closes his analytics with some thoughts about the way he would like to see the FSFE evolving.
If you see some news you think should be included, forward it to us. If you'd like to share any thoughts, send them to us. The address is as always newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!
From 10 to 24 April 2017 the FSFE ran the ninth annual vote for a Fellowship representative to represent the FSFE's community and Fellowship in the FSFE's General Assembly. The General Assembly consis...