Hi Paul,
some of your topics are very interesting, thanks for the feedback!
Am Mittwoch 29 August 2018 18:17:46 schrieb Paul Boddie:
== FSFE offerings of personal blogs
It is interesting to bring up the blog service because there were moves to abolish it, presumably so that only the planet aggregation service would need to be maintained instead.
But what the planet and blog services provide is a venue where people can hopefully exchange views, learn from each other, and collaborate generally. Such well-advertised, coherent, high-quality venues are seemingly not as common as one might think, which is why de-emphasising the role of the blogs was a bit mysterious from a strategic perspective.
Your argument is interesting as it brings up a strategic perspective of high quality contents, which I will have to think about more.
Questions I am asking myself: I was not involved in the deeper arguments of running a blog or not. From a distance it looks like running a serious service for a number of people is expensive and we cannot do it with volunteers alone. FSFE's costs of running a service would be higher than buying this from numerous service providers. Is this extra money well spend?
If you are right and there is a lot better coherency and advantages to FSFE, we could try to contract a service provider. However how do we get better contents on the platform? In the end we cannot really influence the contents of blogs, so they could have anything, even something that is bad for Free Software. Of course we could keep illegal contents out of the blogs, but if we had to come up with a "guidelines what would be appropriate" on our blogs to fellows, this would add another layer of maintenance and contents "inspection".
[..]
There are good arguments for the FSFE not providing much in the way of common services, at least if it imposes an unreasonable burden.
[..]
And when is a burden unreasonable? If we would have 200% the costs of an available commercial service vendor? Each offering will have to be weighted on its own, given the value and what else we could have done with the funds and resources.
At the same time, services that coordinate activities and perhaps archive some of the technical artefacts would be within the remit of the organisation. In the latter regard, the aim would be to guard against things disappearing from the Web, thinking of all those repository hosting services that no longer exist.
There are plenty of services to preserve what has been on the web (e.g. archive.org). It would be a major undertaking to build something up that lasts.
OK, but continuing from what I wrote above about high-quality venues for collaboration, how effective are the ones that the FSFE provides? For instance, this mailing list is pretty general and to the bafflement of some readers tends to veer off into FSFE organisational politics rather often.
That is a good question. Especially with new people coming in that have been socialised with other communication media (group messengers, social media, micro blogs).
Now, I still feel that this list could be more active in ways that are more relevant to people. Meanwhile, more specific topics could find a home within the FSFE's operations. One example from personal experience is that of Free Software groupware.
It is ontopic here to discuss any topic related to Free Software (as long as it happens in a respectful manner, which goes without saying). I believe there is a different problem of who is your target audience.
Good luck to anyone trying to find a venue for discussions about general technologies, interoperability, and other matters pertinent to a topic as mundane as groupware!
You can start a discussion here, but I take it would not really thrive.
Personal background: As you may know I have been coordinating a group that constructed a Free Software groupware for about 10 years, and I probably would not spend much time discussing this here, because I would need to write and amount of text filling a book before I got some of my arguments presented in a way that I believe that others have a chance to understand them. My personal time does not allow for this, and nobody will pay me for it either. So you won't get my detailled opinion here and not elsewhere. It would not be fun for me to repeat the basic arguments without getting into the deeper ones that demand a lot more context, so I probably won't do it. (Please do ask anyway, I'll always trying to help if I can.)
My theory is that Free Software has been so successful (because almost everyone is using it and most consumer devices freshly activated run a a Free Software operating system) that being Free Software has becoming such a broad topic that a few exchanges on some digital media just won't work. We have also seen a decline on general Free Software fairs and conference, they all get more specialised.
In this regard, I perceive a lack of continuity between the FSFE's advocacy and practical measures to make the advocacy believable. It is all very well saying that public organisations, for example, should be using Free Software, but a commitment needs to be made to support the development of the software they need, even if it is to act as the body that puts all the right people in the same room. Otherwise, the advocacy is little better than cheerleading, which is how some of it comes across.
Given our limited resources, we cannot just start an implementation project for some software product. We have noticed this early in FSFE. Our elder sister did and successfully reached the initial goals of their GNU "project" a few years ago. However this were different times. We found out with FSFE that it is much too easy for the opponents of Free Software to work against us on a policy level, for which technical hacking cannot provide resistance. In order to allow many other people to hack on Free Software, we must sure that politics, laws and procurement policies allow them to do this. The people and organisations that profit from less empowered users have become a much harder political opponent over the last years. So far I do not think that FSFE's resources are well spend if we would directly do development of missing Free Software components.
== license compliance
I have some concerns about things like upholding licence compliance. It seems rather strange to me that those of us who care about copyleft licences not being violated by corporations with apparent impunity seem to need to support organisations based in the US to look after these things in Europe.
While it is fine to support our elder sister in the US of course, license compliance is a main topic and activity of FSFE. The question is what is the goal of the compliance, we want organisations to come to compliance and stay there, because this is the best for everyone.
For this we offer a large (I think still the largest) community of legal and technical people to give advise, specific and general and we also follow a number of cases. Just as the FSF (US) we prefer an internal approach first, because we assume that a non-compliance may have been an oversight and it is better to get people to listen and to understand before you go public or legal.
For some of the activities see: https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/legal-conference.en.html
And this is where transparency means rather a lot. Beyond any reasonable legal caution, the FSFE should be able to indicate the extent of its work in such matters. Currently, I perceive very little transparency, which means that I have to conclude that very little is going on behind closed doors.
Or see the links to the reports from https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170619-01.en.html
It is only human to seek reassurance that something is indeed happening, and such reassurance has to be concrete, not vague or aspirational.
Over time we have increased our publically available reporting as much as we could, just look at the monthly https://fsfe.org/news/newsletter.en.html
and our documentation of long running current and concluded activities: https://fsfe.org/work.en.html
== PMPC
for example the new https://publiccode.eu/ initiative.
In contrast to previous campaigns which seemed to solicit supporter contributions, this one appears much more closed and opaque.
In the past we had more open (up to do what you want in that area) and more close campaigns. So it depends on the topic, which I think is fair enough. For some topics we can make a greater impact by making a participation easy, because many people like our work, but can only spare 5 minutes for a particular topic. This way we have won 151 organisations and 18000 individual supporters up to now.
Although I can understand the need to prevent haphazard communication and uncoordinated advocacy that undermines the campaign's objectives, this and similar initiatives risk failing to take advantage of the insights of the broader community, potentially failing to meet the expectations of those who might have expected something better or more convincing.
The best time to have more influence is to participate in the creating of campaigns, in many cases we are given an early indicator about what is going one, sometimes beta versions or more. As we do not warn some of our political opponents too early, we do some of it on our internal mailing lists. So if you want to participates in campaigns like this, go to a local meeting, get on one of the local mailinglists and then start your actions with your coordinator. Reading this mailinglist and responding to announcements also helps to be involved in a campaign early on.
Naturally, one reaction to criticism is to tell people to take their "business" elsewhere, assuming that such people are uncommon and that there will be plenty of newcomers to step into the gap, anyway. But apart from being generally disrespectful towards those who would support the organisation (although depressingly familiar from the broader realm of "open source"), the ultimate consequence of doing this is to put the organisation in decline as people start to perceive it in some of the more contentious and provocative terms already seen in this discussion.
I agree with the dangers and this is why I'll try my best to be respectful. This includes removing people that are disrespectful to others, we may have been to lax about this lately and may have seen some decline of participation because of this. To cite a recommendable work about how to run technical Free Software initatives from Karl Vogel:
https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#prevent-rudeness Nip Rudeness in the Bud
Best Regards, Bernhard