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Acting in the name or on behalf of ADISI? LOL!

ADISI stands for Associazione di Diritto Informatico della Svizzera Italiana, i.e. Cyberlaw Association of Italian-language Switzerland. In the last-and-umpteenth-in-6-months version of its home page, a "Nota della redazione"(editors' note) says:

Avvertenza

Dall'ottobre 2006 la signora Claude Almansi non è più autorizzata ad agire in nome e per conto della nostra Associazione.

which means: "Warning: As from October 2006, Ms Claude Almansi isn't authorized to act in the name and on behalf of our Association".

Don't worry, folks: nothing is further from my mind. And here is why:

Flashback

July 2002 - October 13, 2006

For four years, i.e. since the association was founded in July 2002 until October 13, 2006, I was in charge of information and training there. Thismeans that I:

• wrote, translated, or got permission from others to publish, texts that made the greatest part of the content of ADISI's main site
• opened ADISI's blog and wrote most of its content
• did the content editing for all of ADISI's Tam Tam broadcast, i.e. I contacted guests, discussed with them the themes to be covered, interviewed them, wrote the dubbing script when the interviews were in languages other than Italian, wrote the broadcast descriptions
• above all, represented ADISI in international and Swiss projects and associations dealing with Information society, which both enabled ADISI to fullfil its mission of information about the evolution of Information society, because of what I learned in this activity, and gave ADISI visibility.

This was publicly acknowledged on several occasions by Giovanni Rengucci,ADISI's chairman. But towards Summer 2006, things started going sour. He wanted to make money from the accumulated content ("far rendere quel popò diroba che abbiamo"), and wouldn't listen when I tried to explain that thiscontent's only value was in documenting a capacity to keep up with the rapid evolution of information society and its tools.

October 14, 2006

On October 14, 2006, during a phone conversation with Giovanni Rengucci, I said I disliked the arrogant tone of an e-mail sent by a collaborator who, back then, was particularly in favor with him, because of his "business approach". Giovanni Rengucci yelled "Basta, chiudo ADISI" ("Enough, I'm shutting down ADISI") and put the phone down. And he sent an e-mail to thiseffect to the whole team. A couple of hours later, he sent a second e-mail, entitled "correzione - adisi resta ma si ristruttura" ("correction, adisi remains but renews its structure"), in which he announced:

dopo una breve consultazione con il Comitatao di Fondazione diADISI, si decide che: ADISI resta registrata a RC, ma si ristruttura.Vengono interrotte le collaborazioni con effetto immediato con :A. Veronese (...) C.Almansi (...)

Translation: "After a brief consultation with ADISI's Founding Committee, it has been decided that ADISI remains registered on the Trade Register, but gets restructured. Collaborations with A. Veronese [who had been veryefficiently collaborating with me in research and editing since May 2006 - CA](...) C. Almansi are interrupted with immediate effect."

October 15, 2006 - January 2007

If Giovanni Rengucci had apologised to both Anna Veronese and me in another e-mail to the whole team, maybe we might have considered going back. After all, everyone can lose his/her temper at times. But he didn't (quite the contrary in Anna Veronese's case). So I wrote to all the associations and projects where I had represented ADISI to let them know that I wasn't representing it anymore, and handed ADISI the administration of all the web tools I had created for it.

But I asked one thing from ADISI: that in the dynamic version of the site, the date of first publication, and my name be added to the texts I had previouslyaccepted to publish anonymously, as the attribution was implicit because ofthe description of my role on the site. This was accepted.

On November 30, 2006, the dynamic version of ADISI's site went online. There was an attempt at attribution, but ADISI's IT team tried to do it through the template of whole directories, so the result was a mess: I was described asthe author of texts written by others and viceversa, first publication dates were added in a fully haphazard way.

Meanwhile, Giovanni Rengucci had asked me if I would suggest projects in which I could collaborate - on a paid basis - with ADISI. Basically, I wasn'tinterested, but considering the above mess, towards the end of December I wrote him that I would be ready to spend an afternoon explaining to the ADISI team how to find the authors and 1st publication dates of the texts. He didn't answer.

January 2007 - May 19, 2007

Early in January 2007, ADISI's site went off-line, replaced by a page announcing that it was being revised due to problems pointed to in users'feedbacks.

Towards the beginning of April (?), the dynamic version of the site started going back online, still with a message about the site being revised at first, then with a message giving a link to the former static version, which was back online too.

On May 19, 2007, I discovered that 26 texts (1/3 of them dating back to 2002, some of which I had written as Diavolo Incarnato for the"Swiss Italian Weblaw Project" before ADISI was actually founded ) - had been added in the Divulgazione section.

• Instead of adding my name in the pages written by me when it was missing, ADISI had removed it from the ones where it had been present, and all these new pages bore "Scritto da Redazione ADISI" on top
• All occurences of "I" had been replaced by "ADISI", "noi di ADISI" (we of ADISI) or "gli esperti di ADISI" (ADISI's experts). Even in texts by others: so in the translation of an excerpt of a talk by Cory Doctorow, where he recalled a conversation with MPAA's representative at a WIPO meeting on DRM, the new version said ADISI had had this conversation (see Cory Doctorow's content used by ADISI). Even in texts that pre-dated ADISI's foundation, as in a review of a seminar entitled "Copyleft o Copyright?", which took place on May 17, 2002, where the text now said that it was ADISI's experts, not I who had attended the seminar.
• Understanding was hampered by the excessive use of subordination, of imperfect subjonctive, and by a host of misplaced commas
• Several factual mistakes had been introduced in each text, at times inverting the meaning.

So I saved the revised pages as evidence and consulted a lawyer. On his advice, I wrote to ADISI on May 22,asking them to either replace the revised pages with the former versions, adding the 1st date of publication, author's name (and if relevant,translator's) name - or to simply remove these revised pages from the internet, within May 30, 2007.

