OpenXML and accountability

Georg C. F. Greve greve at fsfeurope.org
Wed Mar 14 15:58:34 UTC 2007


 || On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:48:30 +0000
 || MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote: 

 mr> FSFE can say that this is wrong, immoral, unethical and so on,
 mr> but I believe that FSFE leaders should not go around questioning
 mr> the accountability or democracy of other groups.

FSFE is an entirely democratic organisation with personal liability
and accountability of all elected executives towards the general
assembly and a large European team (as well as local teams) that
generally work on the basis of consensus of all active people.

It cannot be open or representative for reasons explained multiple
times, but that does not change its democratic basis.


 mr> With the FSFE Raffle of the N800, which several fellows seem
 mr> unhappy about, what can they do?  There doesn't seem to be any
 mr> process besides non-renewals.  Emailing comments?

Emailing comments would have been one idea. That is also how the
general assembly and all the teams of FSFE normally work.

As a matter of fact, *no* Fellow actually got in touch with us prior
to this public debate, and the most verbal people in this debate are
not Fellows, and have not participated in FSFE's work of the past
years in any other way, either.

So yes, for Fellows a good way would have been to get in touch and
raise this as something they see a problem with.

And if they were overly unhappy with the reaction to their getting in
touch that it undoes all the things they agree with, they could have
decided to not renew their Fellowship.


 mr> Well, even after the negative feedback started was clear here,
 mr> the FSFE Newsletter still went out with the raffle "happy to pass
 mr> these gifts on" item included, so email clearly has only minor
 mr> effect.

There are two responses to this.

Number one: The devices that were discussed here are only a small part
of the raffle, that (some people argued that point well) maybe should
not have been put into the raffle in the first place, but handled
differently.

So there are several things that are indeed very fine gifts that
should be passed on to the people who made the work of the past years
possible.

Number two: Writing and translating the newsletter is a long process,
it takes more than a week. So practically, it was written and
translated long before anyone raised any issue.

It probably simply didn't even occur to the person sending it out that
there was a connection with this discussion.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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