Re: [gentoo-project] [gentoo-nfp] Foundation meeting agenda for April 2018 - update1

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 1:05 PM, Daniel Robbins <drobbins@××××××.org> wrote:
>
> by banning me on this
> list, you are infringing my right as a Foundation member to offer feedback
> related to the direction of Gentoo Foundation.

You do not need to post on a mailing list to do so.  You could simply
contact the trustees via email/etc.  The bylaws do not mention this
list as the only way to conduct official business, and in fact refer
to other ways for members to inform the Foundation of official
business.  Not having access to this list does not infringe on
anyone's legal rights as a member.

I own stock in various corporations.  This does not give me the
unconditional right to access their property, or use whatever social
media or communications channels they may have.  If I were disruptive
it wouldn't even give me an unconditional right to attend an official
meeting of stockholders.  If I accumulated sufficient votes I could
force a corporation to put a proposal to a vote against its wishes,
and the same right is afforded to any Foundation member (they need
signatures from 10% of the membership to do so as far as I can tell).
Even this doesn't give me the right to just send arbitrary
communications to other shareholders - at best I'd get to put a single
reasonable-length proposal in a proxy statement, right next to a
rebuttal provided by the company with no ability for me to further
respond.

Whatever rights the Trustees may have to oversee the operations of
this list or the servers it is hosted on do not extend to random
members of the Foundation.

I'm not really sure why we'd expect this list to be different from any
other Gentoo list.  They all use the same infrastructure, and I don't
see why we wouldn't want to enforce the CoC in the same way
everywhere.  If the CoC is bad then it should be fixed.  If it is good
then it should be followed.  If its enforcement is bad that should be
fixed, and if not it should be allowed to function.  These are not
things we as individuals get to make unilateral decisions on.

IMO it would make sense to harmonize Foundation membership with CoC
enforcement, as it does not make sense to ban somebody from
participating in the community but allowing them to vote for our
board.  However, this is somewhat tangential to this specific issue,
as is the details of how they might be reconciled.

-- 
Rich