Sökformulär

Anger

I've noticed a particularly idiotic post on the site of the man who is now going to represent me as a Pirate Evangelist in Europe and the world at large.

Well. Here. Rick Falkvinge becomes a lot easier to work with when you don’t work with him at all.

He is sometimes easy when he likes you and you want cash.

I admit to having abused this expression of bad leadership
once when I thought representation of the party at WIPO was very important. I was given about €700 without any formal approval by the board. From a budget with €50000 in a year. That is slightly more than 1% of the budget.

Before Almedalen, three cameras that cost €150 euros each were bought. This is €450, again, around 1% of the total budget with no prior approval.

In the election €9000 were spent on candidate parties in a much criticized decision. I agree that it is fun to party, but quite frankly, as a non-candidate I would have liked if money that could have went into political campaigns before the elections (and 1/5 of it none-the-less!!) were not spent on people being encouraged to drink alcohol purchased by the party. They didn’t even get a DJ, and the parties were closed to the general public. This is not a good way of getting votes, which perhaps also shows in the end result.

I see a party board, and any board in an organisation, as a very important thing once the organisation starts having money. Money is a source of conflict. Money is a source of dissent. Money needs to be handled in a careful way which I perceive not to have happened ever. Rick has once incurred costs on my local constituency (Skåne) totalling 1/3 of our total annual budget, or, 1/5 of our total budget for the event (see, we got money from the youth organisation Ung pirat for holding the event). He did not remember signing up to the event. 1.5 years later our party secretary (hired half-time at the time) discovered a bill of €200 for this event that had not been paid. The party secretary is no longer hired now, because keeping track of bills and other things is not valuable to this organisation.

I am very, very annoyed by this. It is completely agonizing when you, one week before an event, get told that you have €200 extra costs in a budget of €1000 which was difficult to hold in the first place (actually, because we were given only €200 by our constituency for holding an event, it was 100% of money used by the party - we had already used it up for printing folders - and the rest of it could not have been used to pay for costs incurred by the party since they'd been given to us from a different organisation, even if, granted, I was on the national board of that organisation. We took a board decision after having motivated our costs and made a project plan). Otherwise we could have planned around this event and, say, given up our regular visitor’s information stand which was not terrible well visited but did expose our organisation and its existence to many people who didn’t know us (but were autonomous activists and therefore probably didn’t care).

I am pained by this. Like. Money is a source of conflict. If it takes you five years to not realize that, you really should start thinking about it and consider whether people may be annoyed by other people using what is essentially the money of an organisation they consider theirs and to be a part of. Gosh.

I remembered that he once hired a person to go with him on a national tour. This was a very attractive girl who’d joined the party about 2 weeks before going on the tour. Because this was a quite large cost for the organisation it caused a lot of people to be upset, but I agree that the situation, after emergency board meetings and several angry emails to Rick that apparently have destroyed his creativity, was resolved well with Anna Troberg following Rick on the tour as well. Troberg was not Rick’s choice, and to my knowledge her much desired presence on that tour was not his idea.

Uhm. About the child pornography thing: much more weird is that there is a board decision on Rick not hitting on girls because he is making girls uncomfortable to the point of them leaving the party (this happened to a friend of mine). For some reason, this has never happened to me, but I am told it might be because I’m a) scary or b) has never met him drunk.

11 kommentarer

I have a sincere and very bad confession to make. Our party secretary, Mårten Fjällström, who did the accounting for us for a bit over one year, asked me repeatedly to send in receipts for the journey that me and Sandra Grosse were meant to have made in December 2009. I did not, ever, during that entire year. Therefore, 7000 SEK from 2009 that were "inofficially" given to me from the budget because I guess I had a good sales pit, are not accounted for and this is extremely unfair to, among others, the people in Göteborg who had organised a brilliant patent forum just 4 months earlier. It is also grossly unfair to the people who wanted to organise a demonstration that autumn in Malmö.

Even more unfair is that the money never actually got used.

I had fallen badly ill that week, and asked if Sandra wanted to go alone. After Sandra had researched all options for getting money back for the flights, and debooking the youth hostel, it was very soon obvious that there was not going to be a journey. Sandra did not want to go alone, and there was no one who could have stood in for me at that time.

As it happened, Sandra has since been able to go two or three times to attent the Standing Committee on Patents at WIPO and with grand success. Sandra has brought back very positive experiences from the forums that I think have benefitted Ung pirat, their contact network, and their internationally oriented activities. We are very lucky to have that experience, and that knowledge, within the organisation now. Kudos to Sandra. Just... Awkward shame and hopefully reproaching on me.

I am posting a response here, and on your blog, so that I am extra certain you will get it since I'm sure you're confident enough to only bask in the glory of the 70 or so comments you from people who have never worked close with you who completely condoned your self-pity, which, I do not.

You. Do. Cock-ups.

Then you blame other people for them. And get angry when people point them out. Like, seriously? Blue fire? You say that you have learned something these years and now you say that criticism makes you lose your inspiration? That was criticism well used then. Except for the fact that this self-pitying fool who seems unable to get it even when people point it out /very/ clearly (this holds for the €9000, for instance, and for the €150 (or was it €1500? people were /very/ upset about it, but I guessed in your favour)). You gave the same motivation then as you do now. "It was vitally important that the cameras were bought, midimip, otherwise we would have never gotten media." Except we did. With you kissing a 16-year old.

The reason you can sit around and say that there was "formal approval" of the way you spent cash is that you were allowed to make purchases up to €1000? €5000? without asking the board. This was in fact one of the points of criticism that arose on the annual congress in 2009.

