The temperature in my office is still around 85 degrees today and now there's a leak in my lab across the hall! It's hard not to feel jealous when I go to visit someplace like MIT. But that's neither here nor there. In any event, it's another day working at home, when I'm not driving back and forth to see if the water is leaking into the printer.
This morning there was a report on CNN that provided a really cynical soundbite from Bush's visit to Africa. I can't remember whether it was Bush himself or a reporter who said something like "We realize now it's in our best interests to address the problems in Africa". In other words, "now that it's clear you might all become terrorists, we need to make conditions there enough better that committing suicide to kill a few of us doesn't seem like such a bargain."
I've been thinking more about Humphrey Tonkin's speech. He thought that the Esperanto movement needs to become like other successful public advocacy campaigns that, as soon as someone gives money, are constantly barraging them with more requests seeking money. I'm not sure I agree. At least I don't want to receive more requests for money. He also thought they need to use new technologies more effectively.
It seems to me that he's missing the point. The point is that old organizations solve a problem that doesn't need to be solved anymore. It used to be that the primary role of an Esperanto organization was to help Esperantists find the Esperanto community and each other. The new technology means that all you need is a web browser and you can instantly find "the community", or at least many parts of it. With little more effort you can either find individuals or just broadcast information that will reach a lot of the community immediately. The libroservo? (Bah! Who reads books anymore anyway. :-) There are some on-line retailers already and if we could get Amazon to do it, we'd be even better off. (That's was Humphrey thought, anyway.) The bottom line is that we don't need UEA or ELNA anymore. At least, we don't need them to fulfill the mission they were doing before. Or maybe that was his point.
During the "How to Improve ELNA" session a number of people were not too sanguine about the increasing domination of technology mediated communication in the Esperanto movement. I think the answer was "Tough. Get over it."