Relations with other organizations

[Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org>]

Hi all,

First post here, so a self-introduction should added, read next lines :)

I'm Gil Forcada, member of guifi.net[1] [2], a free, open an neutral
network that started on Catalonia nearly 6 years ago.

Maybe some of you already know me since I have been trying to not mess a
lot on the infodesk for the past 4 GUADEC's and helping translate GNOME
into Catalan (current coordinator) :)

That should be enough. Now back to the topic:

As lots of other projects in guifi we finally created a foundation [3]
to be an enabler for the community just because we found out that it
would be easy to talk with the local governments, get some funds, et al
by having an established body.

We created it 2 years ago and now we are trying to promote as much as we
can our goals: we are in contact with free network communities from all
around the globe, lobbing with the OSA[4], we are also an official
European LIR member[5] (if two networks aren't connected one of them
isn't that open [6]).

And now the interesting part for this GNOME marketing list (sorry for
this long introduction):

We want to spread the word about our project as much as we want (the
same as GNOME and all projects) so we thought that it would be cool if
the GNOME foundation and the guifi.net foundation could make an official
endorsement somehow: I'm thinking in a press release, banner exchanges,
keep a line of contact to let the other know projects that maybe
interests it, giving support ...

So I sent an e-mail to Stormy who then add Brian and finally Diego but
they resolved that it would be better to talk in this mailing list.

With the guifi.net foundation board member hat on I'm here to ask what I
wrote above, but since I'm also involved on GNOME I'm also here help the
GNOME foundation to establish a policy about relations with other
organizations which are loosely tied with GNOME but that they still want
to be somewhat related.

Diego's mail on this list back in November [7] was a really good
starting point.

Thanks for reaching this point!

Cheers,

[1] http://guifi.net/en
[2] An amazing mashup to show our growth:
http://guifi.net/guifi/menu/stats/growthmap or see the graphic on the
left column of the website
[3] http://fundacio.guifi.net/ sorry in Catalan
[4] http://www.openspectrum.eu
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Internet_registry
[6] Ok by now it's just theoretical we are just configuring the routers
et al :)
[7]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2009-November/msg00066.html


-- 
gil forcada

[ca] guifi.net - una xarxa lliure que no para de créixer
[en] guifi.net - a non-stopping free network
bloc: http://gil.badall.net