Gno and Gyes campaigns - About positive Free Software campaigning

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier argues in his article that positive campaigning is much more successful in reaching more people, than negative campaigning. He especially criticise the FSF for its "Defective by Design" and "Windows 7 sins" campaigns. I fully agree with Joe's point that it is important to do positive campaigning. This is especially true in Europe. That is why we -- FSF's European sister organisation -- always tried to formulate our message in a positive way. Only with positive campaigning FSFE is able to be recognised by European politicians and in return get their recognition, e.g. with this year's Theodor Heuss Medal. But also the FSF already had positive campaigns. Here some recent examples from the FSFs:

• Document Freedom Day: The Document Freedom Day is a day for Document Freedom and for Open Standards. FSFE did most of the work for the central organisation of the DFD in the past years to promote Open Standards. The FSF also has a campaign page for Open Standards.
• rOgg On: For this years DFD FSFE promoted Ogg Vorbis. The German and the Austrian team encouraged two radio stations which already use Ogg vorbis, by giving them a prize and a tart with the "rOgg On" slogon. Deutschlandradio stated that they Feel more honoured than for the Grimme Prize". The picutres clearly show how positive that campaign was. During that campaign we translated FSF's PlayOgg website into German, which also is a positive campaign.
• I love Free Software For this years Valentine's Day we started the "I love Free Software" campaign. People can show their love to Free Software.
• PDFreaders.org FSFE's Fellows started a campaign for Free Software PDFreaders and also explaining Open Standards in this context.

There are more examples of positive activies on FSFE's activity page, and there are also more examples on FSF's campaign page. Although there are a lot of "Gyes" campaigns out there, the problem is to get media coverage with positiv campagins. Beside that sometimes you have to critise bad things. For example Digitial Restriction Management (DRM) is bad for software users. The FSFs work that users have to control over their computing. So we have to defend them and say "No" to DRM, even if we do not have a solution how to make money with music and videos in the future. It is important for the FSFs to keep a firm stand on users software freedom.