Re: [Fsfe-uk] AFFS strategy (Was: Beyond bitching...)

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 11:25 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:

(Anything chopped I probably agree with)

> AFFS knows (or can find out or decide) what resources it can
> offer but LUGs don't. It should offer those as a starting point,
> along with an invitation for LUGs to ask questions.  LUGs are the
> backbone of our free software community at the minute and AFFS
> offers them little.

True. I know in the past we've been asked by LUGs for basic things like
leaflets - we're probably the easiest/quickest place to get FSFE
leaflets, and obviously we have our own stuff. But, I don't think there
is a huge amount we can offer LUGs because we're a different type of
organisation; we're primarily about campaigning whereas a LUG is a much
more hands-on thing. There is definitely an overlap and mutual interest
there, though.

> All of the suggestions seem good ones, but which have
> resources and opportunity? For example, a LUG newsletter would
> need an editorial policy, decisions about publishing and some
> real bridge-building with LUGs to get a good distribution.

Well, the idea of a LUG newsletter would be that it would be very
similar to what we do already - it could be more or less the same thing
we send our members, modulo some bits of content - it would be good use
of resources we already have. And, I think the resources thing is key -
we can't offer things which will take us a lot of time to do, because we
simply don't have the resources for that right now.

> More generally, AFFS should be a figurehead or a muster point
> when it's appropriate. In some fields, it's probably no longer
> appropriate and it's time to work with, in or on the group
> that is the figurehead, instead of continuing the pretense of a
> workgroup. In others, if there was a clear offer for workgroups,
> I think it could work.

Yeah, I totally agree. 

> > [...] but maybe the answer is that we open affs-ctte, start
> > an affs-private and hope that the majority of discussion continues on
> > ctte? [...]
> > Just as a straw poll: do others think this is worth pushing? [...]
> 
> The sentiment is good, but the past archives shouldn't be opened

Oh, that's not on the table, I don't think we could (legally) even if we
wanted to, there are all sorts of private mails on there :D

The idea of opening affs-ctte was basically predicated on the assumption
that habits are hard to break - maybe there are some on ctte who have a
problem working on a public list, I don't know, but I suspect most use
of the private list is simply out of habit. 

What Andrew said about commitment is probably bang on the money - it's
about breaking habits.

> I think ctte just working on public lists unless it's actually a
> private matter would be better and simpler. It may help to keep
> down the number of uninformative noise posts too.

Do you think AFFS-Project is the list, FSFE-UK or some other new list?

I personally think AFFS-Project is it. I'm interested in what others
think about this.

Cheers,

Alex.