Ira, you're absolutely right.
On Tue, Dec 06, 2005, Ira Abramov wrote about "Fabulous Beaurocracy =>
Spectacular Infights":
> A few years ago, a few fellers (myself among them) sat around to decide
> once and for all if we should start an NPO to give FOSS activism a legal
> financial face.
> A legal purse if you wish.
>
> The idea was simple, we could then open a bank account, get donations,
> and anyone with a good FOSS project and lack of cash to fund it, could
> apply to get some of that money.
Excellent description of how Hamakor started. However, some members either
never believed in this goal, or think that now the Amuta exists, it needs
to set a higher goal for itself; So to them, the Amuta must not be just
about managing the money so that it could be used legally by individual
volunteers, but also about initiating new actions. Some of these people
continue to equate the Amuta with its board, and continue to say that the
Amuta's board is not doing enough because it's acting as a "purse" (like
you put it), and not as a leader. This would all have been fine if it
weren't for one thing: Some of these people continue to bash the board's
members in public, forgetting the good old way to change the board's
actions: plan what *you* would have done on the board, and then nominate
yourself in the next elections.
It is exactly this sort of bashing that drove Alon to resign (he later
took back his resignation) and now Orna.
Please think about this: How can a volunteer (not a professional, highly-
paid politician) do anything under an atmosphere that everything that he
or she does is ridiculed and attacked? How can someone try to execute new
initiatives when two months (!!!) after he or she started his job, people
came and attacked them for "not doing enough"? And this when everybody
knows that getting used to a role takes a couple of months - and this is
doubly true in Hamakor where successive boards left very little documentation
behind to help one another, and there was no "administration" (burser,
and similar roles) left to smoothen the transition between the two boards
and help "teach the ropes" to the new board?
And a comment to the people who brought up all sorts of "structural changes"
ideas lately, like the "the 3 person board sucks, so let's do it a 5 person
board" idea: Please think about the following two questions:
1. If this idea would be so helpful to the board, how come that every
current and previous board member that wrote about this idea, was
against the idea? Maybe somebody should actually be *on* a board
before he thinks he completely understands what board members think
makes their life difficult, and what doesn't?
2. When people see the current board being attacked, they become afraid
to nominate themselves. People who know they are not thick-skinned
politicians might simply think that they will not be able to withstand
these sort of attacks. So if we continue with these attacks, I'm afraid
that not only don't we get more than 5 nominees in the next elections -
we might not even get 3.
Everyone, please try to remember that we're not running a government here,
but a small Amuta that is only trying to do good and everyone is an unpaid
volunteer, not a corrupt opportunist.
> Zoom forward three years later. We had 3 successful fund raiser parties
> with little public visibility outside the community. We had no active
> visibility in the press which led to very few reporters turning to the
> amuta for comments. I _personally_ think that PR-wise, the Amuta did not
> do too well.
PR in the press would be nice (and the more, the merrier), but the Amuta
has also been representing us (the free software people) in more substantial
endevors. One of them was talking with the government (done mostly by the
first board). Another one is the cooperation with ISOC-IL in their call-
for-projects for free-software projects to fund (http://www.isoc.org.il/open/).
There's always more to do, and if someone has good ideas of what needs to
be done and polite mails to the board or trying to pull it off yourself,
running for board is what you should do. Crying "the board is stupid" will
achieve nothing. Crying to the comptrollers will also not achieve much,
as we're supposed to be on the lookout for improprieties and corruption,
we're not the stupidity police.
--
Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Dec 6 2005, 5 Kislev 5766
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The trouble with being punctual is that
http://nadav.harel.org.il |nobody is there to appreciate it.
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