[I am sending this email to Carl, the fundraising and infra team leads, fundraising and video team mailing lists, and the DebConf chairs.] I presume you are all aware of this, but in case somebody is not, last year the chairs learned that in many archived DC14 videos, there were logos from a company that was not a sponsor of DC14 added at the end of the video, effectively having as much -if not even more- visibility than logos from companies that were prominent sponsors of the conference. The company in question happens to be Carl's company. This is inadmissible for a range of reasons: this was introduced into the videos without anybody knowing, it looks very bad if our sponsors were to find out, and made many people very angry for what they consider profiting from other people's volunteering. I agree with that sentiment. This is a breach of the trust put in Carl by the rest of the organising team and volunteers. We are all sponsors in a way, as we could be earning money instead of using our free time to make DebConf and Debian happen, but nobody else gets the chance to promote their personal projects with the resources of the conference. I know that Carl was asked to remove these logos, and nothing happened. I believe that the Fundraising and Infrastructure teams were asked to intervene, as it is in their best interest not to alienate sponsors or volunteers, but I think that was not conductive either. It has recently brought to my attention that the issue was still not solved, and I consider this situation unacceptable. So, with my DebConf Chair hat I kindly ask: 1. Carl to remove these logos from any public copies of the DebConf videos and issue a public apology. 2. The Infrastructure and Fundraising team to verify that this issue is solved within one week from now, that is, February the 16th. 3. The Infrastructure team to put offline any videos that are not compliant by that date, and not bring them back online until the logos are removed. Then recruit volunteers to do the work inside the infra/video team. Tincho. -- Martín Ferrari (Tincho)
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