Comment by emarkz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emarkz | Hacker News Reader

From the trenches of those Dojo Members seeking to regain control of our nonprofit... In my opinion:

The last executive director was brought in to fund raise via grants and sponsorships, and failed miserably, instead raising that $400K ($300K + $100K stolen), off the backs of it's members by doubling membership fees, and converting a quarter of the Dojo into a private VC incubator.

He also wasn't an entrepreneur or a hacker, but more the slick politician type, and killed the Dojo culture, driving away most of the best volunteers and people, by ending member voting, spying on members, and banning anyone he didn't like (at the slightest of excuses at times). This and the previous board ignored members complaints, until he let the corporate status lapse, and there was no corporate veil for the board to hide themselves behind.

And now we are at war with this board, trying to gain back control that existed as a gentleman's agreement between the founders and the members, but wasn't written in the bylaws because clueless lawyers were consulted.

Also - the $30K number is a made up number by the most recent board member, who bought his board position, and is the most responsible for harassing the recently resigned whistleblower member. There are few to no records kept of the purposes of expenditures. If all unaccountable expenditures were added up - it'd be double or triple that $30K number...

Lesson: Bake your culture into your DNA, or when the good King era ends, the bad king era will begin...

Kind of blows my mind that in Silicon Valley - the Valley of the Disruptors, Hackers build an organization utilizing 100 year old feudal corporate antique autocratic bylaws.

Don't tell me we can't smart phone app, wisdom of the crowd, self govern our own hacker asses.

Having been a member the Dojo until recently, and a fan since they opened, I disagree with a lot of your characterization, and am going to give Ghufran the benefit of the doubt. However, this is important:

>Lesson: Bake your culture into your DNA, or when the good King era ends, the bad king era will begin...

What I see at the fundamental problem with the Dojo is that, baked into its DNA, is the belief that legal compliance and good management are not really important. The Dojo had to leave its old space because they were so in violation of Mountain View building codes that it would have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring them into compliance. A problem that could have been easily avoided if they had bothered to talk to the City about code compliance before moving into that space.

And now they've demonstrated a lack of interest in basic financial governance.

I wish Ghufran, and the new board, the best in terms of turning the Dojo around. But I worry that the disinterest in compliance and management is so integral to Dojo culture that it will have another (completely avoidable) crisis in 3-4 years.

I'm guessing I'm the target of this anonymous attack "the $30K number is a made up number by the most recent board member, who bought his board position, and is the most responsible for harassing the recently resigned whistleblower member." Since that makes me pretty easily identifiable, I therefore feel I should respond.

"bought his board position" - First of all, isn't donating money to a non-profit a good thing? Are you saying that you're proud of the fact that you don't donate any time or money to the organization? I'm a full-time emergency physician, and have lot's of my own tech projects I want to spend time on, what possible reason would there be take on what is currently almost a full-time job fixing the mess?

In fact, Sudarshana ('Sophie') Bannerjee is the reason I got involved, she asked me to to get involved as an 'independent observer', and she is the one who nominated me to be treasurer in her email of March 2nd 2016: "Appoint a new treasurer immediately. I would recommend Ghufran, who along with his wife just donated $10K to the Dojo. He is passionate about the Dojo, and volunteered over 20 hours in the last two days. "

https://gist.github.com/ghufransyed/db9c923b49efe57ef1edf0f0...

"made up number" - This is the message I posted on slack, while trying to provide members as much information as we reasonably could. HN readers can decide whether this is an accurate characterization: https://gist.github.com/ghufransyed/393de8dc0a06782cdebb0099...

If you look at the comments at the bottom of the original mv voice article, it looks like quite a few people have posted further information that was mysteriously missed by the author and many of the sources, who IMO quite clearly have an axe to grind. The fact that Sophie was unemployed during this entire time, wanted the $55k / year executive director fired so she could take his job, and left the board as soon as she found other employment is pretty well documented...and still doesn't take away from the fact that she did the Dojo a huge service by uncovering the financial issues.

I think there was a shocking lack of financial controls by the previous treasurer and board members, but those people are no longer on the board. The question is whether the way to fix it is by shouting a lot like the poster of this message, or actually do the work.

If we're talking about culture, Hacker Dojo never claimed to be a 'democracy', but a 'do-ocracy' - you want something done, you go do it. The current board are all people who are putting lots of their own time to try and fix the Dojo, along with full-time work elsewhere. We are not 'at war' with anyone, but you claim to be 'at war' with us: well, we don't plan to show up for your war, we'll just focus on actually putting in place the financial controls and other issues that will make the Dojo stronger. We'd love it if you would do the same. [typo edited]

Looks more like a failure of the people running HD to get their shit together, not a failure of laws.

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