David Graham wrote:
On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
In essence, my platform is the charter. I just didn't want to cut and
paste ;)
The purpose of the charter is to outline the list of anything and
everything we are allowed to do as an incorporated non-profit, not a list
That does not change my assertion that my platform is the charter.
of things we necessarily intend or plan to do.
As you just said, "intend" or "plan" to do. That is the exact point I am
making.
As with any corporation,
the purpose must be set out at its founding and it is my understanding
that this purpose cannot be changed.
Actually it can. Well at least it can from a for profit corp perspective.
It is therefore imperative for the
founders of a corporation, as the founders of SPI here tried to do, to
forsee all activities SPI may ever consider carrying out at any time. I
don't believe it was ever the intention of SPI to do all these things at
once.
Was it ever the intention to do any of them? At present I see we do
"one" of the eleven.
That said, it is a noble goal to try and carry out everything from
government lobbying to conference organisation and to generally promote,
foster and advance interest in computers and computer software by all
available means and methods. Thanks to our charter, we can adopt member
projects who do any of these things.
Well understand that I am not in any way looking through rose colored
glasses here. I would "like" to do these things. I "will" work toward
them. I do "not" expect that if I am elected the next week or even next
six months will bring about fundamental change in the SPI way of performing.
Incremental, steady, organized progression.
Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake
On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Anthony Towns wrote:
On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 11:32:16AM -0400, David Graham wrote:
We have to decide as an organisation if our purpose is to influence the
community or simply be the wall the community can lean against while it
does its work.
As a community member, I don't want to feel like I've got my back up
against the wall ;)
Ok, perhaps a bad analogy, how about providing a bar table to sit at? ;)
Personally, though, I'd put that differently, more as SPI being one
means by which the community influences others -- which from SPI's
perspective still means trying to publicise and advocate various ideas,
but with the focus being taking those ideas from the free software
community rather than trying to push them onto the free software
community.
I can't disagree with that; influence by osmosis instead of by aggressive
lobbying is quite constructive. I don't want SPI's focus to be on lobbying
or advocacy primarily because SPI is alone in its much needed niche and we
should concentrate on that niche as our primary focus.
I believe that we should make every reasonable effort to assist our
associated projects in doing any advocacy they wish, within the bounds
of their budgets and our charter. I don't believe our role is to be an
independent lobby group, but our projects are free to be with our
backing.
The difference there is that having projects do advocacy rather than SPI
removes the opportunity for SPI to actively help projects cooperate.
SPI's in a position to have a broad overview of the goals of an already
somewhat wide range of projects and notice similarities and help them
speak with one voice; which is a bit harder to achieve from a single
project's standpoint.
That's a point on the surface, but I don't necessarily see it that way: I
am not suggesting that SPI not actively help its projects cooperate or
even advocate, only that we do so by the request of our member projects,
and not on our own whim. If projects want to work together or seek to work
together, then that is a kind of request they can make to SPI if they so
choose and SPI can then approach the other projects, for example. This
would be fine with me. I simply have reservations about SPI overtly doing
the advocacy or lobbying without the urging of its member projects whose
interests we are meant to be primarily focused on.
- -
David "cdlu" Graham - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Guelph, Ontario - http://www.cdlu.net/
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