[UK-TUG] Problems with UK-TUG funding for my TeX Hour activity

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

The message below from Jay was sent just to me. From its content it's clear
that he intended to send it to you. I've resent it to get it in the same
thread as the original post.

Jonathan


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jay Hammond <jay at jjnr.uk>
Date: Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: [UK-TUG] Problems with UK-TUG funding for [J.Fine] TeX Hour
activity
To: Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com>


Hi Members

from Jay Hammond

read on if you are interested in the Subject.  Otherwise please stop
here. £43 is not the issue.

Summary: lack of communication led to misunderstanding and hurt feelings.

This is a sad story, and I genuinely regret the outcome.   Again,
communications broke down, and feelings were hurt. Jonathan Fine has
not given you the full picture. I have a contribution to make.

For clarity, UKTUG declined to formally sponsor JF's hour of TeX.  There
may be some hurt feelings there.

What follows is about the grant for Zoom licences made but not paid to JF.

I reached out to Jonathan Fine when,  as far as I was concerned, he had
not responded to the committee's Zoom licence grant offer and asked him
to say whether he accepted the grant.  He did respond.  I'll leave him
to tell you his responses, if he cares to.  I could not take any action
except to clarify. I reached out to him again later, asking if he would
like to negotiate about the grant conditions. (or accept. reject)  He
didn't negotiate. Then,  about monthly over  the next 3 months, I asked
him to respond, to accept, reject or negotiate the grant conditions. In
later emails I suggested that the grant should be withdrawn if he failed
to meaningfully respond. I didn't get anything useful in response.
Maybe nothing, that is my recollection, but I may have had  emails that
I could not take action on.  My emails on the subject stopped there.

I now recall that there was a timing difficulty over receipts. There
must have been  other correspondence on the conditions with the Secretary.

I saw the Grant as an offer of money (with conditions) to promote
voluntary effort by JF. It was certainly not an employment contract. And
JF was at liberty to say (before he took up the grant)  that he did not
want to volunteer his time to advise UKTUG (e.g. on the suitability of
Zoom).

This wasn't a grant to a buddy to do their own thing. UKTUG needed to
know about the about the suitability of Zoom for its purposes,  (SGM's
for instance) and JF was offering to use his skills and  Zoom for his
TeX-hour. So we were happy to offer him a 3 month set of licences, if
he'd let us know  what he could about whether UKTUG would find Zoom
suitable.  For the protection of UKTUG's funds, and JF's good name,
UKTUG did need to have a report about Zoom.

I am not aware of any mechanism that blocked JF from re-applying.  Until
I saw the email below, I was not aware that JF felt it exists. This
hurtful aspect is a complete surprise to me. I regret that communication
between Jonathan Fine and the committee did not work better.

Jay Hammond

[quote of JF's email snipped]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/uktug-announce/attachments/20211028/54380f93/attachment-0001.html>