Re: Questions for candidates

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 2:30 AM, Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> wrote:
> Do any other candidates want to state plans to intentionally spread
> the ideas of the free software movement?

This is not precise enough to qualify as a plan, but it sets the
general direction I'd like to follow.

With the surveillance stories in the last few years, the general
public has become more aware of the importance of privacy. This is a
domain where free software can really shine and we should use that as
one of the vectors for our advocacy.

Two talks that I find very inspirational in this regard are "More
secure with less security" by Stefan Walter [0] and the keynote Jacob
Appelbaum gave at GUADEC 2012. They both talk about how we should be
helping the users by providing more security while making them have
less to seek it actively.

The implementation of such ideas is of course a technical matter and
the board doesn't have much to do with it. What the board can do is
facilitate it and promote it. We should reach out to people working on
freedom related projects (like Jacob and Tor to take an earlier
example) and discuss how we can integrate with them, and how they
would like us to work with them. The board can extend an invitation
for a talk/keynote at GUADEC that will hopefully foster activity
around a given topic in the community afterwards. That can also take
the form of a simple email discussion, or a hackfest where GNOME
people would meet with people from another project to work on the
integration.

Privacy is the most prominent one, but not the only domain where this
applies. Free culture is another example that comes to mind, and we
could come up with many others. We should reach out to free content
creators, show them how our platform can help them produce their
content and publish it.

Last but not least, when reaching out to the general public, we should
show them how this integration benefits them.

[0] http://videos.guadec.org/2013/More%20secure%20less%20security/

-- 
Alexandre Franke