Guest accounts for Fellowship wiki

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It is now possible to have guest accounts on wiki.fsfe.org. This helps a lot so more people can contribute to the wiki and work together with Fellows on activities. Thanks to Cri our sysadmin for implementing it! To register a guest account:

  • Go to https://wiki.fsfe.org and click on the “Login” link in the upper-right menu bar
  • Click the “request a guest account” link below the login form and you will get a registration form.
  • Fill in all the registration form fields; please note that a “Guest-” prefix will be automatically prepended to your chosen username) and save your password in a secure place.
  • Your account must be manually approved by one of our administrators; you will receive an e-mail message as soon as this is done.
  • When you receive the confirmation e-mail message, you can log into the wiki, using the username contained in the message, and the password you chose at registration time.

A good start might be the Video or the audio section. Compared to the transcripts they lack more content and structure. So help us improving the infomation.

Fellowship Jabber meeting “Meet the candidates”, Wednesday 17 February 19:00 CET

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Hello Fellows,

all of you should now have received the voting e-mails for the second Fellowship seat in FSFE’s General Assembly (GA). You will have
time until the end of February to vote.

To give you the possibility to ask Julia and Björn questions which are not answered on the election pages about their candidature we will held a jabber meeting on:

Wednesday 17 February at 19:00 – 20:30 CET

How to participate in the Jabber meeting:

  • login with your jabber account (see Jabber Howto)
  • Join the multi user chat (MUC) room “fellowship” at the server conference.jabber.fsfe.org
  • Ask your questions

We encourage you to test connecting to the MUC before the actual meeting so you can contact us in case you have any difficulties.

Looking forward to see you at the meeting,

Matthias

Server problems today

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Dear Fellows, this morning the hosting centre where our Fellowship servers are located suffered a partial power outage.
Due to these circumstances beyond our control, the servers were offline until 14:30 today.

Unfortunately, this affected all Fellowship services, including the @fsfe.org mail forwarding. Delivery was delayed, no mail was lost. We apologise for any inconvenience.

What do your taxes buy? Free Software in the public sector — Fellowship Jabber Meeting Dec. 21

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As you can’t have helped but notice, Christmas is coming up. It’s not exactly being discrete, with “Jingle Bells” playing ad nauseam in every store and a perceptible upsurge in greeting card spam.

Here’s some relief. We’re holding December’s Fellowship Jabber meeting on Monday the 21st. From 19:30 to 21:00, we’ll discuss the role and state of Free Software in the public sector.

Hey, why are you yawning? Don’t. From a Free Software point of view, public administrations are quite exciting. Why?

  • because the public sector spends a lot of money on software and related services.
  • because it’s tax money. *Our* tax money. Yes, yours too.
  • because citizens and companies could profit if public bodies in European countries would spend more of the above money on Free Software and services around it.

At FSFE, we’ve been quite involved in a heated battle for more interoperability in the European public sector. It’s a nice showpiece for the way in which political influence and proprietary lobbyism work.

I’ll be there to discuss these topics with you, answer questions and collect ideas for things we can do. With me, I’ll have Hugo Roy, one of FSFE’s current interns working on policy questions.

And no Jingle Bells playing in the background. Promise.

Here’s the announcement:

What do your taxes buy? Free Software and interoperability in the public sector.

Among other things, we will discuss why the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is important to get more Free Software into the public sector.

Among other things, we will discuss why the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is important to get more Free Software into the public sector.

Karsten Gerloff (President FSFE) and Hugo Roy (intern FSFE) will be there to answer your questions.

You can read more about the EIF on:
– EIFv2: Tracking the loss of interoperability

– FSFE: EC caves in to proprietary lobbyists on interoperability
So join the jabber-meeting:

Monday 21 December 2009, from 19.30 – 21.00 CET.

= How to participate =

– login with your jabber account (see Jabber Howto)
– Join the multi user chat (MUC) room “fellowship” at the server conference.jabber.fsfe.org
– Ask your questions

We encourage you to test connecting to the MUC before Monday so you can contact us via fellowship@fsfeurope.org in case you have any difficulties.

If you have topic proposals for next meetings please let us now.

Fellowship Jabber meeting about FSFE’s education activities – Wednesday 18 November 20:00 CEST

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Hi Fellows,

after some time of inactivity the edu-team went back to work. Therefore you are warmly invited to participate in the fellowship-jabber meeting to join the discussion on the future of the education activity.

A lot still needs to be done, but also a lot has been archieved already. FSFE president Karsten was interviewed for a magazine about Free Software and Education, Guido and others put much work into the wiki to keep the information up to date and the website will be moved back to active projects as well.

