[sudo-discuss] [omni-consensus] Proposal: Hire or Replace Me as Omni's Bookkeeper

[Marc Juul]

On 3/31/19, Patrik D'haeseleer <patrikd at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the more salient part of Julian's counter proposal is to get a 6mo
> extension on our taxes, which should give us enough time to focus on the
> GCEA mediation first.

There's no reason to believe Jenny's proposal will still be valid in
six months. It is almost certain that she will have had to seek other
employment. Nor does Omni's accounting consist of a single lump of
work done once a year. It is continuous work that cannot not be paused
for six months.

> And if Julian thinks he can recruit a free intern to help out with the
> bookkeeping, I don't see anything wrong with that. As long as we don't
> spend *more* effort training an intern plus doing the books...

You'd be asking someone to work for free to replace themselves with
someone else who we hope will continue working for free indefinitely
or long enough to train their replacement. That's after putting in a
bunch of labor to train them. For anyone with experience running a
volunteer-based organization this is an obvious recipe for failure.

Julian and Steve's original complaint that this proposal will somehow
put Jenny in a position of more power has been thoroughly rebutted by
multiple people and they have still not addressed that their only
stated reason for blocking the proposal is invalid. Everything else
from their side is hand-wavy complaints about elitism and racism but
with no concrete examples of this behavior ever materializing, nor how
it's related to this proposal.

They are blocking without engaging in good faith toward a resolution
around the reason for their block. As such their block is invalid and
we can move on without them. If they at that point come up with some
previously unstated new reason for their block then it's mighty
suspicious that they waited to bring it up until then, and again it
would be obvious that they're not interested in working in good faith
with the rest of Omni community.

The only new thing to come out of Julian's last email is this:

> The issue is that if the delegates decide to validate one party while invalidating another, we are setting mediation up to fail by setting it up on a biased basis from the get go.

and what a load of bullshit. Of _course_ the mediation is biased from
the get go. People have made decisions and followed them up with
actions and the rest of the community have formed opinions and made
decisions based on those actions. This is how reality works. Does he
think his blocking is doing anything to prevent that? If anything it
has done the exact opposite by putting this in the spotlight and
eliciting statements of support for Jenny's proposal from many members
of many collectives.

Thinking that a block from two guys calling themselves a collective is
somehow going to unbias the upcoming mediation requires some serious
mental gymnastics, to the point where you have to start questioning
the motive.

Julian's blocking is either terribly misguided or actively malicious
and I am beginning to consider whether he and Steve are now seeking to
get their collective kicked out in order to walk away with some
perceived moral high-ground. They have at this point generated enough
animosity towards their collective-of-two that I cannot imagine
staying would be pleasant for anyone involved. They have backed
themselves into a corner and losing their collective status may be
their least painful remaining option.

-- 
marc/juul