[CryptoParty] Analysis of 'German Foundation's offer'

Thu Jul 18 09:26:11 GMT 2013

Thanks for your feedback Jens,

re: "1. we talk to them and tell them our concerns"
as Hauke already suggested, they do not know how to help and they want to
figure that out.
Maybe rather than listing concerns we can take the lead a bit and actually
just flatly drop their previous proposal as not working and suggest an
entirely new one:

I think after reading everything... in fact / come to think of it, if this
group would instead of offering money and such restrictions just even send
like one PGP / GPG expert to a party to volunteer and participate as an
informed / expert "guest" just like any other guest then this would be 100x
more useful and entirely constructive to their aims to teach people crypto.

Proposal 1. Organise, wherever possible to send volunteers to take part in
a non-official capacity. I.e. not giving speeches about TT, not advertising
anything. Do the good work without corporatising our volunteer /
decentralised movement which has, until now, just been about the crypto /
content. More people learn crypto. Everyone wins.

re: "2. make a short notice on the website which says "you can get money
from TT under this conditions" and "we don't support this because …"

I am personally really uncomfortable with this proposal and I feel it is a
bad idea to advertise that offer on our site especially seeing as we are
still discussing the terms and the nature of such assistance and money
will, given the feedback so far, not be how we end up receiving help from
these guys...

Just FWIW I notice you did not mention the bit where I was talking about
why we would even need money in the first place and how this might
complicate things? I think this is a key argument in this whole discussion:

Why would we trade *any* autonomy and/or reveal information about our
network for some beer money? This is just not smart.
So just to echo what I said before:

Maybe they are nice guys that want to inform and protect the public?
Or maybe they want to push certain agendas, co-opt and then destroy
the movement?

I am not sure which they are... but for the price of a few beers, I do
not want to find out.

*Self-Funding*
Subsidizing drinks might sound like "free as in free beer" but to be
honest, would you rather not just spend 10 euros on something from the
supermarket and run an free-range / independent event?

If you *must* get back this cost then there is a very simple solution,
a little donation box:
https://openclipart.org/image/800px/svg_to_png/126853/donation.png

Also, if a speaker had to travel a long way then the donation box
system can be a nice way to make that work for them.

*Crowd Funding?*
If we need money so bad for 'drinks' and maybe for domain names and
server hosting and so on then why not just crowdfund that? We have a
large support base...

- -Well then we would need a bank account.
- -Therefore we are more centralized.
- -Therefore we need a process to approve spending.
- -Therefore we argue about money and profit.
...IMHO Life gets worse not better.

To conclude, we state in our own literature that we are
non-commercially aligned and do not sellout to such free pizza + beer
offers and what I have outlined about is precisely the reason why we
must be careful when considering what is offered and what is asked for
in return. So let's consider defering to the collective wisdom of our
global movement and keep CryptoParty free and DIY!

samthetechie

On 18 July 2013 08:29, Jens Kubieziel <maillist at kubieziel.de> wrote:

> * Samuel Carlisle schrieb am 2013-07-18 um 01:05 Uhr:
> > Asks
> > ====
> > -give us your hacker / crypto contacts all over Germany.
>
> Only the last sentence asks for a contact. As far as I understand it
> they want a contact address of a person or legal entity who organises
> the CryptoParty. So if we want to support it I would suggest that we
> don't give them any contacts. When someone is interest in getting in
> touch with TeleTrusT we give this person the contact of TeleTrusT. This
> is the better way in my opinion.
>
> > -we will take over accounts (??? does this mean pay for things or to
> > *do* our finances, the translation is not clear to me).
>
> What they are saying here that they will pay for real costs. So if
> someone has to rent a room, pay for food and beverages, TeleTrusT will
> cover those costs.
>
> > -your events may not have any political affiliations.
>
> Not an affilitaion with a special party. In September are elections in
> Germany and some parties misuse such events to make campaining. I think
> they want to exclude this here.
>
> > Not to mention that there is also a veiled encouragement to get us to
> > be able to make "proper invoices" which I assume in German, like UK,
> > law mean that we have to become a legal body.
>
> Speaking for Germany, many hackspaces are legal bodies (Verein) here and
> so are able to issue invoices.
>
> > Maybe they are nice guys that want to inform and protect the public?
> > Or maybe they want to push certain agendas, co-opt and then destroy
> > the movement?
>
> Their agenda seems to support encryption for public use. In a sentence
> which you didn't translate they wrote that they want to support "mail
> encryption" in a way that everyone uses it.
>
> I would suggest that
> 1. we talk to them and tell them our concerns
> 2. make a short notice on the website which says "you can get money from
>    TT under this conditions" and "we don't support this because …"
> So others which want to do a CryptoParty can evluate for themselves if
> they think it is a good idea or not.
>
> --
> Jens Kubieziel                                   http://www.kubieziel.de
>
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> CryptoParty at kuix.de
> https://kuix.de/mailman/listinfo/cryptoparty
>
>

-- 
Samuel Carlisle BEng (Hons) Dunelm MIET
pgp: 0x54828CAA
Fingerprint: 9E01 D8A4 CFEB ED72 B0D2 70D7 1D57 A297 5482 8CAA
twitter: @samthetechie <https://twitter.com/#!/samthetechie>
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