It is good to see this discussion and how it is conducted. One point that hasn't gotten enough attention, imho, is this:
Volunteer work is fueled by values, idealism, even ideology. That cluster of values, which motivates the contributors, is not necessarily explicitly spelled out in the official documents. The potential ideological discord is not sufficiently dealt with by stating that the volunteers donating their time to Monsanto do that voluntarily and those who don't want to don't have to. Volunteers tend to walk away, not from one event but from the organization, when they start questioning whether they are still contributing exclusively to "the Greater Good". Maybe I am an outlier, but consider this: I became aware of swc via Twitter. Had the first couple of tweets been about a Monsanto workshop, this would not have passed my "interesting stuff" filter and I would have missed the chance to look deeper, get excited and to decide to become more involved than just freeloading the teaching material. I think the safest solution, as long as there is enough other funding to sustain a reasonable growth, could be to restrict hosts for SWC-label workshops to non-profits. Instructors who want to help Monsanto still have their swc credentials and can deliver exactly the same thing - sans swc-label - on whatever terms. If swc provided a forum where interested companies & instructors can connect, maybe even in a form where instructors do not compete but cooperate for a better bargaining position, all the better. Cheers, Harald _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
