[governance] DISCLOSURE REQUEST Re: Funding Available for Strengthening Civil Society...

[Daniel Pimienta]

While I understand the inconvenience of De and accept the principle 
of her arguments, full transparency on the funding of civil society 
organizations
is really a duty. And the point is not to make a value jugdment on 
the capacity of one organization to maintain independency
of criteria in spite of receiving fund from one entity which does not 
share the same criteria but how much in terms of finance
is this support compared to the total budget of that organization.

Would you trust, for examples :
- an organization dedicated to promote open source with 80% of 
funding from Microsoft?
- an organization struggling against advertisment as the economic 
model for funding the Internet with 30% of funds from Google?
- an organization working on privacy with a 25% of funding from US-AID?
- an organization working on promoting muktistakeholderism funded at 
90% by the Russian government?
- an organization working for the promotion of English as lingua 
franca of the Internet funded 100% by Francophonie?
- an organization working for the defense of whales funded at 80%  by 
the Norway government (if it were Human Rights I will certainly in 
that case :-))?

I wont, as a responsible civil organization manager, and this not an 
arbitrary value jugdment but just common sense apply to very sensitive matter.
Ingenuity is not a good strategy in our area, indeed.
While some of the examples I have selected are just funny (and did 
not mean to offend any group) and so absurd they are improbable,
some others are probably happening in real life. So we need to exerce 
caution...

This is why we do need to know where the funds of civil society 
organizations come from and I support Norbert's position (and accept 
we should find
the most respectful expression of it).


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