Voting for Debian Developer Daniel Pocock in Ireland This Week
ON MONDAY we mentioned a sort of endorsement for a Debian Developer who runs for Parliament [1, 2, 3, 4]. He's not unfamiliar with politics; he had been actively involved in Australia before doing the same in Geneva (Switzerland). He spoke in front of the UN.
"I will do some more blog posts during the week leading up to the vote," he told us. It is important to give some sense of urgency in communications with any other groups who are not as technical and don't know anything about Daniel Pocock.
If voters in Ireland don't endorse Daniel Pocock, there is nobody else who can speak for software engineers and computer users in that part of Ireland... or even in the EU (except maybe very few others; we can't think of any who are still there). While some people cannot make sense of software freedom, we can at least explain to them that, "if you don't endorse Daniel Pocock, it might be the last chance before all our devices become totally closed by DRM/'Secure' Boot/whatever". For those who have fallen for buzzwords and hype like chatbots one can say, "if you don't endorse Daniel Pocock, we will be taken over by AI [sic] and never vote again..."
Voting day is Friday and turnout is usually relatively low (compared to national or general elections), so there's plenty of leeway provided people can be convinced to actually use their vote. Local elections in the UK attract only about 30% of eligible voters (~70% choose not to vote at all), so to win local elections mobilisation in one's own region matters a lot. The same goes for EU elections. █