The CryptoCards, which will give all Fellows the power to use strong authentication and encryption are currently at the printer. They should be ready around 20 March 2005 and we will start personalising and shipping them immediately.

All things considered, you should hold your card in hands around the end of March.

To celebrate the Fellowship launch, FSFE and Newthinking – Network for Free Software – are having a Freedom Party in Berlin.

On 19 March 2005, Fellows and interested users will mix and mingle in a

relaxed environment at the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystr. 48,

Berlin-Mitte. Besides socialising, guests can catch up on the news

about Freedom in the digital society and Free Software.

At this opportunity, FSFE will present the CryptoCard that makes strong data protection available to all users.

[Download Flyer]

[Click here for info (in German)]

As you will have noticed, some parts of the portal are still not fully functional, in particular the blogs are still having a permission problem. Together

with people from the Plone community we are working to get the

functionality up and running within the next days. We apologise for the

delay — if you think you can help with testing workflows, hack

portlets, integrate i18n, please get in touch with the list system-hackers@fsfeurope.org.

The Fellowship of FSFEurope is very special for FSFE: we have been

working hard in past months to create this community. A special

thanks goes out to all of you who have already signed up as Fellows at

FOSDEM. Thank you!

But is the first person to sign up automatically Fellow #1? We at

FSFE think that it would be more fair to give to all

FOSDEM participants the possibility to be Fellow #1, so we're offering

the chance for number #1 to be assigned randomly among those who have

signed up before 23:59 on Sunday, February 27.

So, sign up now and good luck!

Fellowship team

After artundweise.de was so kind to

volunteer doing the design for the site based on the pro-bono

artworks by futurebrand, we had a long week getting things properly

applied and installed.

Special thanks go to the global Plone

community that helped us quickly and competently with the tasks at

hand. Special thanks go to Russ Ferriday for help with the layout, as

weel as Riccardo Lemmi from reflab.it and Holger Lehmann from

catworkx.de, who helped us with the not-entirely-trivial registration

form. Thanks to that combined effort, the page is now online and

ready to accept your registration.