Hi Behdad & board, On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 5:11 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Unfortunately it turned out to be so. Needless to say, I did not mean > to offend anyone. And I apologize if I did.
I'm sure you had no intention at all of offending but well, you did. Since it was unconscious it is good to discuss and move it to the consciousness. An advice for future years could be: - Don't be partial to any candidate if you are involved in the decision (Behdad did in this list - which is fine but then it would be good to stay out of the process). - Don't expose any candidate publicly, especially not with cheap stereotypes (I'm afraid you did, by tying Tampere and Coruña to popular non-excitement and also by connecting Gran Canaria to sol, playa y fiesta). - Explain the reasons why the winner won, and why the rest didn't. For what I remember your "survey" mentioned mostly beach and price of beer. No mention at all about Coruña or Tampere. - Invite the no-winners to resubmit next year, making clear that we want to have them on board. Do we need to remember how hard has been to get a single candidature in previous years? - Say a clear "Thank You" to all - probably GNOME's Rule Number One. > Each bid > has its own unique strengths, but in the end, we decided that the unique > opportunity of the Gran Canaria bid to reach out to Africa was something > we really want to explore. Like a good brother I'm not criticising the decision, but I recommend you not to put this argument upfront before prior investigation and concrete decisions made on that direction. In fact, this might be a problem as it was in Vilanova: plenty of requests for recommendation letters from African countries from which I count just a couple from Algeria and Morocco as legitimate - and they couldn't get the visa either. This took a lot of time and hassle, including calls and conversations with Spanish embassies in remote countries. At the end most of them were probably fake (and I don't blame them either, at the end borders are full of sad stories) The Canary Islands are one of the main gateways of immigration from Africa to the EU. In this sense is like a European military fortress, no matter zillion priviledged citizens fly there as tourists free as in speech and quite cheap as in beer. Africans with properties and a bank account won't have problems but considering their origins (e.g. South Africa) they will probably fly via Madrid, Paris or London anyway. All the rest will need a lot of help from the organization to get a visa and a flight ticket. Fyi there are direct flights to Gran Canaria from Cape Verde, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal and Western Sahara. Working out something with computer science faculties in Casablanca, Marrakesh and Dakar seems like the first thing to try if we really want to play the African card beyond the good intentions. -- Quim Gil /// http://flors.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list