you hopefully visited this page because you want to give your precious vote for the FSFE’s Fellowship election (which starts to February 20) to one of the three candidates, Nicolas, Felix, or to me.
The Fellowship Election takes place once a year. The elected person will be part of FSFE’s General Assembly, its most important organ, for 2 years. The GA makes important decisions like the strategic agenda or budget plans. The two Fellowship representatives have the honorable task to attend these discussion in the name of the hundreds and thousands of Fellows. Besides that, they can also use their weight to push changes to the FSFE which all Fellows might benefit from. So these elections are a very important democratic tool for YOU to influence FSFE’s future path.
In the next few paragraphs I want to tell you **who I am**, why I want to be **your representative**, why I may be the **right person** for that task and also why you **may not want to vote for me**.
My name is Max Mehl, 24 years old and currently living in Konstanz, Germany, next to the Swiss border. I’m in my last semester of Politics and Administration. Besides I work as an IT freelancer (computer support, websites, server administration) where I work with Free Software as much as possible. In some months I will [go to Tanzania][1], Africa for half a year to work there as a volunteer teacher.
My connection to FSFE began 2011 when I subscribed FSFE’s translators mailing list. It didn’t took long until I became a proud Fellow like you. But all the time I wanted to do more – not because I had a lot of time but because I felt that this Free Software organisation is something special. And as luck would have it, I was able to do [my six months internship][2] (required by my university) at FSFE’s Berlin office where I met many staffers, GA members, Fellows and volunteers. With this motivation and gained knowledge I joined the germanophone team where I am as active as in web@ or translators@. On [my FSFE team page][3] there’re listed some campaigns and activities which I am involed into.
During my internship where I was able to look behind many scenes I realised that one thing needs improvement for Fellows: more insight and transparency. Admit it: We’re supporting the FSFE financially (and that’s great!) but do you exactly know which people are using it for what? Wouldn’t it be good to have the possibility to 1. get to know the great people behind FSFE and 2. get to know what they are currently working on?
When I spoke with some Fellows in my home town, most of them don’t know about our structure or the staffers and what they’re doing. I think, that’s something which has to be improved, for example by periodical small reports by the people themselves and the interesting things they’ve done in the, let’s say, last 4 weeks – from their personal perspective.
And that wouldn’t even cause really more time consumption for the staffers because many reports already exist – they just have to made public in a way Fellows could be interested in (and not complicated organigrams or endless lists of avatars).
From a Fellowship representative I also expect to be available for all kinds of questions and feedback of the people he represents. So for me it goes without saying that you could contact me anytime if you want to know something or want me to bring some input in the General Assembly. Of course, I would also still be an active member of the teams I’m working with at the moment, so translators@, web@, the compulsory routers team and some others would still have to read my mails :P
The goals I explained above aren’t going to be easily implemented. FSFE is – like many others – a place where people like to discuss their opinion. My advantage is to know most of the many perspectives of FSFE: The view as a volunteer, a Fellow and a staffer. Especially as the last I had a quite good oversight over many aspects because I helped organising campaigns, co-worked with many people in- and outside of FSFE, followed a lot of internal discussions and also witnessed a few conflicts. I can relate to both our Fellows‘ side and the staffers‘ or GA members‘ side and I am confident to be able to intermediate when needed.
When thinking about running for the seat as a Fellowship representative, there came also some reasons in my mind why you may not want to vote for me. All of them may be legit but I also want you to know my side of the story.
<span style="text-decoration: underline;">You are German</span>
Yes, I know. There’re people complaining about the percentage of Germans or german-speakers inside FSFE. First of all, I cannot relate to this problem because there are a lot of people from other nationalities very active in FSFE and the whole Free Software movement. And second, I cannot understand this nationality-focussed point of view. We’re an European organisation, most of FSFE’s work is communicated in English on mailing lists and chats and if you take a look in the translators team you’ll see that collaboration between different nations and languages works. And additionally I live so close beneath the Swiss border that many – even German – people don’t even know in which country I live ;)
True, it would be cool to have more women inside FSFE. Unfortunately there’re no women running for this seat so if you don’t vote for me or Felix and Nicolas because of this reason, please ask you female friends to get active in FSFE, become Fellow and run for this seat! There’ll be many people appreciating it :)
One may think that living in Africa makes it impossible for a western living to represent tech-savvy people. I don’t think so. There are many internet cafés, my workplace has two broadband connections and you can also have quite cheap internet connection via radio network. So I would still be able to follow discussions in mailing lists and answer your questions and concerns. And this stay in Tanzania would only last a quarter of the whole representative’s term.
