ke, 2011-01-19 kello 11:00 +0100, Matthias Kirschner kirjoitti:
Hi Otto,
- Otto Kekäläinen otto@fsfe.org [2011-01-18 21:05:18 +0200]:
And one more thing... is there any update on lower Fellowship fees? We would really need that to gain more Fellows in Finland.
We will first try it out with the monhtly payments (5 EUR a month is not so much as 60 EUR a year). Reinhard (in CC) is working on that. The problem is, that we cannot lower it without a financial bufffer, as it might happen that Fellows lower their fee and we will not be able to balance that with new Fellows.
As you might remember from our discussions at FSCONS, this issue is vital to me. The current fee (and to some degree the unfriendly Fellowship join form) stop 99% of the potential Finnish Fellows from joining (based on my experience so far). I'm ready to do a big push for FOSS-issues in Finland now when the elections are just a few months away and I'm willing to do it as a FSFE representative, thus gaining lots and lots of visibility and moral support for us.
I feel that some of my effort is wasted if I don't harness the visibility to get some of the FOSS-population to join and monetary fund some organisation that fights for the cause.
Do you think that as a compromise, the Finnish translation of the near-future version of the join page could advertise a lower fee than in other languages?
That could also serve as an interesting study on the matter of Fellowship fee elasticity, as the economic term goes, without risking anything European wide..
I know this matter is not easy, but I want to bring it up again, so that you know that it is very important to me.