jep
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response 89 of 90:
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Jan 3 15:56 UTC 2000 |
Apologies to Marcus. I read back, and he's right.
Arbornet didn't plan in advance to submit it's own grant application as
far as I know. We heard of the grant because Valerie Mates invited the
Arbornet Board members to get together with the HVCN folks, and I became
Arbornet's representative. We all discussed things for several months,
over a number of meetings.
I made it pretty clear what I thought Arbornet would be willing to
participate in. I missed the final grant application meeting, during
which the final decision on what to apply for was made (I was in Paris
at the time), and the decision was to focus on things I had said many
times Arbornet wouldn't support. (Kiosks, specifically.)
Arbornet had a Board meeting the following weekend, and at that Board
meeting, the various views of the Board members came out. Everyone was
opposed, but everyone was opposed for a different reason. It was
awfully chaotic. It was also a big surprise to me. I think even if the
joint grant project had been something I would have supported, the rest
of the Board wouldn't have wanted to participate.
I'd been posting about the discussions in the policy conference through
the entire process, but there was no participation from *anyone* else.
Not the Board, not any other users... the item looked like a log file
from me, more or less. So I didn't have a clue as to what anyone
thought.
Anyway, I made the Arbornet Board's motion to withdraw from the grant
project. You can be mad at me for that, Jan, but as I said, the focus
of the grant was made to be something I didn't think Arbornet should be
doing, and I'd made that clear to the rest of the participants in the
grant project. The motion passed unanimously as I recall it, because of
a lot of different reasons -- everyone had their own. No one ever
discussed their reasons with me, before or after. I also told the grant
project that Arbornet was withdrawing, at a meeting. I'm sure some of
those people are still mad at me about it, but I think withdrawing was
justified by the circumstances.
The Board did say it was going to do it's own grant proposal, and that
was stupid, because it was far too late in the proposal process. It may
have been unethical as well. I guess I won't argue that if anyone says
it was.
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mdw
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response 90 of 90:
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Jan 4 08:28 UTC 2000 |
It made arbornet look extremely bad from the outside, because from the
perspective of anyone who didn't know what the arbornet board was
thinking, it looked exactly as if arbornet had intended all along to
submit its own grant proposal, and had only participated in the joint
proposal for the purpose of sabotaging it and gaining competitive
information. Since the only people who had any idea what the arbornet
board was thinking was the board itself, that meant the entire rest of
the world. Anyone who didn't know the board wasn't in a position to
present its own grant proposal would necessarily have concluded that the
arbornet board did in fact have such a proposal, and had either cribbed
it from the joint work done, or had been preparing it in advance
secretly - both certainly very unethical. Even knowing what the board
was thinking doesn't really make the situation look that much better.
In any event, it's still all water under the bridge. It's not likely
such a proposal will arise again. It doesn't appear that arbornet has
any resources to lend to such an effort, and resolving the trust issue
will presumably be a moot point by the time arbornet does have any spare
resources.
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