Statement from a few members of the Guardians of Cardano

English General Discussions
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Dear Cardano Community,

Please take our appologies for the weeks of silence and not being at your service.

We did help the Cardano Foundation to move on the path where it may reestablish it’s organization, but we were not able to reorganize ourselves.

When our group came together we never had previous working experience and some of us never had any kind of personal contact before.

This was not a traditional startup venture formation, more an ad-hoc group coming together from the Forum discussions, people being desperate about the situation at the Foundation and willing to do something about it.

During the “Liberate the Cardano Foundation” mission the severity of the situation and the urgency to resolve it kept us together.

However once Mr. Parsons stepped down we had to decide how shall we continue, what can be our purpose in the Cardano Ecosystem.

From this point it became clear we are all very passionate, committed members in the group looking out for the Cardano Ecosystem, though having very different values, vision, priorities, private agenda, cultural habbits and experience.

Just a very few fundemental examples where we couldn’t agree in a comforting supermajority:

  • which are the key responsibilities of the Guardians of Cardano, what belongs to the cause of Guardianship and what does not?

  • should people who had significantly more contribution and added value to the Parsons Misson (which in the end established our “recognition and reputation”) have more influence and decision power regarding the future of the Guardians?

  • would having the Guardians become a non-profit, audited association (registered in Norway / Switzerland) operating a staking pool to compensate reasonable and justified hours and expenses end up in loosing our independence and credibility?

  • in case of a split should the group who clearly added more value and effort to the Parsons Mission have the right to carry on the brand to their group?

  • shall we delegate the Guaridans of Cardano ideology, responsibility and brand to the Community and drive such an open Community movement?

On some days we had between 500-1000 messages trying to convince each other, without reaching unanimous or supermajority decision.

In the haste of the discussions unfortunately things turned sometimes personal, feelings were hurt and trust was imminently lost.

It even ended up in a situation when recently personal attacks, disinformation and trying to discredit people came into false play.

This is where we realized we have ran off way too far from the true path of Guardianship and have to split along our differences otherwise we will not find the way back.

This honest confession from us about our faults & failure is also meant to show we are not different, anyhow better or more special then anyone else from the Community.

What will likely happen now is a few spin-offs will appear from the Guardians of Cardano group, with members who share the very same values, vision and have good chemistry to allow for efficient and friendly operations.

We have fought for transparency of the Cardano Foundation and we believe in providing transparency into our struggles and operations, even if we might loose our “reputation” and look fragile and broken.

More update will follow whenever there is a group who spins off from the Guardians of Cardano to let them present themselves.

Very likely the Guardians of Cardano brand, social media and communication channels will simply be shared among the groups to aggregate information and when there is enough interest moved to the Community movement.

As a final comment some of the Guardians started to investigate how the reconstruction of the Foundation is progressing and initiated an interview with Mr. Pascal Schmid.

We have some very good news to the Community as we have personally met Mr. Pascal Schmid at the Plutusfest and he is a man of great character with strong proven integrity we may confidently trust.

The Cardano Foundation is in very good & caring hands, Pascal is as passionate about Cardano as any of us in the Community.

He promised to come back with a response to some questions we asked, which will be published soon.

Thanks for your patience and understanding,

Bertalan Vecsei @bercinho

Eystein Magnus Hansen @Eystein_Hansen

Mihori Liu @Mihori

Tim Wulteputte @Bullish

Guardians of Cardano

We invite all the Guardians to sign and unite around this statement.

14th December, 2018

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My thanks and respect everyone.

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Bert,
This letter reads very nicely at face value, but this is not the type of diplomacy I was talking about when I asked you to be more diplomatic with other people. You need to contact each person individually and privately and try to resolve some differences, or be patient and let the heads cool off. Some differences are unresolvable I believe.

Here is where you screwed up:

  1. You used the Guardians account instead of you own personal account, then you published this letter with a minority of Guardians. You have done this before on both this forum, and on Twitter, and there are only 4 of 11 people on this letter at the time of this post.

  2. Then you asked for signatures after publishing.

  3. The letter amounts to a “Public Shaming” of those who disagree with you privately.

I agree with the message in the letter, but again I disagree with the way you go about doing things. I am not signing a public letter that coerces other Guardians to sign or be publicly shamed.

Bert, you have no idea how hard you stomp on other peoples toes.

Cheers,
Rick

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Rick,

If you want to get into the details of the Guaridans Story from the day one till the end let´s do this on a Cardano Effect Podcast in an open, transparent & professional discussion somewhere in January, to let things calm down until then.

But taking snapshots out of context and presenting them here is not really fair and manipulative.

There is absolutely no one who may stand out on a moral and ethical ground and criticize the others.

We could not have used my personal account as this is a message from 4 Guardians and it is clearly written “few members” in the Title. It also strongly relates to the second question in the topic description, which was one thing we couldn´t agree upon.

