OpenXML and accountability, was: 3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows

MJ Ray mjr at phonecoop.coop
Wed Mar 14 14:48:30 UTC 2007


"Georg C. F. Greve" <greve at fsfeurope.org> wrote:
> We generally would however prefer to get that feedback in a non-public
> form first, because public discussions draw additional resources from
> ongoing work. I am for instance quite worried about the fact that ISO
> put OpenXML back on the fast track [1] and would prefer to spend more
> time on this issue and others.
> [1] http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/openxml_back_on_fast_track

FSFE can say that this is wrong, immoral, unethical and so on, but I
believe that FSFE leaders should not go around questioning the
accountability or democracy of other groups.  That's the pot calling
the kettle black a bit.

For example, that article mentions "it seems that such processes can
be ignored by lone decisions of the ISO personnel" - well, at least
they have a process.  With the FSFE Raffle of the N800, which several
fellows seem unhappy about, what can they do?  There doesn't seem to
be any process besides non-renewals.  Emailing comments?  Well, even
after the negative feedback started was clear here, the FSFE
Newsletter still went out with the raffle "happy to pass these gifts
on" item included, so email clearly has only minor effect.

I know that there are strong reasons why FSFE is not more democratic,
but this means its leaders need to be careful with the comments from
the above article.  Otherwise, more supporters will look at FSFE and
say the reasons against greater democracy aren't sufficient.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Webmaster/web developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop maker,
developer of koha, debian, gobo, gnustep, various mail and web s/w.
Workers co-op @ Weston-super-Mare, Somerset http://www.ttllp.co.uk/



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