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

Wed Jul 29 17:57:55 UTC 2015

The more specific our asks the better the chances of success.

And yes, we can be a socially responsible organisation promoting inclusion
without policy positions on these things.

Dimi

2015-07-27 15:47 GMT+02:00 Owen Blacker <owen at openrightsgroup.org>:

> 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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