Contenzioso / litigation?

On May 24, 2007, ADISI chose to remove once more almost all its site content and to replace it with the present home page, with 2 exceptions:

• http://www.adisi.ch/accessibilita, i.e. Luca Mascaro's page about the project Accessibilità del Web in Ticino, only hosted by ADISI.
• the content of the http://www.adisi.ch/tamtam/ directory, because otherwise the external link to the feedburner Tam Tam podcast Podcast di TAM TAM top right of the new home page would not work.
  

Now the Partners and the Statutes pages, and a PDF flyer about their internet point, are back online (at least that's how it is today, May 25, 2007, 21:45).

Apart from the fully unnecessary warning about my not being authorized to act in the name or on behalf of ADISI mentioned above, the Nota della redazione / Editors' note also says:

Informiamo la gentile utenza che ,a causa di un contenzioso sull'attribuzione dei testi in riedizione, attualmente questi sono forniti gratuitamente solo su esplicita richiesta.

which means: "We inform our kind users that, due to a litigation about the attribution of texts that are being republished, these texts are provided for free only on explicit request"

Maybe other authors complained about these "revisions" - I don't know. In my case, though, there is no contenzioso / litigation. I did consult a lawyer, because that's what you do when people mess up your work and republish it under their name without consulting you, but otherwise, all I did was to ask ADISI's committee to abide by the Swiss copyright law and by the terms of the Creative Commons license under which their site was when I published my writings there.

Surely, not an exagerate request from an association

• whose name means "Cyberlaw association of Italian-language Switzerland,
• which offers "Moduli formativi di Diritto Informatico" ("Training modulesin Computer Law" - present home page), and
• prides itself of teaching people "cosa è lecito e cosa non è lecito fare con e nella 'grande rete'" (what you can and can't legally do with and whithin the "big Web" - Si inaugura il primo Internet Point di ADISI, ADISI's blog, February 28, 2007)?

ADISI's external links under Menu

ADISI's present home page has 3 external links under Menu, top-right: Il nostro Blog, Aggregatore and Podcast di TAM TAM.

Blog: since Giovanni Rengucci decided to sever collaboration with Anna Veronese and me on October 14, 2006, there have been new posts:.

1. MELANI - UPDATE, November 16th, 2006 (08:49 am), from a MELANI alert I forwarded to Giovanni Rengucci, suggesting he subscribes to these alerts directly.
2. Serata Internet e Ragazzi, November 21st, 2006 (12:56 pm)
3. Nuova versione del sito ufficiale di ADISI, November 30th, 2006 (03:54 pm)
4. Accessibilità del Web in Ticino, November 30th, 2006 (04:05 pm), announcing publicly a first meeting of the Ticino Accessibility project, against the decision of the project's initiators, that only the representatives of the disabled people's associations should be invited.
5. Resoconto incontro sul tema "Accessibilita' del Web in Ticino", December 7th, 2006 (04:05 pm): copypaste of my summary of that meeting for the project initiators: hence the English version, because it was meant to be sent to an English mailing list too. Giovanni Rengucci had brought along a collaborator of ADISI who, he said, would write the minutes of the meeting, but these minutes never saw light, so my summary is the only written trace of this first meeting.
6. Si inaugura il primo Internet Point di ADISI, February 28th, 2007 (07:34 pm),

To sum up: 6 posts in 7 months, of which 4 genuinely ADISI's, of which 1 made contrary to a collective decision. Nothing about the site going off and online after No. 30, 2006.

Aggregator
This aggregator was started, organized and updated by me. I handed its administration to ADISI in the days following Giovanni Rengucci's decision to sever collaboration with me. No changes were made since: they even kept the link to the feed of my Odds And Not Ends blog on the Digital Divide Network in the "Intorno ad ADISI" folder - which is not very coherent with their warning

Podcast
As said above, in order to make the feedburner podcast work, ADISI kept online the Tam Tam directory of the pre- Nov. 30, 2006 version of the site, http://www.adisi.ch/tamtam, which contains the mp3 files are hosted. It looks a bit funny as http://www.adisi.ch/tamtam says:

Il programma è sospeso per un breve periodo ADISI, oltre a ristrutturarsi, sta preparando la versione della 4.a edizione!!! A presto.

I.e.

The program is interrupted for a short while. ADISI, apaprt from restructuring itself, is preparing the 4th series!!! See you soon.

and has been saying this since October 15, 2006.

Apologies

Finally, I want to extend my sincere apologies to all of you who, in the past, granted me permission to publish their work on ADISI's site, and keep seeing it disappearing and reappearing, transmogrified or not, with the same or with different URLs. I can't help it: all I can say is that I sincerely believed that ADISI's team, and its chairman in particular, believed in the commitments they professed. Naiveté is no excuse, though.

The last working version of ADISI's site saved in the Internet Archive is the Feb 05, 2006 one. Better use that one for your bookmarks / links. I also cretated a kind of mirror in my wiki linking to existing Internet Archive pages, and patching the gaps with other ones on my hard disk. In theory, this mirror (and the whole wiki) should be easily searchable, but the search engine at times skips a beat. If you want help finding a page, please write to me at claude.almansi_at_gmail.com.

In italiano

Versione italiana (lievemente diversa nella forma) di questo post.

Picture credit

The picture is taken from Keeping the Pulpit Honest by Bishop Emeritus Donald N. Bastian. This article, republished on freemethodistchurch.org, first appeared in Christian Week (Canada), Jan. 20, 2005.

Technorati tag

adisi, associazione di diritto informatico della svizzera italiana, diritto informatico, rengucci, giovanni rengucci, cyberlaw, author's rights, Veronese, Anna Veronese.