[Advocacy Advisors] Topic scope inquiry; legal question about Harald Bischoff

Mon Jul 27 13:47:38 UTC 2015

Much as my European tree-hugging-hippie socialist politics would love that
everyone support all the things James mentioned in the first mail in this
thread, I'm with Stéphane and Gervaise on this.

There's nothing to stop the Foundation having staffing policies on those
things or acting towards those aims (in ways that the trustees feel
appropriate, of course) — such as choosing a more-expensive but
more-environmentally-conscious hosting provider, perhaps — but, much though
it weren't the case, I'm sure there are many people in this movement who
think that universal preventative healthcare is a means of abrogating
personal responsibility or of spreading vaccine-based autism cooties or
something.

While **I** may think that the people who believe those things are wrong
and stupid, I don't think **the Foundation** should be telling them that.

I'm afraid I'm unaware of Harald Bischoff and how he might or might not
have defrauded anyone, so I don't (yet) have an opinion on that.

Owen

On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 at 14:20 Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:

> Delurking momentarily, might I say that in a Mozilla context we have
> found this:
>
> On 26/07/15 21:11, James Salsman wrote:
> > I am of the often non-unanimous opinions that the Foundation should, in
> > complete yet indirect accordance with its mission, take at least pro
> > forma and ideally active stances in favor of social issues such as free
> > public education through college, universal preventative health care,
> > income equality, gender wage equity, and greenhouse gas mitigation.
>
> to be a spectacularly bad idea.
>
> People support <ORGANIZATION> because they agree on the explicit goals
> of <ORGANIZATION>. There is no guarantee whatsoever that they will agree
> on other goals, and to make <ORGANIZATION> support them institutionally
> risks alienating volunteers and supporters for negligible gains.
>
> You may think it's obvious that anyone who supports the goals of
> <ORGANIZATION> must also support these other "obviously good" things ("I
> support them! So therefore every right-thinking person does!"), but I
> would say that people are more complex than you think, and (at the very
> least) you need to admit that people can be inconsistent, and that
> should be OK.
>
> Gerv
>
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