Most of you are members of AMSAT. IMO the organization has some serious problems, and as members it is your duty to steer the organization with your votes. That means that you should remain aware of what is going on and you should make an informed vote. The satellite discussions go on, mostly uninterrupted, all year. A short break for politics is not unreasonable, and acrimonious discussion is to be expected when we take that break.
Organisations are run by people who would not be doing the work if they did not have strong emotions about it. And they all have their own failings. Unfortunately, volunteer non-profit directors (and many public ones in big corporations) never learn a critical skill of democracy: *how to deal properly with opposition. *That is the root of what we are arguing about now. Opposition are not the enemy! Yet, they are clearly being treated as such. They are simply people who would reform the organization or take it in a different direction from the incumbents.
In this case, Michelle and Patrick, before they were elected, were the loyal opposition - dedicated to a better organization, and deeply troubled by the decisions and conduct of the incumbent board. The incumbent's response was not to work with the opposition, but to hunker down and use lawyers. To the incumbent's great distress, the very same people got sent to the board by the membership! Leading to more lawyers. IMO the incumbents should have read this as a signal from the membership, rather than doubling down their resistance.
The sad reality is that the newly-elected directors have never been allowed to function as directors. You should be concerned, since they are the people whom you elected to represent you. The main means used to disable your elected representatives has been refusal by the incumbents to hold board meetings. This refusal is almost total, with exactly *one* meeting being held after the organization's annual convention.
The second means used to disenfranchise the newly-elected directors was that the incumbents withheld information which a director would generally be expected to have access to. As it happened, this information was at least in part discussion of those very same people, and contracting of legal counsel in a process against them.
Every board has the right to legal counsel. But it's expensive, and must be used wisely. This was not a wise use. A wise use would have been to engage the opposition rather than to hunker down.
One very large cause of all of this is that the same people have been running AMSAT for a very long time, and it becomes an echo chamber after a while - the us-vs-them mentality of the board vs. the opposition - but really the board vs. everyone else - becomes self-reinforcing.
This is obviously wrong for the organization. The solution is simple, and every organization needs it: *regular turn-over of the people in the organization's leadership. *Not the stratification that we currently have.
You can fix this by electing more new blood to the board.
Thanks
Bruce