The message has been shared strictly on the Forum in a very closed circle and not communicated via any social media channels to the wider community for the purpose that anyone may join and we may unite around the statement beforehand.

Regarding the critisim of Twitter feeds, I am sorry to say but having managed from day one all the social media & communication channels and every single interaction on them, yes there were some mistakes made under the pressure and load.

I am not a fan to air our dirty laundry, and kindly ask everyone to stop with further attacks and attempts to discredit people. It was enough and there has to be an end to this.

None of us from the 4 Guardians who signed this statement will get into an endless thread of argument here, we can discuss on a podcast if that´s what you really want.

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Bert,
Leave The Cardano Effect podcast out of the discussion. Do not even go there. You have no idea how impossible you can be. You were not stepping on my toes, I was trying to tell you how you stepped on others.

Now you stomped on my toes. Nothing goes on The Cardano Effect until I get concurrence from @philpa Philippe , and I would not even ask Philippe to do this episode until there are many other further resolutions from many other parties, both official and unofficial parties. And we already had this idea on the table.

~Rick

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I’m with @rickymac, I agree with much of what @bercinho says there (not all) but disagree strongly with the way in which he has done this, which I see as typical of his style.

Some of the same qualities that made Bert a good “wartime” leader (though never elected) make him a bad peacetime leader – or even, for me, colleague: he’s obviously intelligent, energetic and determined. But he’s also an autocrat. Due to his style I could never work either under or alongside him, outside of such an emergency as the Parsons issue.

No, I’m not signing his statement.

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What is being asked is to have every Guardian on a live discussion to make it fair and transparent if you would like to go into the details of the Guardians Story.

Of course it doesn´t have to be the Cardano Effect, we can have any ad-hoc livestream.

Would you agree to such an open, transparent and democratic discussion?

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I will have a discussion just between us Guardians, in a live video teleconference, this Sunday, December 16th Monday to Friday time frames do not work well EU to USA time wise.

And we have been working on sorting this out already.

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Looks like you’re trying to take the credit for this idea, but it is obvious that you know we were already considering it. In fact I know who told you.

But yes, we should have a hangout, and let’s stop this now.

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We would like to let and trust the Community make their own adult judgement following a live discussion among the Guardians about the True Guardians Story.

They absolutely deserve this, and many people in the group deserve it, especially the ones who stood out with this post.

Only a transparent public discusson is a fair and worthy way to end the Guardians story.

People eventually have to take accuntability & responsibility for their actions.

Please if you agree let´s plan this for January and chill down during the Christmas holiday period.

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You got that wrong too. The hangout is about resolving our current differences. Personally, I think (a) agreeing the True Guardians Story will probably be impossible, and (b) even if we could agree on it, there’s probably no great public interest in it.

It’s always the Grandstanding with you, isn’t it? :grin:

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what a pathetic display of egos…lol

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I would say this more showcase future governance issues. We can mostly agree on more universal issues (change CF, basic human rights etc) but we need a layered approach for different cultures and groups in any governance model or risk paralyzing many potentially good actions.

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as far as i see bercinho sounds most reasonable… why are you attacking him? why don’t you want to confront each other in public debate?

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This doesn’t concern the public, it’s about what the Guardians want to do in future, when we’ve decided that we’ll present it to the public (or present them, as two separate groups, almost certainly). Some time ago I brought internal Guardians disputes into this forum, I now regret that, it was an emotional reaction that did not help the situation.

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In case you are interested in a view from outside the guardians:

I highly appreciated your work in the Parsons case but I’m not at all interested in internal fights of the group. There seems to be the necessity that you discuss your different viewpoints. Please don’t do that in the public, it seems to have become to personal in the meantime.

A story comes to my mind which I was told as a young scientist: At a conference the brightest brains sat together to talk about where to go on in the future. When the result was presented, it was quite short: “n<=1” which means: “The number of primadonnas in one working group should be less or equal 1”.

Therefore I propose that every group which comes together out of the community should do this only for a certain purpose and should step back afterwards again. The group account should be used ONLY if all of the group members agree.

Best Regards,
Martin

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because we had an agreement to meet at Edinburgh, talk to each other, and then re-evaluate the democratic decision we already had reached. internaly!
But now we see Bertalan and a minority obviously doesn’t wait for a consent opinion and (again) try to lead and drive instead of being a democratic part of the whole group.

