At the beginning of December, we asked for your donations, and promised to turn those dollars into decibels.

With your support, we quickly reached our winter fundraising goal of $350k by January 31st. In fact, we've surpassed it by quite a bit. As of today, we've raised over $389k. That's 111% of our goal.

This support has put us in a great place to face up to the challenges the year will bring for free software. Most urgently, we need to push hard against software patents, Digital Restrictions Management, and Restricted Boot, while pushing in favor of free software development and use everywhere.

But in addition to dollars, we also need members. Every member not only provides financial support but is also an advocate, a critical part of the worldwide free software network. In order for the decibels to matter, we need the voices to amplify.

To that end, we adopted a "stretch" goal of 121 new members for the last half of January. We need 71 more members in these last few days to reach that goal.

There are many reasons to join the FSF as a member, but today I wanted to highlight a brand new (and much requested) service we are offering members. We've launched an XMPP (Jabber) server, for FSF members to use. This service is federated, meaning that you will be able to communicate with any other XMPP user, on our server or elsewhere.

To take advantage of this:

If you are not yet a member, join here. If you use PayPal, there will be a short (24-hour) delay. Connect to member.fsf.org using your FSF username and password (FSF_LOGIN@member.fsf.org). Make sure encryption is on.

We've tested it (thank you to the members in #fsf on the Freenode IRC network who helped out with that earlier today), but it is a new service, so there might be hiccups. If you encounter problems, please let our sysadmins know at sysadmin@gnu.org.

If you are looking for a free software client to use with XMPP, check the Free Software Directory. Personally, I use Bitlbee with ERC, but most people I know use Pidgin.

With Microsoft announcing that they will be moving all Windows Messenger users over to Skype, this is a great time to bail and switch to using free software for your instant messaging needs. And while doing so, you will be displaying your FSF membership, providing an easy way for others to find out about free software too.

Thank you again for your support!