A congress which is not yet over btw, because you and your board can't be arsed with paperwork. I notice that while the party had a secretary there were protocols from the meets.

The thing is. You have been a dictator and spent comparatively huge parts of our resources without asking anyone else for approval. It is true that the board does not approve every pencil bought but this falls under a budget called "office material" which is usually not controlle by party chairman. You single-handedly controllen as much as 10% of our total resources and you spent them badly. Do you really see nothing wrong with this?

My money, our money, shared money, good money. Which was, as you yourself admit in your blogpost and subsequent comment on my criticism, used on a "small minority of the members" not the "thousands of activists" that were working on ground level.

In Skåne we had a budget of what? €1000 for the election year? I could be off by €500 or so, but that is not. a. lot. of. money. for. an. entire. district. in. an. election. year. Especially not when €9000 is spent on a "small minority" for a "kick off fest". We had Skåne posters and Lund posters printed on a home printer, despite the fact that there was a annual congress decision on being able to be in local election - a decision you never liked and fought against vigorously (shows in the budget?).

Do you not see anything wrong with this? I agree that you should have realized you had to be more careful - WITH MONEY! WITH MONEY, RICK! You pissed everyone off except the people who did not know for 4 years. Fou! People who don't keep track of what you're doing are quite happy with you. People who do go insane and blubber things about that you're a, well, I should say resource wasting leader. And now you are going to represent me in Europe.

Stop this self-pitying insanity. Just stop. I should be the one pitying myself.

Incidentally I do not, so much. I have a lot of friends who are considerably more knowledgable with what they do, and who teach me an awful lot about everything. This Saturday is Public Domain Day in four different cities in Italy. I, for some reason, know quite a bit about the public domain and orphan works and older works where the authors are known but impractical to track down (news paper articles for instance, or media such as films) so that they can't be archived legally, but in Luxembourg they do anyway because they have very gutsy librarians who are very scared about getting sued, and in the Netherlands there is a film archive that doesn't have a lot of films because the paperwork is too much for each and every one of them.

I am very concerned about this. I have accessed both archives just to check them out, and that's like, a very valuable resource they're providing there. It hurts not being able to take legal part in this archived material - I am, as a private individual, essentially doing something illegal watching these illegal copies. It hurts me.

Now, as opposed to you and criticism, I take these things very seriously. Extended collective licensing would make these people being legaly able to provide me with an archive of material that I like very much and want very much to have access to sooner than 120 years after they were created (most works after 1950 I wont even get to see enter the public domain).

The Piratpartiet is against extended collective licensing. I am really very torn about this. Extended collective licenses justify and perpetuate an essentially bad system for managing works. But they are also a quick fix that will benefit me and everyone else.

In Sweden we don't notice there problems so much, because we already have extended collective licensing which makes these problems less obvious to us. I have realised that there is a very low understanding of this, except among the people I talk with. And this is like, a point of reflection and subsequent agony for me since... 9 months or so. Or since I started evangelising less and listening more.

Let's hope the EP, or wherever the problem lies today, soon come to its senses, and let you unleash all that scariness on those who want to make the world their own little tightly controlled money machine!

Som nybliven partisekreterare och som tf ekonomiskt ansvarig så känner jag att jag borde kommentera på delar av din post. :)

Jag är just nu i full färd med att sätta mig in i det ekonomiska systemet och gå igenom hur det ser ut. Bland alla saker som jag och Anna Troberg håller på och ser över så finns just rutiner för hur vi hanterar förskott. Specifikt förskott där vi inom rimlig tid inte fått in underlag på vad de använts till. Det är helt enkelt inte rimligt att pengar som donerats till partiet ligger ute och inte används i partiets verksamhet.

Enligt det ekonomiska system som vi har så stämmer det att du fått ett förskott på 7000 kronor för en resa till Wipo (#501) och att det fattas underlag för det.

Alla kan bli sjuka och det är det inte mycket man kan göra nåt åt. Det du hade kunnat göra i det här specifika fallet är att skicka in underlag på att man faktiskt har bokat, men att man har blivit sjuk och inte kunnat avboka.

Det allra bästa är givetvis om man kan få till ett läkarbesök med ett intyg eftersom man då oftast kan få tillbaka i alla fall en del av pengarna från resebolaget.

Däremot så har du skickat in ett underlag på 995 kronor för en resa från Vilnius till Köpenhamn (#936). Det betyder att du i nuläget har en skuld till Piratpartiet på 6005 kronor, vilket också framgår tydligt i vårt system och vår förre partisekreterare har, precis som han skulle, bett att få in kvitton som han inte fått.

Jag vill också understryka att det det inte rör sig om några större summor som partiet i nuläget ligger ute med, men att rätt ska vara rätt och därför har vi redan börjat ta tag i det.

/Janne

Jajajaja. Jag måste ju ha bekräftelse på resan någonstans på Gmail. Det är bara jag som inte gitter leta för att jag tror att det skulle ta ett tag. Å andra sidan har jag ju inte direkt blivit straffad för det, men jag tycker nog det är bra att ni går igenom (faktist - jag har känt mig lite skamsen).

Jag sitter inte just nu och går igenom förskottsbetalningar för att se om vi har fått in kvitton eller inte, men det kommer att ske. Så det blir lättare för alla inblandade om du letar reda på kvitton på utgifterna och använder det systemet vi har för att registrera det. :)

Stort tack för att du tog upp det här! :)

Lägg till ny kommentar