[removing d-p from cc list]
Dear Ian,
I fully understand your desire for transparency. We appreciate
transparency as an ideal and being the Debian Project — independent
and guided by ideals — we can and should pursue it, if desirable.
However, transparency is not always desirable. As I am sure you know
from the outside world, some deals and transactions, correspondence
and agreements need to be made behind closed doors, for efficiency
purposes or other reasons.
We even have some examples within our project where we willingly do
without "full transparency" because we acknowledge the need
(debian-private, security, some financials, etc.). In all these
cases, we (and others) build on a strong foundation of trust between
the members of our project and accept or even choose to set our
ideals aside in pursuit of other causes and necessities.
As an organisation that needs to deal quite a bit more than usual
Debian with aforementioned "outside world", DebConf cannot always be
as transparent as we might wish. Especially when it's about money
and third parties, it is often necessary to forego transparency for
bigger and better causes. I am dealing myself with potential
sponsors who simply don't want to be named and chose me as their
proxy. Do we want their money and respect their wishes, or do we
decline?
And if some people want to push a venue for whatever reason, how is
that any different from e.g. the University of Helsinki or the
Region of Extremadura any other venue offering us a deal? Of course,
you can attach bad feelings to that, but is it really necessary?
Not everything that happens is always ideal, but in the end what
counts is that the conference takes place and attendees can make use
of the ability to meet in person, indirectly giving the sponsors
their bang for the buck through advancements in the project.
I am sure that everyone of us starts to feel uneasy when
transparency is given up, but in the end will walk the thin line
of making the conference happen while not straying away from
a responsibnle path. If we can hold our heads high afterwards, then
we succeeded.
I ask you and everyone else to put forth the same amount of trust
towards the organisers of our conference as we do towards each
other, and not to fuel suspicions about insider jobs or similar.
Doing so is highly demotivating for the team (irrespective of
whether it happened or not), who are dedicating even more of their
time and energy than usually to bring us together in the same
physical space, and allocating resources to uncover the mysteries
gets us nowhere nearer to our goal.
If you are unhappy with the way things are going, the only
suggestion I have for you is to get actively involved the next time,
and to try to achieve by yourself what these guys are doing right
now. Should you find out that full transparency, which you currently
advocate, isn't possible, then I won't point fingers at you.
However, what you are doing currently — pointing fingers at others
from the idealist's point of view — is counter-productive and
outright unfair to the organisers.
Please stop.
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org>
: :' : ex-DebConf orga team; ex-press officer
`. `'`
`- DebConf13: Vaumarcus, Switzerland: http://debconf13.debconf.org
"to have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact,
talk to every woman as if you loved her,
and to every man as if he bored you."
-- oscar wilde
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