On 08/28/2018 10:43 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
It was attempted in a very underhanded and juvenile manner, an administrative motion tacked onto the last page of a 9 page notice (attached), reading "The current Fellowship representatives' membership ends immediately after the this extraordinary General Assembly." Some people didn't even notice it was buried in the document, some people felt it wasn't intended to be noticed. When I asked council to explain it before the meeting, they gave no explanation or response.
In cricket terms, this is underarm bowling but then it just isn't cricket, is it? It isn't sportsmanlike.
I remember there was some discussion on this about this at the time.
In the end, the motion you quote was one of three motions to be voted on, and it was not adopted - meaning that you're still a Fellowship representative and your membership wasn't terminated at all.
This course of events would suggest, to me at any rate, that there was never any intention of adopting the third motion in point 6, and that it was probably included for clarity ("these are the options").
Frankly, I don't see any reason to assume bad faith on anyone's part regarding that point.
That said, I don't really have a lot to contribute to this discussion. The relationship between the FSFE and the Fellowship has been the subject of intense discussion for years, it was something we discussed a lot when I was coordinating the local group in Aarhus, for instance. At the time, this confusion was logical for a number of reasons, one of them being that the FSFE seemed to be at once a meritocratic volunteer-driven grassroots organization (the network of local groups, volunteers manning booths at events, handing out flyers, giving talks on free software), an association with paid membership (i.e., the Fellowship - with the added confusion that many if not most volunteers were Fellows, while very many Fellows were also volunteers), and a formal organization run by a limited number of people, the GA (most of whom were also Fellows and volunteers, I believe).
This arrangement hasn't always been easy to understand, and some people, who were both Fellows and local group coordinators, have expressed frustration that they were both paying and volunteering quite a lot, yet were not considered part of the formal organization and had no easy path in that direction either.
The GA has been trying to remedy this situation by declaring a more open membership process.
Daniel Pocock has been trying to address the same situation by insisting on openness and transparency; as Paul said, and as I hinted above, echoing concerns which have previously been voiced by quite a number of other people.
Both things would seem to point in the right direction - however, somewhere along the line, communication has gone awry. That's why I don't really feel like participating in this discussion as it is now. People should try to settle the personal matters off-list, and once matters have cooled down, we could return to discussing the best ways of furthering the cause of free software in Europe.
Best Carsten