Thanks to everyone who came to the meeting last night! Here is a summary of
what we discussed.
*Updates on FSFE activities*
- Fighting for Open Standards in Dutch schools, trying to prevent Dutch
Government from making Microsoft Silverlight Mandatory in all state schools:
https://fsfe.org/news/2011/news-20111107-01.en.html
- Court victory for the GPL in Germany: Cybits vs AVM battle over right to
distribute changes to the Linux kernel concludes in victory, with the help of
FSFE and gpl-violaions.org:
https://fsfe.org/news/2011/news-20111110-01.en.html
- Free Society Conference in Sweden: talks took and workshops took place on
digital money, anonymity, cryptography, accessibility, feminism, human rights,
and Free Software in charities, many of which were given by FSFE staff and
Fellows:
http://my.fscons.org/schedule/
*Planning a decentralised hosting service in Manchester*
Questions we discussed:
- What would the service be?
- What would the organisation be?
- Who would run it?
- When would it be launched?
- Legality / liability of running the service
- Quality of the service that we could provide
- How would the projec scale in future?
- Getting funding as a social enterprise
Decisions we made:
- To go ahead with the project!
- To use existing second hand hardware from Arcspace initially, if it's
available
- To offer only email and mailing list hosting initially
- To encrypt user data so that admins can't access it, if possible
- To only offer a few pre-configured domains for use by members (not allow
members to use their own domains like johnsmith.com)
- To not register as any kind of entity (company, charity etc.) initially, to
see how the project goes initially and reconsider this later
- To make the core goals of the project freedom and privacy related, and to
communicate this effectively to members
Actions we agreed on:
- Stefan (kitestramuort) - investigate technical feasibility of encrypting
emails on mailserver so that system administrators can't read them
- David Bolton - Investigate legality of storing mail in a way that sysadmins
can't read them
- Mark Wastling - investigate feasibility of using multiple freedomboxes for
distributed processing, and hosting our mailserver on such a system
- Sam - investigate suitability of a Freedombox as a mailserver
- Sam - find out about insurance situation at Arcspace
- Sam - investigate admin overhead involved in running mailman server
- Sam - find out about available hardware at Arcspace for initial server
- Anna / Everyone - try and think of a name for the project / website, and
some appealing domain names to offer to members for their email addresses
Links:
Fripost website:
https://fripost.org/index.en.html
Interview with Fripost founder:
http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=422
Autistici website (Italian community hosting group):
http://autistici.org/en/
FSFE Cloud computing wiki:
http://wiki.fsfe.org/CloudComputing/
UK Freedombox supplier:
https://newit.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=Deb_DreamPlug
Arcspace community centre website:
http://www.arcspacemanchester.org.uk/
Thanks,
Sam.
--
Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : samtuke(a)jabber.fsfe.org
Latest UK Free Software news: uk.fsfe.org
Is freedom important to you? Join the fellowship.fsfe.org
The November Manchester FSFE Fellowship meeting will take *this evening*
at 19.00 in MadLab:
http://madlab.org.uk/content/fsfe-7/
Following on from Tuesday's lively discussion at MFS about Diaspora (a popular
Free Software alternative to Facebook) we shall share ideas about how to move
forward with providing Manchester with its own community hosting, making use
of ArcSpace community centre's facilities.
- What services should we offer?
- How many users should we aim to sign-up?
- Who will do the technical set-up and maintenance?
- How much should we charge?
These and many other questions will be raised. Please come along and share
your thoughts, even if you're not sure about being involved with the project.
Recommended reading: an interview with the president of Fripost - a community
hosting cooperative in Gothenburg, started one year ago and now with 60
members:
http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=422
For more information see recent emails to the list. This meeting was
rescheduled from last month.
See you there!
Sam.
--
Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : samtuke(a)jabber.fsfe.org
Latest UK Free Software news: uk.fsfe.org
Is freedom important to you? Join the fellowship.fsfe.org
= Summary 14-20 November =
During two days this week I spent most of my time travelling back and
recovering from FSCONS in Sweden, following up tasks from the conference, and
publicising next week's Manchester Fellowship meeting.
= Detail =
== Fellowship ==
- Set up account on Grical for posting Fellowship meetings and FSFE events
- Added Manchester Fellowship event to FSFE.org
- Emailed mailing lists about next Fellowship meeting
- Added page to Madlab website about next Fellowship meeting
== Web ==
- Investigated / tested LimeSurvey as potential survey tool for use in FSFE
charity survey (following from my workshop on the subject in Sweden) and also
other surveys in future
== PDF Readers ==
- Committed extensive improvements to my PDF Readers bug processing scripts;
now letters are saved separately to envelopes, bugs are automatically added to
the corresponding xml file for their country (and then displayed on the online
list of bugs), some special characters issues were also resolved.
== Community ==
- Emailed contact from OggCamp information about the Freedom Task Force & GPL
compliance. Finally got this person's details, hence the delay.
- Attended Manchester Free Software meeting on Diaspora; the speaker cancelled
last minute so I led the group discussion on decentralised Internet
technologies. Very positive, about 10 attendees, nearly all of them now in
communication with me on Diaspora.
== Other ==
- Had meeting at FSCONS with Matthias (German Team Coordinator) about
progress, strategy, and Document Freedom Day 2012
- Emailed mailing lists request for help with European Parliament's Free
Software User Group website on behalf of Erik Josefsson
- Contacted my bank about recent failed transactions between FSFE and myself
- My audio interview from OggCamp is now available:
http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=0857%3E
== Editors ==
- Identified interview candidate for November, suggested them to Chris Woolfrey
Thanks,
Sam.
--
Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : samtuke(a)jabber.fsfe.org
Contact the British team: uk(a)fsfeurope.org
The November Manchester FSFE Fellowship meeting will take this Thursday
24th at 19.00 in MadLab:
http://madlab.org.uk/content/fsfe-7/
Following on from Tuesday's lively discussion at MFS about Diaspora (a popular
Free Software alternative to Facebook) we shall share ideas about how to move
forward with providing Manchester with its own community hosting, making use
of ArcSpace community centre's facilities.
- What services should we offer?
- How many users should we aim to sign-up?
- Who will do the technical set-up and maintenance?
- How much should we charge?
These and many other questions will be raised. Please come along and share
your thoughts, even if you're not sure about being involved with the project.
Recommended reading: an interview with the president of Fripost - a community
hosting cooperative in Gothenburg, started one year ago and now with 60
members:
http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=422
For more information see recent emails to the list. This meeting was
rescheduled from last month.
See you there!
Sam.
--
Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : samtuke(a)jabber.fsfe.org
Latest UK Free Software news: uk.fsfe.org
Is freedom important to you? Join the fellowship.fsfe.org
--
Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : samtuke(a)jabber.fsfe.org
Latest UK Free Software news: uk.fsfe.org
Is freedom important to you? Join the fellowship.fsfe.org