Give Me Strength

It appears not only that TFN do not follow their own rules, but also neither do they follow the funding guidelines issued by their main backers - WMI.  Waste Management explicitly prohibit the use of their funds for political lobbying - see their Charitable Giving page for more info.  And yet the US company explicitly promoted the use its resources, against the wishes of its moderator membership for political lobbying of the UK government while it canvassed opinion on its Climate Change bill.

A change in the climate

One thing that catapulted me into the debate, rather than sitting on the sidelines was an initiative in the name of Freecycle. This was to issue a declaration on behalf of the wider (UK) Freecycle community to the UK government as a response on the Climate Change Bill. While an extremely laudable initiative, and one with which I have great empathy what I did not agree with was Freecycle, per se, taking a position and representing that as being something that the Freecycle community agreed with.

My dissent found very wide agreement and although the submission was modified it still went ahead. Not only that it is important to understand that this was sanctioned and supported from the very top of The Freecycle Network. This was an appalling situation that struck to the very heart of democracy and showed me in no uncertain terms that The Freecycle Network was not democratic. As a very clear example of the lack of democracy a poll was issued to garner opinions on The climate change bill. While again, very laudable, the poll was extremely flawed.

Not only were questions skewed to the answers the proponents wanted, a fundamental flaw was that if you answered NO to the first question then you were blocked from clicking “submit”. Hmmm. ok, this could be an honest mistake but at no time was the poll taken away. And in fact the results were published. And not surprising of the around 100 respondents a majority supported the proponents perspective.

Anyway the submission was made and my blood and the blood of others boiled.

I cannot reproduce any of the content (largely in UkModSquad) since it is under privacy terms of The Freecycle Network so this summary will have to suffice.

This then changed the climate of my approach to The Freecycle Network. Now I understood that it was a sham. People who were in “power” were speaking on behalf of others as if they had their authority, as the “Directors of Freecycle UK”.

Where does this blog now go? To me it is about rights and responsibilities, and that is a two-way street. Right now The Freecycle Network is claiming lots of rights but is demonstrating very little responsibility. That is very sad, and that’s why I call it a sham.