Instead of awaiting the result of all members reconsideration, Bertalan decided to go public and let it “sound most reasonable”. But in reality, it is an attempt to let it look like they are the only ones continuing to act as guardians (for example by announcing the interview) because they want to win the public opinion and the right to use the guardian “brand” for their ideas.
His statement - by (miss)using the guardians account without any democratic legitimation - that the commercial idea was proposed after Parsons resignation is not correct. In fact, he created a poll a couple of days before Parsons resigned. (out of nothing and without any others involvement)

Just to give you a slight insight into what happened after his own proposal wasn’t able to reach a majority and the alternative proposal was accepted as the way to go: (this is what he mentioned as the 1000 messages)

The majority winning proposal was

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As a reaction Bertalan (alone) attempted to add 10 interpretations to the majority decision that should be used as an explanation for a public statement. Things like
“1) No one can use the Guardians brand or claim he was a Guardian, tell the story what the Guardians did or mention who were the Guardians in any private, public or commercial context. The brand is strictly frozen and not accessible or may not be communicated to anyone in any situation on any platform.”
As this and 9 other interpretations didn’t express the majority voters opinion but much more expressed Bertalans attempt to let it look like an “all-or-nothing” decision, these additional explanations weren’t accepted. Why? Refusing the idea to get paid for guardian activities does not strictly implicit that there wouldn’t be any Guardian activities and values anymore.

So the next attempt of the “so reasonable sounding” Bertalan was to propose the voting should be redone, by using a weighted voting system. He should have a weight of 10. All the rest only a weight of 5-4-3-2 or 1. Details don’t matter. I simply still have no words for this.

In his last message Bertalan expressed “I won’t waste my time in this trash talk any longer” and “You can always PM me and send any proposal we should discuss on Hangouts and then vote on, but don’t expect me to follow up the TG group conversation here”
That’s why he’s still a guardian who was part of the “liberate foundation” project but not more a member of the TG group and it’s discussion.

After leaving the group he, the legal owner of the domain guardiansofcardano,com removed the DNS-delegation in order to bring the existing website offline. He also reseted all passwords for email and social accounts some time ago and didn’t share them with anyone else.

We (the majority group) restored the website under www.guardiansofcardano.org and await the permission or prohibition of the Owl designer to use it because we believe that .org and the owl most closely reflect the Guardians real values and we do not want to be commercially or financially dependent. Due to the gentleman agreement we had, to meet and find a consent solution during plutusfest, (up to now) we hadn’t communicated anything of this.

As today a group of 4 out of 11 Guardians (two of them joined the project only after the first letter) released the above communication without involving the whole group in advance, it’s a bad feeling now, but even after some hours of deep breaths, it seems necessary to let the community know about. tbh it’s a pain to recognise that neither democratic processes nor gentleman agreements allowed a good handling and solution for the whole story.

Real Guardians observe and point out problems. Therefore an owl and not a bull or lion
We have 3 ICO-organisations who have to perform and deliver. And there are certainly many very good and less good third-party projects that would like to become active in this ecosystem. Nobody forbids someone to start a bull, lion or frog project to achieve his goals and wishes. And this is also justified because everyone needs a solid income somewhere. In my opinion, however, one is active in a special way for the community and should be able to separate this very strictly.

All this said, I personally hope that the values for the big picture with which we originally started our campaign has been correctly recognized in the community and can continue to be valid. In the best case, it’s motivation for other community members to contribute once it looks necessary.
If there is now the desire with financial support and income to make an even more intensive activity possible to create and deliver things ourselves, it should please be so. But not by occupying and using a GaurdiansOfCardano account, and disobey a majority.

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Thanks rossi for an outsider view appriciate that.

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As I mentioned before, taking small pieces, entirely out of context and just showing this carefully selected snapshot of an event / discussion with a one sided interpretation is terribly wrong and highly manipulative.

For instance here is a snapshot of a poll related to yours:

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Does this cover the entire story? No! Shall I write a manipulative lie around it? I won’t. This is not a way we should fool the Community please.

I suggest let everyone discuss on a live public webcast and let the Community hear the real story from the beginning till the end from all the different perspectives and let them make their own judgement. We have highly educated, intelligent and adult people in the Community who we may trust with this.

I don’t want to go down the dirty road of throwing in chat screenshots (apart from that indicate example above) into the thread. I would have a lot on your politically incorrect methods Markus Gufler, but do we really want to fight like infantile children in the playground?

This situation makes me terribly sad and disappointed as we agreed if we can’t solve our differences at Plutusfest then we may go public about the split. This is exactly what four of the Guardians did and offered a very fair settlement / statement.

Regarding our numbers as “minority”, please relate to the second question in the topic description we couldn’t agree upon. One reason of the split.

I kindly ask you to stop it here and move on to a live webcast. The comments on this thread doesn’t serve justice, neither is it constructive, it’s purely used to attack others integrity.

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You know it’s a ridiculous suggestion but you want us to reject it so you can accuse us of trying to hide things. We have already agreed it should be a private hangout, not a public podcast. Typical dishonest manipulation. You drag the name of the Guardians in the mud, while claiming the moral high ground. It’s quite despicable, really. The only good thing is that people will know not to work with you in future.

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