[tz] Replying to government officials

[Brian Inglis]

On 2021-02-11 22:58, John Hawkinson wrote:
> I wonder if we should have some kind of understanding of when it is 
> appropriate for the general members of the list to respond to emails from 
> government officials, versus deferring that task to the project
> coordinators.

Agreed and implied for info.
Politics should either be banned to all (miltered), possibly a policy for all to 
just totally ignore and not respond, or open to all.

> (I have thought this was a concern for some time, but multiple recent 
> messages have amplified it in my mind.)

These posters are apparently emailing from org email addresses, most recently 
and last Oct from the government computer center: we have no way of knowing if 
they are officials, or the communications are official, or interns trolling for 
brownie points, especially when there is no official attribution in a signature 
block, almost always included in relevant communications from officials.

In the recent cases we attempted to educate them previously, and they just 
repeat their political demands: we need to repeat our responses stating our 
apolitical stance and the irrelevance of all politics in this project, other 
than that of recording changes to standard and alternate time zones legally 
mandated by politicians and bureaucrats in control of territory.
How the data is identified and encoded is in the sole control of the project 
administrators.
The rest is us just blowing smoke to support the independence of the 
administrators, or advocate for stability or change as the case may be.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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