[Fsfe-ie] 1-page letter, faxes at the ready

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

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).