Zeitgeist movement Greek chapter at risk! - Forum

Within RBOSE IRC I recently came upon this issue which was a bit interesting and it reminded me of the time RBOSE at the time TZm dev's wrote a letter to Peter Joseph Merola concerning his movements direction. The Greeks have reached just about the same conclusion as RBOSE. I was thinking conspiracy science could help the Greek chapter out in their letter to basically Peter about the direction of his movement. I have been in contact with greek individuals affiliated with TZM as well as I am not the only individual in contact with them as most people involved in RBOSE are as well. I can see the trend is continuing. So I'm gonig to help the Greeks make the best letter possible to Peter Merola :D

Dark Dancer better be licking the Greeks boots and kissing there butt as well as listening to their every command or expect them gone Gilbert

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http://typewith.me/HellenicIssue</p>

Greek Chapter Issue

Dear members of the Zeitgeist Movement, this email will try to depict the current state of affairs that has been tantalizing the Greek Chapter for quite a while, since there are numerous demerits of a select group of people that make it hard for the rest of the Hellenic Zeitgeist members, not only to offer their precious help to the Movement, but also to have equal rights of conduct when activism projects and courses of action are being planned.

In an effort to exclude sentimentalisms that have no relevancy whatsoever, we will try to describe, through a number of events that have been taking place for quite some time, the environment and behaviour that many members receive, as well as the lack of communication between members and the administrative team, and the long-term lack of a platform that would give room for the activism teams to get organized and flourish.
We would like to share with the members globally our experience regarding our participation in the official chapter and to publicly illustrate the reasons for splitting up. We believe that the Greek case should be illustrated because probably other chapters have similar problems with us here or some chapters may have these kind of problems in the future if nothing will be done regarding the issues we would like to point out with this letter.

Needless to say, this is the reason why the Hellenic Chapter shows signs of deterioration regarding the members on the official .GR site, as opposed to the Global Site participation.

Main issues:

Lack of organization and methods for Decision Making

Lack of communication between a certain group and the rest of the members

Clinging on positions of power by not allowing members to help

Isolation from other chapters all over the world

Bullet points:

1) The official chapter is almost totally disconnected from the rest of the Chapters in the Movement. They have attended 1 (maybe 2) of the total of International Chapter Meetings (and those attended after warnings by the Intl. chapters coordinator - Gilbert).

2) Around 2 weeks before Z-Day 2010 the Greek Chapter's Athens Team had a meeting for discussing how the Z-day schedule would be organized. Instead of discussing, we were just presented a pre-decided schedule. Although most of the members considered a Q&A and discussion session absolutely necessary, we were told by Antonia Pappas and John Holidis with absolute certainty that this was impossible, due to lack of enough time available (which was proven to be utterly untrue) and a lack of a spokesman. Unfortunately they [Antonia and Holidis] projected their own lack of knowledge regarding the tenets of the Movement to all the rest of the members of the Greek Chapter, without even having made a human resources database.

3) The Communication Spokesperson claims that the presence of leaders in nature is mandatory and that the rest should follow them. Justifying that by citing a publication by 'Nature' magazine concerning pigeon flocks.

4) A relatively new member of the Greek Chapter (now member of the IT team) noticed that there was an announcement on the main page of the Social Network, asking for money for the hosting of the site, so he offered for free hosting in a server from a data center in Germany, by making a relevant blog post. He was totally ignored for weeks. The admin's constant excuse was 'lack of time'.

5) Eventually we managed to get hold of John Holidis, and 3 developers had a meeting with him to discuss technical issues. Technical help was offered for improving the existing site by adding modules and fixing existing bugs. Additionally, a Project Management System platform was presented to him to get his feedback. After the meeting we never heard back from him regarding any of these issues. Even though he has very little development experience, as he has admitted himself, and he was extremely busy and had very little time available, he would not give access to other more experienced members of the Movement, for improving the website and upgrading its organization further.

6) In the same meeting there was an explicit request to put a banner/link for TeamSpeak so members would know where the meetings are held (e.g. Translations Team, etc.). He rejected it by saying that it needs "cleaning". Additionally, there could have been put a banner/link for Teamspeak for the European and International Chapters meetings, but not even that has happened until today.

7) When an IT-DEV team was formed by initiative of members of the Movement, J.Holidis, being the admin of the site, was invited to join the team and accepted the invitation. He was asked, directly via chat, email and phonecalls, to attend the IT Teamspeak meeting, that was published on the newly formed IT team's group section, to discuss about moving the site to the server in Germany and other technical issues. He didn't respond or came back to us about it.

8) After the US hosting provider dropped the official chapter site, John decided to temporarily accept the proposal of moving to Niko's server in a Data Center in Germany. John was worried about how the transfer of the site is going to happen from 1 host to the other, but Nikos reassured him that he has the technical knowledge to do it very quickly, provided that the US host used CPanel and that he could have access to the previous server. Surprisingly, after a couple of hours John called Nikos to tell him that Antonis Fasolas (a non-active ZM member, as Antonia Pappas admitted in a former TS meeting) has found a host in the UK and the company he works for will provide it for free. The host was technically inferior in all aspects (VPS VS colocated in Germany, smaller ping times). In the same call (as a sidenote) Holidis mentioned to Nikos that apart from the Movement's site, which was going to the UK, he had some personal sites which he could give to Nikos to host them.

