Collecting Testimonies

Periodic task for every FFII activist

As a supporter of FFII, you should, as a matter of routine, collect one company testimony per day before you do anything else. This is simply to get you exercised and to prove that you are working as part of our network. Or call it clockwork: it's connected to the mechanics of being organised and supportive.

There are two procedures: one if you have a shell acount on the FFII server and another if you don't. We will start with the second one, so, if you do have proper accounts and permissions, scroll down to the second section

Helping without an account

Get a company to work on

To start collecting a testimony from a company, first you need a company.

You can select a company in three ways:

Getting basic information

For a start you need to find out:

  1. Name of the company
  2. Web address of the company
  3. A contact within the company (preferably, CEO or owner)
  4. Contact information

Gathering testimony information

For a testimony to be published it will need to contain these parts:

You can gather this information yourself and propose a premade testimony to the company, or you can simply ask the company for the respective information, but in this case you must be ready to explain to them what is The current situation with the directive, what software patents could do to their business, how Council version enables software patents and why European Parliament got it right. You should also be ready to provide more pointers to additional information.

A good testimony should state how exactly software patents in Europe would harm this particular company. It would be good to mention explicit opposition to Council's position and support for restoration of the EP version. The testimony should not be larger then 2-3 paragraphs or 100-200 words

Always ask the company for confirmation and corrections before asking editors to link companies page to the main page. Editors will not link the testimony you collected to main page without a clear message from the company that they like the final version.

Formatting a testimony for publication

Note: There a new interface up for testing here you can also submit testimonies there. The system will give you a preview link that you can give to the company to confirm their testimony. This way you'll only need help from em-testimony team only at the very final step

When the testimony is ready or when you want to present it to the company for evaluation, you must prepate it to the format that is used to publish it on the Economic Majority website. This format consists of 5 files:

  1. Big logo of the company: logo.png, PNG format, minimum size - 150x100 pixels, maximum size - 300x200 pixels, should look good on a white background (example)
  2. Small logo of the company: logo120.png, PNG format, width - 120 pixels, must be proportional to the big logo, should look good on a white background (example)
  3. Photo of the contact person: portrait.jpg, JPEG format, minimum size - 120x160 pixels, maximum size - 240x320 pixels, crop to a portrait (example)
  4. Small photo of the contact person: portrait100.jpg, JPEG format, width - 100 pixels, proportional to the big photo, crop to a portrait (example)
  5. Text file with the testimony information split into fields - index.en.txt (this is for English, use index.fr.txt for French and similar for other languages). (English example French example) Each line of the text file represents a data field (with examples):
    1. Name of the contact person (John Smith)
    2. Title of the contact person (CEO of BarFoo Inc.)
    3. Full name of the company (BarFoo Incorporated)
    4. Title of the testimony (Patents kill our business)
    5. Description of the company (BarFoo Inc. is a Sweedish fishing software producer with 0 employees)
    6. The testimony (We hate software patents.<br/>They have destroyed our business in US and now thei are coming to EU.)
    7. Web address of the company (http://www.example.com)
    8. Short company name (BarFoo)

If there is no description of the company, leave that line blank. If you want to have multiple paragraphs in the testimony - use "<br/>" to separate them, not a new line. You can have text in multiple languages (in separate files), but English version is obligatory.

Neither the name of the contact person (first line of the text file), nor the full company name (third line) should be longer then 20 letters. If needed, please use "<br/>" to bring part of the name to the next line, but first consider shortening the name somehow.

Please use GIMP or other equivalent image processing tools to get a result with a better visual quality. For example, Imagemagic tools have significantly lower quality of output. Please also include all original graphics files, so they can be reprocessed if such need occurs.

You can also download a full template testimony here.

Publishing the testimony

After preparation of all files, you send them by email to em-testimony@ffii.org . One of editors will take your testimony and put it up on the economic-majority.com web server in a new directory and send you the address. You must then contact the representative of the company to confirm if they like the testimony as it appears on the page and if they agree that it will be linked from the main page. Reply from the company must be sent to em-testimony@ffii.org, so editors can know the companies position. After em-testimony editors recieve companies approval, they will link the testimony to the main page and the job is done!

Repeat!

Please do not stop after collecting one testimony - make this a daily routine.

Helping with an account

The procedure for those with an account is similar to that without one, but there are a few extras, because for most of the process you will be your own editor. To do that you'll need an shell account on genba with group www-data and PostgreSQL user with group basic_users.

Claiming companies

First of all, you can pick companies from the database and claim them for yourself. To do that:

  1. Connect to genba shell: 
    ssh genba.ffii.org
  2. Connect to FFII database: 
    psql ffii
  3. See the list of unclaimed companies: 
    select uid, firmid, firmurl as url, pfrrem as role, pnom || ' <' || mailuser || '@' || mailhost || '> ' as email, 
 tel, land as country, firmresp as coach, firmhom as employees, firmmon as turnover, firmdon as donation from firma 
 natural join mail natural join pnom natural join padr left outer join pfirm on ( person = uid ) natural left join 
 pfrol natural left join teln where firmmem=true and firmurl is not null and firmemp=true and firmresp is null 
 and (firmmon > 1000000 or firmhom > 2);
  4. Set proper company IDs (usually use 2nd level domain names): 
    update firma set firmid = 'mysql' where firmid is null and uid = 'sakila';
  5. Claim a few companies for yourself: 
    update firma set firmresp = 'yourname' where firmresp is null and firmid in ( 'company1', 'company2', 'company3' );

Publishing the testimony

You can also publish the testimony yourself. The company id is used in this stage as a directory name - it must be shorter then 16 chars and must only contain Latin letters and digits. For the rest of examples it will be 'company'.

  1. Create a directory for your testimony: 
    mkdir /var/www/e-m/testimony/company
mkdir /var/www/e-m/testimony/company/src
  2. Copy all original graphic files to the src directory
  3. Copy index.*.txt, logo.png, logo120.png, portrait.jpg and portrait100.jpg to the testimonies directory (/var/www/e-m/testimony/company)
  4. From an existing directory copy a index.en.php file
  5. If you have testimony also in other languages, (for example, French) copy the corresponding index.??.php file (for example, index.fr.php) and edit it changing EchoLongTestimonies("en") to EchoLongTestimonies("fr") and similarely for other languages.

Otherwise you must follow the common procedure. Also note that all paid FFII workers must do at least one testimony per day or prove completion of another job favorable to FFII in order to be paid.

More about Software Patents - Contact - xhtml 1.0 - Last Update: 26 Jun 2005