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<div>Hi All,</div>
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<div>While I have largely chosen to stay silent in this debate, because I believe many of these issues were already resolved at the AGMM, there is one thing I would like to comment on.</div>
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<div><i>This has become quite normal. Somebody at the floor of the AGM called the entire Afrinic community "a community of mutings" or something like it. And he did it full of arrogance and sense of importance.</i></div>
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<p dir="ltr">Let me take a second to clarify what I actually said here.</p>
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<div>Far to often when something is brought to the floor of a meeting, people want to either complain that it hasn’t been discussed first or that they have never seen it. The reality is, most issues that land on the floor of either the PDP or the AGMM have
in some form or another been on these lists. The comment made here was in reference to the special resolutions that I put on the floor, and the people on the floor who stated that the community had not discussed them or provided input to them. This was inaccurate,
since the special resolutions had been placed on the members list on the 20th of May 2015, and the community had chosen not to respond to them or discuss them. I referred to that as “mute mode”, and never said “a community of mutings”.</div>
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<div>If we choose to stay silent on the lists and only respond when things eventually hit the floor of the meeting room, I argue that we have done the community a huge disservice and we should castigate ourselves for that, rather than complaining we had no
chance to comment. Why do I say this? Because the reality is that on the floor we have fairly low representation, and in fact in terms of members, less than 10% of members were represented on the members side of the room in the AGMM. By choosing to only
discuss and debate (and indeed object) to things only in the room, we disenfranchise the rest of the member base, and deny them our opinions and their chance to agree or rebut.</div>
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<div>This is not the first time this issue has come up either. As I pointed out then, it took an
<span style="font-weight: bold;">incredibly</span> controversial policy going to the floor of the PDP in Tanzania to really engender debate, and in the weeks prior to that policy going to the floor, the community had almost nothing to say on the mailing lists,
yet when it came to the floor, there was a longer queue at the microphone than anything I have ever seen before or since. </div>
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<div>We need to decide, is the only time we have for this organisation and to pay attention to the issues when we are away from home and away from our daily lives? Is that the only time we are willing to spare for the organisation that provides us resources
that are critical to our businesses? I would hope we are more dedicated than that.</div>
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<div>Thanks</div>
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<div>Andrew</div>
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