Activities of FFII 2004-2005: Report to the General Assembly
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Successes and failures of the Association since its last General Assembly, to be reported to the Association by its president Hartmut Pilch.
Below is a very rough outline.
Successes
The rejection of the proposed software patent directive by the European Parliament is to a large extent a success of a loosely knit network. But FFII was more than a label under which this network spoke. It was also a logistical center. During the campaign earlier this year in the EP we distributed funds of 150,000 eur to compensate activists, to conduct conferences and to place advertisements. Sucessful elements of our work were
- provision of in-depth and often quick analysis of proposals at hand gained us trust among many legislators especially in the European Parliament.
Calls for Action and participation software enabled accumulation of a community of 90,000 registered supporters and 800 members
- We were to some extent able to mobilise this community for concerted action.
- We maintained an office and an apartment in Brussels and supported volunteers from all over Europe in working there.
- We managed to get interesting events organised together with academia, companies and parliamentarians in the EP.
- We helped generate pressure in the member states between May 2004 and March 2005, when the Council was busy trying to officialise its Uncommon Position
- We produced some useful PR materials and advertisements in Brussels media
We created a successful web news ticker SwpatcninoEn which links news to background information, and involved many more people in it than had ever before been involved in software patent documentation work.
We built the http://www.economic-majority.com/ campaign which greatly enhanced the credibility of our claim to be the real representatives of "industry" and for the first time realised something close to a serious fundraising effort, which made a noticeable difference.
Some national sections have been officialised. In particular FFII.cz seems set up very well, and FFII.fr is moving forward.
- We have been present at WIPO, WSIS and other venues and produced some position papers on subjects other than software patents.
- ...
Failures
- Everything beside the software patent directive was neglected
- Administrative work rested on the shoulders of overworked activists, some of whom were "burnt out". Since the soldier left in July, the army consists of generals only.
- Nobody was reliably available for rapid response to events and for talking to the journalists. We were by far outperformed by Florian Mueller's one man show.
Much of the FFII's own information infrastructure is a result of somewhat idiosyncratic system building by myself. Opening this up to co-workers or replacing it with more accessible systems takes time and tends to become a source of contentiousness. Some older websites such as http://www.ffii.org/ lag far behind what would have been needed, new attempts such as http://plone.ffii.org/ or http://eu.ffii.org/ didn't reach critical mass. Now with http://en.ffii.org/ we have a hopeful candidate. I asked Aptiko a month ago to replace www.ffii.org with this site and take editorial responsibility for it, but I did not get an answer and for some reason the project doesn't seem to be advancing.
- We plunged into a legal quagmire over defamation litigation from a certain company. I under-estimated the insidiousness of judicial regulation in the area of internet speech and thereby caused costs of 10-20k eur. The only reasonable way to get out of this mess and focus on more important work was to remove the whole documentation for the time being and conclude a ceasefire agreement with said company which subjects both publication and litigation to procedures of mutual scrutiny. The experience highlighted vulnerabilities about which we had not thought much before, and a lot of thinking about institutions and structures. Although upon a close look our current institutional framework is quite shoddy, the reform discussion has sometimes become a problem in itself.
- Since July we have not seriously communicated with our corporate supporters.
- Activities at WIPO etc are not well supported, there is no reliable process for reviewing position papers.
Future Priorities
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