Communicating freely

The fellowship of FSFE has just gained a planet! All of the blog entries from all of the fellows are now neatly collected into a stream at http://www.fsfe.org/en/planet

The RSS feed is here: http://www.fsfe.org/rss/feed/planet_rss20

I have to say I think this is pretty cool. The fellowship is a diverse collection of Free Software supporters from all over Europe and further afield. Having a unified way to read everyone’s thoughts is refreshing. It’s also good for the lazy side of me. My email client delivers each fresh round of postings without needing to open a browser.

The fellowship of FSFE is currently drafting an interesting new project about advocacy.  It’s here if you want to read more about it.

I’m really excited about this.  I think advocacy is a really important aspect of Free Software at the moment.  We’re moving more and more into the mainstream but there is still a lot of explaining and engagement that needs to be done.

A key thing about Free Software advocacy is to contextualise according to the audience.  People are sensitive about getting preached at.  A business man needs to hear about the bottom line.  A political scientist needs to hear about the social impact.  A programmer needs to hear about how their work will be made more productive.  This does not mean changing the overarching message of freedom, but delivering it with consideration.

The FSFE advocacy project will be building a collection of material to enable people to advocate Free Software effectively in multiple contexts.  The idea is to collect slides, FAQs, essays and everything else that needs to go into a speaker’s tool kit.