Re: [Fsfe-uk] Membership

[ian]

On Sat, 2003-05-24 at 11:30, Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Fri, 23 May 2003, Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> > > Also what we should promote as benefits will have to be different.
> > 
> > Presumably the benefits here are along the lines of 'your ideas intrigue
> > me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter'? It's unlikely we would want
> > to stretch to costs beyond marketing materials, etc., as part of our more
> > general role to inform people about free software.
> 
> Given that we are discussing some form of associate membership for those 
> in the education sector would it not make sense to offer access to 
> information resources on how best to use Free Software in education. 
> Perhaps this could be in association with the SchoolForge UK people?

I think part of the global problem is fragmentation. There are so many
free software organisations springing up! SchoolForge UK was set up
partly as a response to this. There is also OFSET. I would see something
like this hierarchy

               FSF

          AFFS UK  AFFS Germany etc

School Forge   (BusinessForge) (NHS forge) etc - I have no idea if such
groups exist but I think there is something in the NHS.

To me it seems logical that members of School Forge would also
reasonably want to be members of AFFS perhaps by affiliation ie the AFFS
allows affiliated organisations as long as they have the same
over-arching goals but these are just in specialist areas. This then
produces a federated model of membership. Let's say SchoolForge achieved
10,000 members (at the moment its only a handful but no-one has really
made a big effort with recruitment) and SchoolForge was affiliated to
AFFS. AFFS can go to the government and say we have our 10,000+ members.

As far as I know, School Forge is really just a Wiki and a list of
members. Perhaps it needs to establish a more formal constitution first.
I have some potential sources of funding to help develop School Forge
but they are by no means certain at this point. If AFFS members think
this model has some merit, I can contact the School Forge members and
see if we could work something out.

> I imagine that the thing most associate members will want will be 
> information on what is available and where to get help implementing and 
> supporting it.

To be honest, I think most associate members would make absolutely no
demands at all. Say a pro-free software school with 100 teachers
enrolled all its staff as associate members, one or two would be active
enough to join in, the others would ask them ;-) The advantage to the
AFFS is simply that numbers provide political clout in a democracy.

You could of course have an organisational affiliation to School Forge
eg school pays £50 and all over 18s automatically become members. This
would generate a bit of income and large numbers which would of course
knock on into AFFS. 

> Jason Clifford
-- 
ian <address@hidden>