By all means, be frustrated with me Mckarnin. I don't mind, and you should be because I'm not being fair. But understand the fundamental difference in approach I am talking about.
With legal matters it is often the case that full disclosure is not possible before a settlement has been reached. That is our current situation.
I've never heard of litigation involving SOME disclosure. Full disclosure is not what we are asking for. Any disclosure would be better than: "We need lawyers. Halp!"
We have made many, many changes already based on customer feedback via emails and based on feedback we received in this forum and on Daily Paul. If we were operating just like a company I would not have spent days answering hundreds of emails in this forum and at Daily Paul from people who often had not only not sponsored the blimp but who were adamantly against it. From the start we have made ourselves answerable to our customers in every way possible and encountered assaults on our honor, our characters and our professional abilities at every turn.
I'm glad you have made many changes. And I'm glad you put up with bullcrap from people like me.
But you missed my point. The structure is wrong. Listing us as "customers" is not going to jive with the movement, and its not going to get me to donate.
Technically thats what we are. Call us that if you want, but treat us as if we are a part of a democratic organization where we have a vote on the major issues.
So long as this is your project, we cannot help you. Thats not how the movement behaves. If instead you post the problems here, we will solve them for you.
At some point additional feedback is no longer expressing anything new but mere repetition of what we have heard repeatedly. 2/3rds of the emails we have received are re-iterations of the same 5 themes and we have answered those questions ad nauseam. People rarely bother to research the information we have already put out there before asking us questions.
There's nothing to research on many of the issues. Your team(not necessarily you) made a mistake. We were not consulted on what the banners should say, ever. We were not given the reasons why the banners said what they did(the for profit advertising model) until after they were decided.
What, did you think us incompetent? Are we incapable of working within legal constraints the way you have?
Instead of organizing and running the world, why not simply direct our fury and pretend you did it to the rest of the world?
Please understand that we are working hard and have been effective in achieving our goals, the largest of which was getting the blimp funded enough to get airborne.
I understand that fully, and I appreciate it.
But I made a post describing, quite reasonably, the mistakes that had been made, what needed to be changed for me to donate. A few people agreed with me and then it was ignored.
But the complaints are still there. And I am far from the only one. As long as the internal model you base the structure around is flawed, they will keep coming up, and we will keep being pissed.
The outside world needs to perceive you as an advertising agency that people can buy in to. Thats fine, we are more than capable of working within those constraints.
But WE need to perceive you as a part of the movement. Direct our fury and seek our consult, and the movement will carry through for you, I guarantee it.
When people on this forum speak of using volunteers and doing things for free it sounds quite lovely. In fact, when we have approached people asking for help 4 out of 5 "volunteers" can either offer no more than an hour or two a day and require constant feedback and supervision or they tell us to ask for help again when we can pay them. Many people have mentioned computer equipment that is so much better than what we have and they will hook us up with but when we have requested that they email or call us with further information there is rarely a response.
I understand that. Its not easy. But I think you went about it the wrong way. Try this:
Post the constraints, problems, and goals to us. We will solve them, with our bare hands if we have to. You have 5 people trying to solve hundreds of problems. We have thousands of minds with hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources. INVOLVE us and we WILL deliver.
Like I mentioned, the blimpographer could easily be nixed, hundreds of non-blimpographers have attempted(and gotten) videos of the blimp that outnumber the blimpographer's productions. The capability to track the blimp via GPS is already present on the web. The MOST you would have to do is feed live coordinates in text form to a page on the website.
One of the supporters, just like RonPaulGraphs or PaulCash.slact would grab that data and make it into something fantastic. And it would cost you $300 for the GPS device and another $200 to get it to the server every 5 minutes.
I swear to you, if you are perceived as a part of the movement, we will come through for you. We did before- You needed 120,000 dollars in roughly 2.5 days. And we did it, just like we brought fourth the tea party. Some of us did it begrudgingly because of how things were being decided.
I'm sure you have thousands of problems to solve on a daily basis. Post anything major, and we will deliver.
Don't, and you'll just have to hope we band together for operation bail out the blimp round 2.
