KDE should rather act then just "strike" (Re: Should KDE join the (Digital) Global Climate Strike this friday?)

Thomas Pfeiffer t.pfeiffer.ux at gmail.com
Sun Sep 22 16:45:07 BST 2019


Hi Christoph,

On 20.09.19 22:35, Christoph Cullmann wrote:

> I must confess I missed that we decided to participate, too, but digging
> in the mails of this thread it seems the board of e.V. did so. (if I
> don't misread
> Aleix mail)

>From my perspective, the course of events was:
- On Wednesday evening, Sept 18th, cahfofpai opened a Phabricator ticket
"Should KDE join the (Digital) Global Climate Strike this friday?" [1]
and around the same time started a thread on this list
- The promo team wasn't sure whether it would be okay for them to do
this because there weren't many reactions on the list and they didn't
want to go against the community
- At 1am of the 19th, Aleix asked me for my opinion on the idea, since
he knew I was active in the climate movement. I told him that it made a
lot of sense to me, and that we'd need to get it going on Thursday in
order for it to have any effect in getting more people to join the
strike on the streets
- Aleix told me that the board had a call the next morning and he would
propose a vote on it there
- After the meeting, Aleix replied in this thread that the board
approves of the action
- At that point, the promo team started to get into "action mode", and I
pushed them to get the word out still on Thursday because I believed
that it would be far more likely for people to decide to join a protest
"tomorrow" than "today"

> This is OK for me, as for that the board got elected, to do some decision
> when we can't wait for weeks to vote on something.
> 
> Thought I would have appreciated if at least a 5 lines post of the
> announcement
> that "KDE joins this" would have been done on the planet or here to make
> clear what happens. I am not sure that communicating this over twitter only
> is the best way to do that, given we have the lists/planet/dot.
> 
> (not that twitter is bad to advertise it to the world)
> 
> I think this would have been be possible to discuss more properly if one
> didn't bring this up
> a few days before it needs to happens.

> Some people in the thread said they had this strike marked since months
> thought it seems
> nobody thought about communicating it to our community here a bit
> earlier that "let's do this
> this week".

I can't say why cahfofpai proposed to join the digital strike on Wednesday.
What I can say is that when I first learned about the digital strike a
few weeks ago (not sure when the idea for the digital strike was born,
the "marked on my calendar for months" was referring to the strike on
the streets), I must admit that I didn't dare proposing for KDE to join
because I knew that some people would react negatively and I am terribly
conflict-averse. I simply chickened out.
It was only when I learned that someone else proposed it that I jumped
on the bandwagon.

So yes, I could have suggested that KDE should join the digital strike a
earlier, had I mustered the courage to go against the nay-sayers. My
bad, will try to be better next time.

Thank you to cahfofpai for being more brave than I was.

Cheers,
Thomas

> Greetings
> Christoph
> 
> P.S.
> 
> :-) You might not remember, but I did put up the "we oppose software
> patents" strike banner
> more than a decade ago on kde.org and got burned a lot for that, even
> thought we discussed that internally
> at that time.

People who take action will always be burned. This is probably the way
any community works, and those who take action sadly have to expect and
live with that.


[1] https://phabricator.kde.org/T11717



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