On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 10:36:44PM +0100, adam beecher wrote:
Thanks a lot guys, I didn't think it would all get done. Fingers crossed now.
Tab-delimited spreadsheet of Irish MEP fax numbers attached, for future reference. Why are there two country codes? Anyone?
+32 is their Brussels office, +33 is their Strasbourg one. This plenary session is in Strasbourg but I've heard that communications sent to one office get forwarded to the other, not sure what sort of delay occurs though.
Any criticisms about the content of the letter?
No, aside from the fact that these things would probably look better coming from an "association" or somesuch
Agreed. This is still something I'm thinking about (how to set up an effective organisation). A board of five people would be great but five people have to stand out as being capable. This can only wait so long. At some point we should just make an org and if it's suboptimal, we'll live with it for a year and have elections then. Jan 5th would be a good cut-off date for an org, it's the 20th anniversary of the GNU project.
when you get right down to it we're just talking about a few forms and a web-fax gateway
A public "fax your MEP" webpage? This could be useful in general but on the software patents issue it would have been a hinderance. One of the problems we encountered was the complaint that MEPs were receiving too many communications.
They got loads of "Say NO to software patents", which McCarthy countered by saying that her proposal didn't create software patents. What the MEPs were asking for was a education about what exactly was bad about the directive. This sort of information can only come from a small number of informed people (preferably with peer review).