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 daniel@pocock.pro To: ga@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 full list of all members. In most countries people who run for public office are given a list of all the people registered to vote at the deadline, this also helps with transparency and detecting errors.
I feel it is important for FSFE to address this.
Personally, I would like to email a report about my own activities to fellows from time to time, probably using a reply-to header set to the discussion list.
I would not object to signing a confidentially agreement, committing to store the data securely, limiting my use of any such data to FSFE purposes and committing not to use the data to promote myself or endorse any future candidates in fellowship elections.
Regards,
Daniel