On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 01:11 +0200, Sean DALY wrote: > Although 2K EUR may not seem like a lot in some contexts (ten years > ago I managed an IT purchasing budget of 1.1MM USD), for a > resource-challenged organisation like the FSFE it *is* a lot.
Sean, you and my colleagues in FSFE are missing what IMHO is the real and only point. It's clear that FSFE doesn't have money spare and it can't give money to third parties easily. But things are rarely black or white. Dozza wasn't asking simply for money from FSFE. You can read his message as a request for help. He was really asking that FSFE took the leadership of a global, worldwide activity to defend open standards from being tainted with a not-so-open standard. In Dozza's mind, an organization that is so big and growing so fast (see the growth of income in the last 3 years: ~80Keuro, ~120Keuro, ~260Keuro) should be capable of taking such role of leader and put the money where its mouth is. Dozza, was convinced that with the credibility and the network of contacts of the big FSFE, finding 2500euro would have been a matter of making one single phone call to a couple of people. (1) FSFE has those contacts and is an expert in the field (having talked about interoperability in the EU antitrust case for years now). Georg took responsibility of managing the opposition to OXML for FSFE, since FSFE team couldn't find anybody else to do the job. And here I perfectly see the reason for Georg's answer "FSFE can't help you": scarce resources! Not money, that's not it. But time and concentration. FSFE team members are all running low on fuel lately, regardless of the higher cash injection. Or probably because of the increased load generated by the higher cash: more employees, 3 offices in 3 different countries to manage, new projects financed by EU (which require high bureaucracy), new division (FTF), the problems with the IT department (server crashes and slowness of fsfe.org), the resignation of the Head of Office ... you name it. FSFE team and ga is under lots of pressure, the highest pressure since its foundation. More money will not relieve the pressure in the long run, improving the existing structure will. The organizational structure of FSFE was thought to be lean and fast, perfect for fast growing groups. It had rough edges, and many people knew it. But we all decided to take care of such details later. IMHO the time has come to adapt the organizational structure to the changed environment. Some of the remodeling has already started internally, but IMO it should and can be done faster and better: Europe and the European free sw community needs a strong and solid FSFE, with a solid ans scalable organizational structure. cheers stef (1) Davide Dozza found the money with a couple of phone calls, that same day. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
