Re: [atlarge-discuss] Report to the ERC

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002 15:11:39 EDT, you wrote:

>Vittorio,
>
>I am disgusted by your report.  You had the opportunity to endorse a 
>Supporting Organization for the At-large which would have assured it seats on 
>the Board, instead you and your fellow stooges have advocated for an Advisory 
>Committee that provides for no representational opportunities, writing:  
>"Other alternatives for achieving these goals were considered and rejected by 
>the Assistance Group."  

Danny,

what Bret has said is true - we were given clear constraints by the ERC: we
would only have to work inside the Blueprint directions, and in some cases
we also had to accommodate more requests from the ERC - for example the fact
that, at least initially, a minority part of the committee should be
appointed from the NomCom. In some cases, we worked to negotiate these
requests - for example, in the aforementioned case, we accepted the ERC's
request, but we added that these initial members should expire in one year
and another process should be implemented in the meanwhile for selecting
their successors. 

Moreover, we stated clearly in the first part of the Report that we, though
accepting to contribute to the process, do not mean to endorse the
Blueprint, and that if we had been given a clean sheet, we would not have
come up with a proposal like this, but with something else - maybe, an At
Large SO.

So the issue is not whether we want or do not want an At Large SO; this was
out of the scope of our Group. Either you accept this mandate, or you don't
accept to serve in such a Group; and I am still convinced that, by being
there, we helped in getting as much as possible within the constraints of
the Blueprint. (And by the way, ours is just an advice - the ERC might as
well decide to disregard it completely.)

>I guess you just don't have the guts to stand up for your principles.

I disagree. Personally I think that you need more "guts", as you say, in
accepting to act under unfavourable conditions to get those principles
implemented in practice as much as possible, rather than simply in repeating
them over and over uselessly by e-mail without ever making any step forward
towards their implementation. Of course the first choice, from a merely
personal point of view, is more risky, because conditions might prove too
unfavourable, and you might end up working for nothing and even being
labelled as the enemy's crony. But that's exactly why you need "guts".
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
--------> http://bertola.eu.org/ - Archivio FAQ e molto altro... <--------

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