CARTA DE ABANDONO DE PLANET (NUEVA ZELANDA): Planet NZ Trust

Tena koe APC Council and APC Secretariat,

This is to report that Planet NZ Trust was the next to resign from its (conditional) membership of APC. We delivered our resignation to Don Anderson very recently.

Also, following from that, I have now withdrawn from APC Council and the Membership Working Group.

Thank you for the opportunity to make friends from different countries and experience camaraderie with other progressive thinkers and activists. That has certainly been one element in my experience.

In what follows I outline very briefly the reason for Planet's decision and the context as we see it.

Divergence
Planet has found the APC name for the last while, to be something that it no longer wanted to operate under for reasons of political discomfort. We have continued interacting with APC only pending APC changing favourably. We see that APC has been shrinking in real constituency terms and that as a membership organisation it has been imploding.

Under its present guidance we expect it will re invent its small nucleus decision making model with resemblence in dynamics to its earlier days, and in real terms members will find themselves in a similar role to what partners are currently in.

The next formation of APC will, in our view, provide no fundamentally different openness and politic. We found there were technicians in APC who passionately wanted to steer towards Open Source, but we have not found a passion in APC Council for an APC embodying open practices and membership, even though there is now some lip service to open software.

It remains of interest to Planet that understanding and pursuit of open source is advanced and that Civil Society receives the benefit in a timely way. So should that actually enter APC's trajectory we are likely to "actively intersect".

Core issues about benefit, interest, and governance in APC have remain unresolved. Obviously changes of some kind will happen as the current APC is not in an stable state. However we see the only movement that is likely to succeed as being based around the contraction implied in recent statements from the chair. So we have chosen to spend our best energies now in places where we find a chance of following Planet's charter more directly.

The Council's requests of the Membership Working Group to work on an existing proposal did not give latitude for the real changes Planet would have sought. In the past we have raised our voice strongly. This time we consider it timely that we depart and let the structures and processes that suit, evolve amongst those who are then at that point comprising APC.

Departure
If by chance Planet ideas and directions in the future are parallel to those of an operation any of you are involved in, or the systems we evolve are of interest, then there is no reason why we would not consider practical interaction outside of APC.

However the larger picture is that our leaving brings to an end the difficulty of having very different operations attempting to work together and be identified as connected.

In fact it will have been obvious to most of you that we have had APC "on notice". We felt that APC needed to reform in many respects or we would not remain involved. We have stated this formally from time to time. Increasingly of late we have found that the processes of APC have been something for which we find it difficult to summon respect and at times APC decisions were raising ethical quandaries for us that were not easily assuaged.

There comes a point where it is best to part. While there have been changes in APC and we have contributed to those, the situation now is that an effort to achieve progress and change in APC is not anymore in our plans. We are changing our concept of international alliance for the year 2000 onwards.

That said, PlaNet NZ and I wish you all well in your lives and in your ICT pursuits of the coming years.

Details
The hosting of the APC website can remain here for a couple of weeks while something is sorted out by APC. We cannot guarantee active support for a migration process, but will do what we can, when we can if complexities arise.

Please remove me from nodeheads and techheads mailinglists as soon as you can.

The planet.apc.org SOA can be withdrawn too, as we are sufficiently prepared for that to happen.

It is important that APC not mention Planet as a member of APC from here on or imply that we have an existing association with APC.

Communications to me should from now be via roberth@plain.co.nz, roberth@converge.org.nz, or roberth@planet.altcom.org

Thank you Ago for your invitation to visit Hungary for the meeting. You did not ever receive a confirmation from me because Planet Trustees were considering this withdrawal, dependent on various factors, and we have only now made the decision final. It means of course, that there will not be a Planet representative to Budapest as we will no longer be part of APC.

It is possible I may receive instruction from my board to formally send more detail of our stance through to APC, however our resignation is full and final.

Robert Hunt
Planet NZ Trust