Advocacy Working Group

Advocacy is absolutely crucial to our initial and, probably, long-term success and viability as a completely-volunteer Free University Project. We don't accept monetary contributions, instead requesting that interested individuals help us out with a much more sustainable currency, that of positive advocacy (as a complement to the constructive criticism that we are of course also always interested in).

We would always encourage people who support our undertaking to try to volunteer their personal time and energy, but we recognize that this is not always an option for everyone. If you cannot help out personally, though, maybe you would be able to help spread their word of our project and increase our mind-share of potential students and volunteers.

Probably the most effective form of advocacy is word-of-mouth: telling family, friends, associates, etc. about our project either in person, over the phone, via email, snail-mail, etc. It's aloso appropriate to append some form of one-line ending to your email messages (commonly known as a signature) to help spread the word. It would, however, be in very poor taste to bulk-email (SPAM) people about our project or to post unsolicited and off-topic messages in forums, Usenet threads, etc. We ask you, kindly, not to engage in these practices; they'll only turn off prospective volunteers and end up hurting the project. Additionally, when posting in an appropriate manner, please make your affiliation with the project clear, and please do not insinuate that you are speaking as a representative of the project unless you're a member of this working group. All these suggestions, and many more, can be found in the Linux Advocacy How-To for the Linux Documentation Project. They can be readily adapted from the promotion of a free software project, such as Linux, to this one.

Thank you for your help in spreading our message.

Current members:

None

Prepared resources:

Conference talk (ps) presented by Daniel Freedman during DebConf 2 at Toronto's York University on 7 July 2002.

Important references:

Linux Advocacy How-To as a model for advocacy of community-driven non-profit projects
Internet Non-Profit Center FAQ
Google Web Directory: Society > Organizations > Volunteering > Opportunities
Google Web Directory: Society > Organizations > Education