Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Resignation from AFFS committee

[Chris Croughton]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 12:02:06PM +0100, Kevin Donnelly wrote:

> On Monday 06 Jun 2005 11:43, Chris Croughton wrote:
> > The claim was that "If something didn't happen at a meeting, and is
> > therefore not minuted, then it didn't happen at all." ?Do you agree with
> > that? ?No email decisions, no phone decisions, nothing will do except a
> > proper meeting with official minutes? ?That sounds like a recipe for
> > either having no decisions at all for months or for losing your
> > volunteers...

Where did the extra question marks come from?

> Perhaps annoyingly, the answer to this has to be "yes" - if something related 
> to structural issues, how something is to be done, etc, is decided on, it 
> needs to be minuted *somewhere*, even if that is in the future, and in the 
> meantime, because of exigencies of time, etc, the new arrangements are put 
> into operation (hence no need for paralysis).

That doesn't answer my question as 'yes'.  I repeat, do you agree with
the claim to which I was responding, vis.

  "If something didn't happen at a meeting, and is therefore not
  minuted, then it didn't happen at all."

I take it that you think that committees which never have any
face-to-face meetings don't actually exist.  I can assure you that they
do exist, as do many other events which aren't "at a meeting, and
therefore not minuted".  If I make a phone call to another committee
member, and don't minute it, that phone call still happened as did any
results of it.  If a committee decide to go out for a Chinese meal
together, and don't minute the fact (and why should they?) the meal
still happened.

> Are you seriously suggesting 
> that a committee just does what it likes, without telling anyone else what is 
> going on, providing a note of record, etc?

No, where did I say that?  I asked the question:

  "... nothing will do except a proper meeting with official minutes?"

Quite how you twist that to "without telling anyone else what is going
on, providing a note of record, etc?", I don't know, but then I'm not a
politician, I'm a programmer, when I ask a question it means what it
says not something different.

> And you have a very odd notion of government procedures if you think
> that is what happens there, any other impressions to the contrary.

Well, since I didn't say that I think that "that is what happens there"
(i.e. ""without telling anyone else what is going on, providing a note
of record, etc?") your strawman falls down.  Telling someone what is
going on is not the same as "a proper meeting with official minutes".

Chris C