Our edu-network (edu-eu at gnu.org) awaits your input be it from an activist, journalist or just interested persons position. Share you stories, challenges, the decision-making processes in your country and other news. What is your opinion on Free Software and education? Got any ideas? Let us know your concerns!

Join the jabber-meeting: Wednesday 18 November 2009, from 20.00 – 21.00 CEST.

See you there,
Thomas Jensch

How to participate

We encourage you to test connecting to the MUC before so you can contact us via fellowship at fsfeurope.org in case you have any difficulties.

If you have topic proposals for next meetings please let us now.

Fellowship jabber: got firewall?

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For those of you sitting behind firewalls or proxies that block connections to the standard jabber/XMPP ports, the Fellowship jabber server now accepts connections also on ports 80 and 443.

To use this feature, just configure your jabber client to use port 80 or 443 instead of the standard port 5222, leaving all other settings unchanged.

Note: since some ISPs may block outgoing non-http traffic on port 80, port 443 is more likely to work. In both cases, the server enforces a secure TLS connection.

Want to learn more about jabber and other Fellowship services? See http://wiki.fsfe.org/FellowshipServices

Jabber service: scheduled downtime

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We are finally ready to replace the old Fellowship jabber/XMPP server with a new one! This will imply a short downtime, so the jabber service will be unavailable starting from Sunday 18 October at 10:00 CET, for about 30 minutes.

After that, to use the new server, you will only have to change the password setting in your jabber client, replacing the old jabber-specific password with your usual Fellowship password (the one used to access all other Fellowship services).

You can learn more about the jabber service at http://wiki.fsfe.org/Jabber, and stay informed about the status of the Fellowship services following the Fellowship News blog.

New Fellowship jabber server, please test

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Dear Fellows, as some of you may know, we are about to replace the current Fellowship jabber server with a new one, that should improve the quality of our jabber service.

Before switching from the old server, we set up a test instance for the new server, so all Fellows are invited to test it and report any problems and suggestions.

To try the new Fellowship test server, you have to create another profile in your jabber client, using these values:

  • username: your Fellowship username (this is the same username currently used for the Fellowship jabber account).
  • domain: jabbertest.fsfe.org (so your complete jabber account on the test
    server will be: YOURUSERNAME@jabbertest.fsfe.org)
  • password: your current Fellowship password, that is: the one used to access all other Fellowship services (please note that this is different from the password currently used for the Fellowship jabber server)
  • jabber server: jabbertest.fsfe.org
  • port: you can use the standard jabber port 5222, or the (deprecated) port 5223; the server will enforce a secure SSL connection in both cases

When you connect to the server, you may get a warning about the SSL certificate (we are re-using the same SSL certificate that we use on the old jabber server), please ignore this at the moment and accept the certificate.

Once connected to the new server, you can find your usual contacts (all have been automatically converted to @jabbertest.fsfe.org), search for other jabber users using the jabber user directory: vjud.jabbertest.fsfe.org, enter the fellowship chatroom, and do the usual things you do in jabber; feel free to mess up with the data on this test server, as they won’t be used in the new official Fellowship server.

Please report your feedback, and especially any problems you may encounter, to fellowship-hackers@fsfeurope.org

As soon as we make sure that everything works fine, we will announce at https://blogs.fsfe.org the timeline and instructions for switching to the new server.

Thanks for your support!

Fellowship GA seat election results

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It has been an interesting time since FSFE added a Fellowship representation to the General Assembly (GA). Torsten Grote, Jan-Hendrik Peters, Michel Roche, and Björn Schießle emerged from the candidacy period, as the first four Fellows running for the election.

The one month election period ended, and you can see the election results on the official FSFE site.

Thanks to all Fellows who participated in the whole process and made this a valuable experience for the Fellowship and for FSFE.

Last reminder: Only 5 days left to vote for FSFE’s Fellowship GA seat

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the election period for the first Fellowship GA seat will end in 5 days with the end of May. So on the 1 June we will announce who will represent the Fellows in FSFE’s highest decision making body, the General Assembly (see FSFE’s legal structure for more information.)

I hope you had the chance to read the candidates’ blog entries, participate in the “meet the candidates” Jabber multi user chat meeting on Monday 20:30, or had the chance to communicate with them in another way to form an opinion.

So this is the last e-mail to remind you to give your vote.

To refresh your memory you can visit the election page where you find a summary about the candidates–Björn, Henner, Michel and Torsten–and links to their blogs.

Happy voting!
Matthias