[amsat-bb] Why we are having this big unpleasant argument on your satellite mailing list

[Bruce Perens]

Most of you are members of AMSAT. IMO the organization has some serious
problems, and as members it is your duty to steer the organization with
your votes. That means that you should remain aware of what is going on and
you should make an informed vote. The satellite discussions go on, mostly
uninterrupted, all year. A short break for politics is not unreasonable,
and acrimonious discussion is to be expected when we take that break.

Organisations are run by people who would not be doing the work if they did
not have strong emotions about it. And they all have their own failings.
Unfortunately, volunteer non-profit directors (and many public ones in big
corporations) never learn a critical skill of democracy: *how to deal
properly with opposition. *That is the root of what we are arguing about
now. Opposition are not the enemy! Yet, they are clearly being treated as
such. They are simply people who would reform the organization or take it
in a different direction from the incumbents.

In this case, Michelle and Patrick, before they were elected, were the
loyal opposition - dedicated to a better organization, and deeply troubled
by the decisions and conduct of the incumbent board. The incumbent's
response was not to work with the opposition, but to hunker down and use
lawyers. To the incumbent's great distress, the very same people got sent
to the board by the membership! Leading to more lawyers. IMO the incumbents
should have read this as a signal from the membership, rather than doubling
down their resistance.

The sad reality is that the newly-elected directors have never been allowed
to function as directors. You should be concerned, since they are the
people whom you elected to represent you. The main means used to disable
your elected representatives has been refusal by the incumbents to hold
board meetings. This refusal is almost total, with exactly *one* meeting
being held after the organization's annual convention.

The second means used to disenfranchise the newly-elected directors was
that the incumbents withheld information which a director would generally
be expected to have access to. As it happened, this information was at
least in part discussion of those very same people, and contracting of
legal counsel in a process against them.

Every board has the right to legal counsel. But it's expensive, and must be
used wisely. This was not a wise use. A wise use would have been to engage
the opposition rather than to hunker down.

One very large cause of all of this is that the same people have been
running AMSAT for a very long time, and it becomes an echo chamber after a
while - the us-vs-them mentality of the board vs. the opposition - but
really the board vs. everyone else - becomes self-reinforcing.

This is obviously wrong for the organization. The solution is simple, and
every organization needs it: *regular turn-over of the people in the
organization's leadership. *Not the stratification that we currently have.

You can fix this by electing more new blood to the board.

    Thanks

    Bruce

-- 
Bruce Perens - CEO at stealth startup. I'll tell you what it is eventually
:-)