Hello,
My brief answers to your specific questions is below and after that is some extra information and some personal opinions.
I apologise for my lousy spelling, but it is late and I'm tired and I lack time to proof read this.. you should also take that into count when you think about the contents ;)
ti, 2010-06-08 kello 14:00 +0200, Karsten Gerloff kirjoitti: ...
In order to get a picture of the current situation, inform the General Assembly, and improve the coordination between country teams and hub, I'd like to ask you as coordinators to briefly answer the following questions about your country team:
- How has your team developed over the past 12 months? Did you gain or lose members, and did you gain or lose active people?
The Finnish team was officially established at FSCONS in the fall of 2009. The team consisted and still consists of me, Henri Bergius (deputy coordinator) and Timo Jyrinki (translation coordinator).
- Please give a brief summary of your activities over the past 12 months, since June 2009.
- 2009-10-11: on the request of Karsten, I contacted some Finnish government officials to ask them about how Finland is going to vote about the EIFv2 draft the following week. Good for us: I was told Finland was going to vote against. Later I was called by the assistant of the Finnish national MP Jyrki Kasvi who asked about some additional intel on the matter. Unfortunately I could only referr him to the FSFE and FFII websites.
- spring 2010: I had some talks with Validos ry and COSS about how to steer public tender makers into taking FOSS into account. Nothing concrete followed - yet.
- spring/summer 2010: I tried to organise a gathering for all the FOSS related organisations in Finland to discuss co-operation. There was not much interest (passive board members in all organisations) but we now have decided to meet during Akademy in Tampere, where I've booked a conference room (to be exact: 2010-07-03 17:15-19:15).
- We did *not* publish any press releases.
- I held a FSFE presentation in Tampere on the 14th of April. 14 peope attended and it seemed successful. My slides are available at http://otto.kekalainen.net/FSFE/fsfe-esitelm%c3%a4.odp (in Finnish)
- A second FSFE Fellowship meeting was held at the same location on May 15th (10 people attended) and a third meeting on June 10th (6 people attended). (All three events are listed and described on the http://fsfe.org/events/ page, but I can't link to individual entries since there are no link anchors.)
- I also held the opening presentation about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in the release party in Tampere May 5th, where I also briefly told about FSFE to the audience of about 150 people.
- Timo has translated the FSFE.org website for before the Finnish team was formed and he has kept on doing it, keeping the FSFE website very well translated into Finnish.
- Personally I've also been active on the web@-list pointing out some usability issues with the FSFE website and the underlying FSFE terminology and "mental structures".
- I also took responsibility of the Google Awords account of the FSFE but I haven't done much with it besides adding some FSFE-ads in Finnish.
- Sent a usability "report" to the PDFreaders.org webmasters, but they didn't do much with it else than argument why their current design is good.
- What plans do you have for upcoming activities in the next 3-6
months?
- I'll continue to organise monthly FSFE-event / Fellowhip meetings in Tampere
- What ideas do you have for activities that you'd like to undertake?
- We'll hope the cooperation with other FOSS orgs will lead to something
- Where do you have Fellowship meetings? How often?
We'll, those who attend are mostly not Fellows and come there for a specific topic (like FOSS in schools or OpenStreetMap) but it could be also called a Fellowship meeting. They have been once a month since 2010-04-14.
- What are your plans to enlarge the Fellowship in your country?
The admin of the fsfe-fi-list does not return my mails, so I don't know how many subscribers we have now. At least the traffic is very low. It's good to have subscribers who listen to us, but real Fellows is of course the main goal.
I've been trying hard to recruit more Fellows, but it seems difficult.
When I started this task 2009-11-01 there where 15 Finnish fellows. Now 7 new Fellows have joined and 2 memberships expired, so we are now at 20 Fellows in Finland.
This is way too little compared to the effort put on it. E.g. at the Ubuntu release party there was a room with 150 people, who were very enthusiastic about supporting the FSFE especially to help break the Windows OEM monopoly. Many people said to me that they'd like to join. For the following weeks however only one person joined. I don't know what it is, but there is something wrong somewhere.
I'd also like to note, that the Finnish Ubuntu-fi.org website has had a recommendation for Ubuntu users to join FSFE for a few years. The website has about 50 000 unique visitors per month and it is the third largest referrer of visitors to the FSFE.org website.
I don't think this problem is specific for Finland. The stats at https://stats.fsfe.org/awstats.pl?config=fsfe show there are 30 000 unique visitors a month. Why can we convert only so few of these to Fellows or donators?
According to the stats at https://stats.fellowship.fsfe.org/awstats.pl?month=05&year=2010&outp... the join page receives 1100 views a month, but only a dozen joins. Why is the conversion rate so low?
From the http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ log we know that there are
about 126 000 Ubuntu users in Finland and I'd guess that there are lots of more people using other distros or even FOSS in Windows. Personally I'd very much like to see that at least 10% of these would join some organisation. If FSFE can attract only 20 Finns, maybe I should invest my energy in some other organisation, e.g. the Finnish Linux user group?
I really don't know why others are not interested in joining (I know I was :)) but here are some possible reasons, which of some or all may apply:
1) FSFE does not communicate well enough _why_ anybody should support it. Maybe we should have a better listing of our activities and microfeeds about every issues current status? I know the web team has done a great job since last FSCONS, but the issue feeds are still missing and for that we need content that the issue teams should produce, not the web team.
2) Maybe the FSFE/Fellowship thing is confusing? Maybe people want to be "proper" members or just pure donators, and some special "donating membership" is not interesting? Or maybe people just don't understand what the Fellowship is? We have so many structures that we need a terminology page (http://fsfe.org/contribute/translators/wordlist.en.html) Maybe the organisation need to be simplified? We also how special protocols, like we differentiate between official and inofficial mail whether it is sent from a fsfe.org or fsfeurope.org mail address, though nobody who recives the mail is likely to know anything about our protocols.
3) Maybe the Fellowship fee is too high? Maybe we should lower the fee into 20-30 €/year and have donators clearly separated as those who can afford to contribute financially?
4) Maybe the pages or the join form has usability issues? It's good that the certificate "error" was fixed, but still e.g. the mailing list subscription page only works for people who have installed CA-Certs and for the rest it gives a nasty security warning. Maybe join page has usability issues?
I don't know. I hope that the GA would come up with a plan to address this so that that it would be easier to get more Fellows. At the moment, the Fellowship amount is the main metric of a country teams our success.
what help and support do you expect / need / wish for from the European hub?
what would you like to do as a team in order to support the European hub of FSFE?
We are willing to help get more Fellows and donators so that you can do the much needed lobbying for us at the EU and UN level. We'll also willing an capable to do quick local actions if you start some coordinated effort (like the EIFv2 voting thing described above).
- as coordinators, what are your personal plans for the coming year? Do you think that you will be able spend more or less time on FSFE activities?
We'll, I'm always busy. I think that I'll have to allocate less time for the FSFE in the future than what I've done until now. I know the other team members are also very busy, so it would be good to find new team members in the long run.
Remember it's not a bad thing that we are busy - all of us work professionally with FOSS and when we are busy it means that the market for FOSS solutions is growing in Finland.