Hi everyone!
It's been quiet for a while on these lists and I would like to take the opportunity to inform you about the latest progress on behalf of the FSF Europe team. The team currently consists of:
Frederic Couchet Loic Dachary Peter Gerwinski Werner Koch Bernhard Reiter Alessandro Rubini Jonas Öberg
and myself. These are the people you reach with team@fsfeurope.org.
We have registered a FSF Europe project on savannah, the GNU sourceforge set up by Loic Dachary and others. You can get to the support section with the following link
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group_id=53
We also added a canned response for people interested in helping. For your information, here it is:
Hi!
We are very pleased to hear that you want to help the FSF Europe. Every little bit helps promoting Free Software and its philosophy.
Currently the core team is very busy organizing the legal steps associated with setting up the FSF Europe (if you take a look at the maling list archives you will see that this is not as easy as we would prefer it to be).
We are very actively gathering information about the situation of Free Software in every European country, however. Examples of things we would like to hear about are: schedules of events related to Free Software, the tendency and actions regarding software patents, the names and coordinates of officials, newspapers, columnists and non-profit associations involved in Free Software or intellectual property as well as possible groups that might be fit to become associated to the FSF Europe.
Promoting the Free Software philosophy is very much a matter of contact, cooperation and information. With your help and all thepeople you can convince to do the same, the FSF Europe will be able to more effectively further Free Software.
If you haven't done so already, we suggest that you subscribe to the FSF Europe mailing lists at http://mailman.fsfeurope.org and take a look at the archives to inform yourself on what has been discussed already.
There are also a few concrete tasks you could become active on, if you want.
1.) Web pages. If you want to contribute by building the FSF Europe web pages, you can export them to your own computer and modify them to improve or add what you have in mind. See the page https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group_id=53 for technical details. When you've modified the pages, generate a patch and upload it at https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group_id=53. It will be reviewed and shortly integrated if we agree that it is a useful addition. If you plan to contribute on a regular basis we can provide you with a protected access that allows you to modify the pages by yourself.
2.) Various public tasks. You can follow the current tasks of the FSF Europe at the URL https://savannah.gnu.org/pm/?group_id=53. Don't hesitate to suggest new subjects. If you want to be actively involved in the task management, we can grant you the necessary rights to do so.
3.) Donations. There is a bank account that can be used for donations if time is of the essence. If possible we would like to ask you to wait until the FSFE has an official donation bank account. The FSFE will seek to achieve charitable status, so donations will be tax-deductible whenever possible.
Discussions should take place on the mailing lists mentioned above. All information that you would like to tell the FSFE in private can be sent to team@fsfeurope.org.
The bit about the web pages is still a little ahead of its time, but we expect to be setting up proper pages soon with the help of those of you who volunteered. Information about this will be posted here, as well.
Personally I have been relatively busy with the trip (and things resulting from it) to the Linux Expo/Linux World and Free Software Foundation Award to Paris. My home page now contains a list of conferences I attended/plan to attend so you can find out where to meet me if you plan to get in touch
http://www.gnu.org/people/greve/conferences.html
The constitution of the Free Software Foundation Europe hub (the central organization) is in the proofreading-phase now and after we made final changes, the FSFE will be officially founded. This will probably happen within the next two weeks.
Afterwards the FSFE needs to start working while creating the local chapters throughout the other European countries.
So much for the current situation, this should be enough information to process for now. We'll keep you updated.
Regards, Georg C. F. Greve on behalf of the FSF Europe