|
Hi SBW committee,
As stated in a previous complaint, I was extremely surprised to receive a printed letter on March 10th this year marked "Private and Confidential" hand-delivered, signed by John Kubale and dated March 8th, which contained alleged judgements from the entire SBW committee in relation to my "recent" conduct. The letter is attached to this complaint.
I have dealt with the first of the two judgements by the committee in the previous complaint. This complaint deals with the second judgement, which says ...
"2) The committee judged your conduct in August or September 2023 in posting on the public-access area of the SBW website, a document titled "The Term of the President", without the committee's prior authorisation or knowledge, to be prejudicial to the interests of SBW in that the conduct:
a) in the absence of informed prior consent of the SBW members named in the document, constituted an invasion of privacy of several SBW members about whom adverse inferences could be drawn by anyone reading it online;
b) was liable to lead to reputational damage to SBW by publicly airing a previous internal and settled dispute about the changes made to the SBW's constitution in August 2023; and
c) was contrary to SBW's interest in maintaining control over what material, particularly contentious material, enters the public domain in the name of SBW."
I would like to deal with a number of details in this judgement prior to defending the document titled "The Term of the President".
First, the first line of the judgement - in reference to the posting of the document on the website - says "without the committee's prior authorisation or knowledge". At the time of the posting there was no requirement for any committee authorisation or knowledge prior to the Webmaster updating the website, as the "Guidelines and Protocols for Electronic Publication and Communications" did not come into force until October 2023. As a result, the phrase ""without the committee's prior authorisation or knowledge" is superfluous and misleading.
Section (a) of the judgement
This section is ambiguous. Was posting the document an invasion of privacy because there was no "informed prior consent of the SBW members named in the document" or was it an invasion of privacy because "adverse inferences could be drawn" from it? If it was an invasion of privacy because there was no "informed prior consent", then all SBW documents which mention the names of any members will also be invasions of privacy if no consent is given. This means "informed prior consent" must be given by any member mentioned on the website, in a Facebook post, in an Ettremist article, in club minutes etc. As this is obviously unreasonable and unworkable, section (a) of the judgement must therefore mean that mentioning the names of members without their "informed prior consent" is only prejudicial to the interests of SBW if "adverse inferences could be drawn". It follows that an invasion of privacy would not occur if the members gave their "informed prior consent", even if "adverse inferences could be drawn".
Also, what is "informed prior consent"? Why not just use "consent"? Presumably, doesn't seeking consent from a member necessarily mean that they are "informed"? And does the word "prior" really need to be there? It goes without saying that if consent to publish is sought, it must be sought "prior" to publication. Publishing a document that mentions a member and seeking their consent after it is published is obviously an extremely bad practice!
Section (b) of the judgement
The document in question was uploaded to the "History" section of the website. The "previous internal and settled dispute about the changes made to the SBW's constitution in August 2023" is a part of the club's history and the story should be available to all club members. The words "previous" and "internal" are superfluous, as by definition, anything to do with the club's history must be "previous" and "internal". This leaves us with "settled" as the description of the dispute. I would argue that the term of the President is not "settled", otherwise the sensible change to the term of the President made in 2011 which allowed unlimited Presidential terms when "no other nominations for president are received" would not have been changed (for the worse) at the 2023 AGM.
This leaves "liable to lead to reputational damage to SBW by publicly airing" the dispute as the supposedly contentious issue. At the time of "publicly airing" the dispute in the History section of the website, all of the club's history was public - we didn't have anything to hide - and there were no "Guidelines and Protocols for Electronic Publication and Communications", so the fact that the document was available to the public is not the contentious issue.
This leaves us with the document being "liable to lead to reputational damage to SBW" as the contentious issue. This is a highly arguable assumption. While the committee obviously believes that "The Term of the President" was likely to damage SBW's reputation, it could also be argued that the reputation of the club could be enhanced by the document. It shows the public that we are not afraid to reveal differences of opinion within the club; that we do not apply authoritarian "rules" to stamp out dissent; and that we provide our club members and potential members of the club with a "warts and all" history of the club no matter the potential consequences.
Section (c) of the judgement
In my opinion the argument offered in the paragraph above - that publication of the document showed the club to be open and honest - could also be used when deciding whether the publication of the document was contrary to SBW's interest in maintaining control over what material enters the public domain in the name of SBW. I would also argue that at the time of publication - which was prior to the adoption of the "Guidelines and Protocols for Electronic Publication and Communications" - the only control over what material entered the public domain in the name of SBW was the SBW constitution.
If the committee decided that "The Term of the President" was "inappropriate" and should be removed from the website, it could have convened a committee meeting, decided that the document should be removed from the website, and ordered the Webmaster to take it down. If they had wanted a quicker result, the decision could have been made via electronic means i.e. telephone calls or emails.
As it happened, any committee decision would have been moot anyway, because by the time action was taken, the document had already been removed from the website. It was unfortunate for the club that the President and two committee members decided amongst themselves to ignore the constitution and take action unilaterally without involving the rest of the committee - and even so, by the time they had organised their unconstitutional meeting with the Webmaster, the document had already been removed from the website.
So, as shown in a previous complaint, the first of the two judgements shown in the "Private and Confidential" letter involving the emailing of "correspondence in" to the committee - should be dismissed because the correspondence should have gone to the committee in the first place.
As shown above, the second of the two judgements shown in the "Private and Confidential" letter should also be dismissed because publication of "The Term of the President" document and its contents was not disallowed by any constitutional or code-of-conduct restrictions; was shown on the website for such a short time that it was gone before any committee action - whether constitutional or non-constitutional - was necessary; that because of this short time any alleged potential damage to the interests of SBW was minimal; and that it is arguable whether the publication of the document - had it remained on the website - would have caused any reputational damage to the club at all.
Regards,
Brett
|
|
