Re: [Linux-aus] Linux Australia AGM Held

[Jeff Waugh <jdub@perkypants.org>]

<quote who="Anthony Towns">

> To contribute a rounded-down 2c, and to continue beating a horse "just in
> case"; my guess would be because outside of a reasonably select few, no
> one really has a handle on Linux Australia: what it is, who it represents,
> how to make sure it doesn't do something stupid, how to get it to do
> something useful. Mostly, we don't know the committee members, don't get
> much of an idea of what LA's doing, if anything, in advance, don't really
> have a way of participating in much of anything, and so on.
> 
> Which basically means you have a shadowy organisation (ie, one you don't
> know anything about), with a relatively large sum of money, that claims to
> represent your interests but not you (or something), that tends not to act
> in a particularly above board manner, and wants to take over the country.
> 
> Personally, I'd be surprised if people _didn't_ instinctively mistrust it.

Why so? When LA was closed and mostly irrelevant, it just didn't matter. :-)
But now that we have a new committee, new energy, and a new openness, why
should we continue to distrust the group, instead of putting our faith in
the new leadership?

The past sucked arse -> and it's not a big problem anymore.

> Hopefully the current ctte will remove the shadows, spend the money, work
> out a good answer to the representation question, and start keeping its
> house in order. We'll call it fair enough if they do all that and take
> over the country.

Rock on, my faith is totally with the new committee to do that... and if
they don't, we'll have a whomping big membership to vote their arses out at
the end of the year. I'd be mightily suprised if the new committee were able
to stuff it up that much!

> PS: Oh, flogging the equine: if you were guaranteed to have someone local
>     on the board, you'd have a grounding point for mistrust. Not only can
>     you go up to whoever it is and find out what's _really_ going on,
>     but if you think LA's behaving badly, then you can talk to someone
>     with the power to *do* something about it, rather than just talk to
>     someone else.

You could get the same thing by talking to your local advisory board member.
There are lots of ways to solve this problem, and I don't think that the
'big organisation' board-members-by-state solution (as favoured by large
groups such as bush fire brigades, surf life-savers, etc) is going to be the
best thing for our little (albeit national) group of geeks. :-)

When we're really huge, perhaps it will be the best way of doing it.

- Jeff

-- 
   "Everyone says they like Free Software - not everyone is ready to make   
         the tough choices to make it happen." - Maciej Stachowiak