|| On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:48:30 +0000 || MJ Ray mjr@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