[Grassroots-l] organisation, olpc_europe, etc. (was: Fwd: [Olpcaustria-intern] What we talked about last week...)

[Aaron Kaplan]

Hi!

With all the discussion of olpc europe, how groups should get  
organized etc.... here is something to read and ponder about.
We met in person for dinner (thx Helga!) and had to discuss a few  
things face to face.
Amongst them the argument between me and Chris about something called  
olpc_europe which is not even clearly defined yet, but which was
already announced prematurely on heise.de (biggest IT related news  
source in all german speaking countries).

So the whole group came together and he had this consensus finding  
process.
In the end we arrived at the following... (interesting to read!)



Begin forwarded message:

> From: Simon Dorner <office at simondorner.com>
> Date: March 4, 2008 6:58:29 PM GMT+01:00
> To: olpc intern <olpcaustria-intern at tema.lo-res.org>
> Subject: [Olpcaustria-intern] What we talked about last week...
>
> Hi everyone!
>
> So this is what i condensed out of our discussion last week:
>
> ---------------------------------
>
> As some of you might have noticed we at OLPC Austria had a quite
> heated discussion about OLPC Europe last week. Eventually the debate
> turned out to be worthwhile and we kind of reached a consensus on
> what we suggest for OLPC Europe. I agreed to sum up our current
> thinking and send it out like this.
>
> We think that OLPC Europe is moving a bit too fast and it needs time
> to evolve more out of a number of strong local groups. The focus
> should be to build and support those local groups first. Therefore we
> suggest that for the time being OLPC Europe should not yet be a fully
> defined and structured legal entity but rather a simple web platform
> for people to get information about what's happening in their and
> other countries. There are two concrete things that we suggest:
>
> 1: Let's create an OLPC Europe web site that consists of an
> aggregated blog of all the individual European groups. Every group
> that wants to join sets up a simple blog and all their news gets
> added to the main blog via RSS. That would be a great resource for
> everyone and is enough for now.
> 2: We think that as long as OLPC Europe is just that, an aggregated
> blog with a common motto, it is absolutely crucial that everyone
> agrees not to use OLPC Europe as a means to generate funding. That
> (along with some basic info text on the web site) must be in the
> small print and has to be agreed to in order to join. Money would
> bring chaos without the right structure - and it's really way too
> early to talk about that structure.
>
> OLPC Europe as a structured legal entity can be founded when the time
> is right and the need for it and broad consensus are there. We also
> think that in order to create a legal organisation we should all meet
> in person and talk.
>
> But first let's all get some work done locally. What do you think?
>
> ---------------------------------
>
> So what do you think?
>
> Simon.
>
>
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>

--
L. Aaron Kaplan
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