cruel to be kind

Oliver Starr writes down, eloquently as usual, his side of the blognation story. As several people have tried to contact me since, I did post a comment on his blog, but obviously it ran into moderation. Well, this is what you do have your own blog for. Please note, that in order to understand my comment, you need to read Oliver’s posting first.

It saddens me to see this posting, but it is the correct, logical next step to take.

Up until now I have stayed 150% loyal to the project, both to outsiders and people from within, defending Sam on many occasions. But there is a limit to everything. (As you are pointing towards me for having ‘attacked’ Sam, I’d like to state that that was an internal message and more the last drop on a series of events, making me explode.)

As most of the others, I have invested a lot of time, effort, money and trust in Sam as well, offered help on many occasions, with similar results to yours, putting also my credibility on the line for defending him.

This course is not perfect angel Nicole on the one side and devil Sam on the other, there are nuances as with every story. But the sum of all things looks pretty dark in this case.

For the moment I am waiting for payment on a snail mail invoice as well as answers to some questions printed on paper – as online communication proves to be difficult. I set a deadline of Paris, and stated that I am on hiatus until payment.

I therefore thank you writing this, as your write-up is much better than anything I would ever produce.

True, this is about money and promises, but as you pointed out correctly, much more about credibility and integrity. One of the reasons I stayed faithful until now is that I would not believe Sam would take the chance of something like your posting here to happen plus we do have documentation plus contracts. Guess I was wrong.

The amount of people involved has the advantage of near complete documentation on all accounts, even though we come from different areas of the world. I expect Sam to pay his bills.

That set aside, I still am a very strong believer in the idea behind blognation. Leveraging non English information to the English speaking world, learning from all sides, the connections both personal and business which can be launched – that is an idea I still believe and I think most of us have from the beginning.

This has been a tough decicion, not if I dare to publish it or not, but if there is a reason to comment this public. The conversations I had today both in email and phone calls tipped the balance towards publishing; to state my side and be done with it for now.

I sent the invoice at the end of October, calculating in the delivery time to England plus reaction time and gave a deadline for Leweb. The reason I gave Sam this deadline is simple: Going to Leweb means either putting on the company hat or not. Don’t get me wrong – there was no intention from my side to run around and make a fuzz about it, we are talking answering direct questions here.

But I already started selecting the bits and pieces for something similar to Oliver’s post, just much less eloquent and well written. This incident paints the road to go – not so much through what Oliver wrote, but Sam’s reaction to it.

Although I believed 100% that my hiatus would just be a temporary thing until payment would be in and then I would go back and continue working, it becomes now clear to me that this is unlikely to happen. I assume that I will find my postings deleted as are Oliver’s soon, but of course I do have backups as well as documentation of posted items. Just because I am trusting other people does not mean that I am stupid.

A note: I am not happy about how events have turned (or to be more precise not turned), but if we meet next week in Paris please note that I do not intend to talk about this much further.

There are much more interesting things to talk about than this.

To bring put stuff in perspective: Wanna know what I am most annoyed about at the moment? That my flight to Paris leaves like 7 in the morning as there is intended to be a meeting of the editors on the 10th, meaning I will have to get up like 3:30 in the morning …

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