Some spontaneous thoughts in response the the latest discussion about UK MP campaign between Paul Karsten and Matthias:
# We don't need a separate site – use a page or subdomain on fsfe, so long as its URL clear, short and sexy(ish). Unless Karsten fears that the campaign may get too political/partisan in future (and would therefore reflect badly on FSFE) it seems to me that it's important to keep the association with FSFE and take the opportunity to improve its credibility and awareness amongst savvy British netizens.
# New artwork would be great to engage with young people, give the campaign an identity of its own, make promoting it easier (offline etc.), but it's not necessary and certainly not at the start. In time campaign branding will be important for making British people take ownership of these issues themselves and not feel as if they are being imposed upon them by FSFE/external influences. I would be glad to do some artwork, but I am not in a position to provide it immediately.
# We need input from Andreas about how he feels the page should be situated within the existing FSFE site structure. This will not be the last UK specific campaign page – decisions about document trees and structure should be worked out at the start – should we have a UK sub-domain with this campaign's page as a child document? Should it reside temporarily as a wiki page? As this sort of campaign is likely to see deployment in other countries, should all similar campaigns of this nature share a single root/parent page along political lines? Restructuring is currently in progress so its a good time to talk about these matters. This is no doubt going to be the first of many such campaign home-pages for the UK, so its important to get the structure right first time. Personally I love the idea of sub-domains wherever possible for clear distinctions and groupings of subjects whilst still enforcing the FSFE 'brand'. However we don't need to wait until these matters are finalised before content can be written - the most important thing is to get the campaign kicked off in my view by contacting MPs, regardless of whether we have a page/site ready to publish progress reports.
# We should make contact with Open Rights Group and the UK Pirate Party – let them know that we're doing this and that we'd like their support/input. It is critical in my view that this campaign is collaborative – we don't want to duplicate the efforts of other organisations who are already established in this field. There are already enough divisions between related British organisations, we don't want any more. ORG and EFF for instance have much higher profile in the UK than FSFE as far as I'm aware and if they could in any way promote or aid our campaign it could be very beneficial in a variety of ways.
Sam.
PS I realise that designers is not the right place for this - where should we take this discussion?