[Fsf-friends] Re: Fund Raising for FSF-India

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

hi,

was reading through this thread and something cropped up. this is
completely off-topic as of now and might also be irrelevant but then
relevance (as my prof said) is relative.

was watching a fine program on BBC y'day evening (~1900 IST) with a
panel of this year's Nobel laureates sitting down with Nik Gowing to
discuss why science is not being appreciated by the common man and
society in general - why for every keystroke i make i do not wonder
about the efforts of comp-sci personnel, scientists and hackers and
consider society blessed (this is my personal addition). what the
panel and especially the chemists and physicists agreed upon is that
the scientific community requires communicators - 'someone like
Richard P Feynmann' who could bridge the gap and make the connection.
they also agree that this will not make people more appreciative of
scientists by forgetting the stereotypical image, but this will help
make society scientifically aware and inculcate scientific spirit and
perhaps (they hope) vision. simplistic ? perhaps, but it will be a
start.

i believe that the raising of funds should not be an one-time effort
only. it must be made into a sustained initiative aimed at
encouraging donations towards the cause of Free Software Movement in
particular and 'freedom' in general. to get this initiative going one
has to look beyond Free Software enthusiasts and volunteers as these
are believers (captive consumers) of the -ism. we need to look
towards larger population of academicians from diverse streams,
businesses (small and large) whose lives and motivations are affected
by using 'non-free' systems and deployments. in order to successfully
do this, we need communicators, we need personalities and we need
faces. it may sound as an anathema but the moment people connect an
ism to a face/person the personal involvement becomes easier. a
successful propagation of ideas and efforts of the FSF/FSFI coupled
with a process for accepting donations would lead to a better
initiative at Fund Raising. let us be realistic, could the regional
nodes take on the responsibility of generating donations from
non-enthusiasts via roadshows and presentations ?

take a local case for example, in his local area tathagata banerjee
(coordinator fsf-westbengal) has a cybercafe owner who uses licensed
MS OS and applications for all his machines. finally fed-up with the
'support' received from local MS after he had to re-install in the
event of a hard drive crash, this person desired to change over to
something more robust and stable and having license conditions that
are not 'freedom curbing'. i am glad to announce that tathagata has
personally helped the migration over to a GNU/Linux setup with the
deployment being done in phases. these are cases that need to be
talked about as it touches at a very believable personal level.

we need to create that belief, we need to create an appreciation and
we need to do it over and over and over again....

have a wonderful day
warm regards

sankarshan



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Everything that has a beginning, has an end - free your mind.
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