[Foundation-l] Seat and Donations (SPLIT from: EFF & Bitcoins)

[Ting Chen]

Hello Alec,

it is so interesting that you mentioned the idea of the board as a 
government. It reminds me of a blog post of Gerard during the election 
in which he said that he is candidating but he don't want to be a 
politician. And that blog post again reminds me of something happened 
earlier in the Wikipedia-history, when the position Bureaucrats were 
created. I believe (if I am wrong, then please correct me) Tim said that 
time that the name Bureacrat is deliberately selected because it has 
such a bad taste in it. It should remind everyone who takes that 
position that he should not act as a bureaucrat. It should even 
discourage people to take that position. I chatted with Gerard later on 
IRC about his blog post. I told him that I believe a board member is 
actually a politician, because what the board is doing is politics: It 
is distributing resources. And that is what the politics does (the idea 
is not from me, I read it in the Mars-trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinson 
and I suppose he got it from some politology studies).

So if you ask me, I would say as a board member I am a politician, and 
by doing this I just want to remind myself of the fact, that I don't 
want to be that kind of politician whom we all find disgusting: smiling 
into cameras and making decisions according to the chance to win the 
next election.

And if you say the board should be a government, than I hope that it is 
not a government that will avoid make decisions just because it is a 
hard decision, and only make decisions that looks good.

Greetings
Ting

Am 24.06.2011 03:46, schrieb Alec Conroy:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> It is not good enough to just do things right, you need
>> to be seen to do things right.
> I just can't emphasize Thomas's point enough.   I spent a lot of words
> trying to say what he was able to say in a single sentence.
>
> It isn't enough to get the right answer-- you have to be overtly seen
> to be getting the right answer via the right process.  There are
> millions of us participating, and we want that number to be hundreds
> of millions or more.   Not millions of viewers, millions of
> participants and 'shareholders'.
>
> That means that in some ways, we have to think more like a government
> than like a non-profit corporation.    I cringe when I say that,
> because I know there ware a LOT of negative baggage that comes with
> that.  But it's true.   We're an organization that interacts with
> millions and millions of people in a way that has never before been
> possible in human history.
>
> That means we have to do things a little differently, sometimes, than
> a traditional nonprofit might.   By and large, I think our leaders
> have done a marvelous job of  adapting the structure of a "non-profit
> corporation" to meet our needs at the time.   We just have to always
> remember that we don't just "publish a product", we aid a movement--
> and that brings a very different set of challenges.
>
> :)  We're learning, and there's also a widespread understanding that
> we need a "new openness" to spark more involvement.   I predict a good
> year full of amazing innovation.
>
> Alec
>
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-- 
Ting

Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/