Hi Christian, First of all, I have to say I am not happy that an email was published here without the consent of the author. In addition, the word "fsfegate 2.0" and the fact that this is a completely unknown person, makes me feel uneasy about this email.
That being said, I would like to answer your email, Christian. Essentially, I will treat the statements in the quoted mail as questions from you personally that deserve an answer. I will answer as many questions as possible. I have been a GA member for about a year, but I do not speak for the GA. We are individuals with differing opinions and that is what makes us strong as an organization. So I will just state my personal opinion without speaking for anyone else and without claiming that my opinion is the only possible one. [Executive engaging the legal team less] I am not a member of the legal team, so I do not have complete insight into this. If the statement is true, I could see multiple reasons for it. Perhaps management feels more confident regarding certain issues due to prior counsel of the legal team. Just an example, but there might be a good reason for that. It is also possible that not everyone in the legal team would support that statement. [Less visibility in regards to legal and policy issues] My impression is very different and in fact, I would say we are gaining visibility. But either way, there is no hard data on this issue. [too strong a focus on campaigns and lack of (long-term) vision] I feel campaigns are good and important. The idea here is to deliver specific goals that can be measured. I would say they play a very important part in the question of "What do we want to achieve in the next 5 years?". More of the vision part comes in in selecting those campaigns. I do see occasional weaknesses here and we deal with them when they happen, but I see no overarching problem here. [losing sight of core goals] I completely disagree with this statement. Yes, we think about issues such as gender equality because we think being more inclusive will strengthen our movement as a whole. That does not mean we lost sight of our core goals. Just look at our website, our mailing lists and check which things we actually work on. You will see that it is all about Free Software and how it is perceived in the world. Other issues like inclusiveness is more a matter of how we communicate, thinking about new channels to use, and so on. [not institutionalizing knowledge] I would say there is quite a lot of knowledge that _is_ being institutionalized and documented, but I agree that this is something we can probably still improve on. This is a general issue with growing communities that a lack of communication might arise. I think we do better here than other organizations I have seen, but there is still room for improvement and I have seen many steps to clarify procedures, to document information about people and events. [all staff being on leave after FOSDEM and unanswered requests] I have seen this in the past, but not this year for example, so the situation about unanswered requests appears to be improving. [no information to stakeholders about absent people] I have not experienced that, but perhaps there is a process here that needs clarification and documentation. [emails stuck in mailing list queues; systems (VMs) down due to lack of monitoring] The situation with emails has improved somewhat in recent years with the introduction of a general entry point for inquiries instead of several different mailing lists. However, we can still improve on that. To me, this is also a question of volunteer engagement and not just about sponsors. I would not expect the FSFE employees to deal with all tickets/emails at all times. We are an organization that is largely made up of volunteers and there are many areas where I think more volunteer engagement could help. The FSFE is not the office in Berlin and its employees, the FSFE is a community. There is simply way more work than we can handle and certainly way more work than staff can handle on their own. So we rely on volunteers to do some of the work and even then, we could always use more hands. That means some things will not get dealt with and what I see is people doing their best to prioritize well. [no improvements but personal attacks from the vice president] I have seen many improvements over the years, but we can always do more, of course. As for the personal attacks, I have a really hard time imagining Heiki (our vice president) making personal attacks. I have experienced him as someone with strong integrity and carefully weighed opinions who handles criticism in an exceptionally constructive way. His emails are concise (quite the opposite of mine) and perhaps sometimes a bit direct. That might perhaps have been perceived as arrogance, but I am certain if someone pointed out a specific situation to Heiki that was problematic, he would clarify and, if appropriate, apologize. That is the way my interactions with him have always gone and not once have I seen him come close to a personal attack. I hope that clarifies some of those things for you, Christian, and others here on the list. If you have further questions, feel free to ask. Happy hacking! Florian _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