9) On the TVP lecture in Athens, a new member asked Holidis if there was anything wrong with the 'newsletter' mechanism of the site. After Holidis admitted that there was something wrong, the member offered to fix it as it was something of trivial difficulty. Holidis, however, never came back to him for this issue.

10) Although there were complaints from the admins' side that members do not participate for the preparation of TVP's lecture, there was a blog written from members only for the purpose of offering help. However, there was no response from the admins for anything. Added to that, there were people that helped with the lecture, despite their discontent of how things are in the Chapter.

11) The global site currently has 9852 Greek supporters with the highest supporters to population ratio (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2642289/Zeitgeist/Stats1.1.jpg), while at the same period the Greek Social Network has 1228. Additionally, the number of members of the initial version of the site of the Greek Chapter was 3000+. These are signs that the chapter is not growing but is shrinking.

12) The only organization of the official chapter, until today, has been the Social Network which, as the admin admits, exists for the realization of friendly relationships. No human resources database or methodology of decision making exists.

13) Website Requirement violation: "Tier one sites... are expected to be responsible to their local members, not act as autority but as a group." Such a thing has never happened, since there is only one Admin, refusing to allow other experienced members in participating (see above).

14) Additionally there was no discussion about whether we want to accept donations from third parties and in return offer them advertising to any of our events. The the venus project lecture was sponsored by an organization named "Proponisi Zois"(Training in Life) and there hasn't been any supporting information - transparency regarding the details of this involvement. We sense that admins of the official chapter have not taken approval from media@thezeitgeistmovement.com about this issue (but we would like to ask Gilbert about that, as being informed by them has not happened). If so, this practice was against the "A practical guide to Starting, Running and Improving a Chapter" found on http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=99999&func=view&catid=263&id=177830, as presented by Gilbert.

15) Certain features of the current website have been permanently disabled, most notably the poll and event creation, without providing any explanations as to why these had to be let down. No open discussion was held before this action was taken.

16) When we the Greek Linguistic Team completed translating the first Newsletter we decided to make an informative blog at the social network of the official chapter with a link to it. John Holidis expressed its non-intension to publish it on the homepage or send it to any member because he didn't like the note in the end of the newsletter that mentioned that the translation was "...done by the greek linguistic team which is independent of the official greek chapter. If you want to help...". The note was merely describing the raw reality. As we were interested of getting the Newsletter out to inform all the members and to avoid accusations expressed by .GR about divisionary perceptions by us we decided to remove the note. We believe that this stance of official chapter is another indication of their "first us, secondly the movement" attitude.

17) And finally even though it was known especially after the incidence with the Newsletter that the Linguistic team of the Greek Chapter is officialized as being the only participator from Greece of the International Linguistic team, the official chapter asked Roxanne to translate the TVP site without coming into contact with us to offer their help. Gman explained to Roxanne that the process cannot be such, since there is a translation team in existance and a non-coordinated activity between two teams will have only negative results. And suggested that anyone who would volunteer to help the Greek Linguistic Team should come in contact with the one in existence. We are still expecting the "volunteers" from .gr to come in touch with us. This is one more indication that proves the divisionary mentality that governs the official .GR.

Results

1) Continuously split-ups and endistancement of many active members (3 times, ours included) from thezeitgeistmovement.gr. The same time that .gr is showing with pride their officiality badge, many active members choose to detach from the movements processes in order to maintain their psychological stability just because they were unfortunate enough to have a different point of view. We all wonder if the personal opinions, stances and attitudes of the admins of an official chapter's site equate with the official tenets of the Movement. We believe it doesn't and we hope it doesn't.

2) The detachment of new members. Right away. As soon as they see the ridiculous behaviors in social network and the non-existence of organizational structure they just leave. (1200+ subscribers but 20-30 active members).

3) Groups (activist, communication e.t.c.) can't be formed because not enough members exist. There is a lack of human resources.

4) The absence at the International meetings or the European meetings results in lack of information due to the developments of the movement internationally which is followed by inability to "inspire" new members regarding the everytime new routes of the movements activities and perceptions.

In conclusion

When you are official and at the same time no mechanisms of decision-making exist, then falling into dangerous totalitarian routes and detachment from the processes internationally is an expected result in order to maintain these routes. People that are totally conditioned from the power-seeking ideas of this free market society find a great opportunity to take advantage of the lack of decision-making mechanisms. It's a natural outcome. It should be expected for them to behave this way. This conclusion is the main reason why we decided to share our experience with you all.
We feel that, just as the current monetary system is a barrier to the progression of human civilization, the current situation in the official Greek Chapter is a barrier to its progression and growth.

Overview of proposed solution:
http://typewith.me/TZMGRSolution</p>

Hi There I would like to throw in some things to possibly enhance this letter. As I was informed by another medium about this I have to I agree a lot with what this letter has inside. I being affliated with RBOSE have written a letter directly to Peter Joseph and I'd like to share the letter and the data within the letter.

http://www.4shared.com/document/eOt2Mebf/Letter_To_Peter.html</p>

hopfully this will help you as the majority of the people in RBOSE has come to this conclusion as well.

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This is the Greek website where they can be contact as well.

http://www.tzm.gr/site/

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