Very good points you bring to the table, @kingi!
No, the HTC did not start outside the sphere of CHT. I guess there were some real plans to build the community under the direction of the core team. But these were blown away after the Cambridge Analytica scandal led to a flood of attention of press and high-profile officials on the CHT. Priorities changed as a result and the community was left to its own devices.
Note, that I am a ‘beast of the community’, in that I am just a volunteering member, who also suffered from the same lack of transparency you mention. I have to go from the occasional communications I’ve had with core team members and other volunteers (like Mamie and Max). I adopted the wait-and-see position at first, like many others, waiting for plans to be unrolled. Which didn’t happen.
I have tried many things to get the proper, well-deserved attention of founders (early on this started with asking for more involvement in open letter).
Later I found out that the core team is truly overwhelmed in work, very small, and underfunded. You can read more on that in We need the CHT core team to actively get involved. Now! and also in our Campaigners group chat, in this comment.
Could the communications to the community have been handled better? Yes, IMHO, they certainly could. But the things went the way they went. We need to look to the future now.
The repositioning of HTC as a separate entity was my initiative entirely, because this community was in flux and slowly going into complete inactivity. We needed to come out of the waiting mode, and have freedom to act, unroll our own initiatives. And that is where we are now.
HTC is an independent entity, working with transparency and in the public domain. The CHT is not that transparent, and they cannot be, because of the nature of cooperations and consultancy they do at e.g. high government levels. How transparent they are to the outside world is up to them; their decision.
How can we cooperate effectively? Well, we have the same mission, and the same strategic pillars. We will place different emphasis on them, because of our grassroots nature and a different primary audience. In the Campaigners team we are currently discussing, brainstorimg and elaborating on this. See this group topic.
If you want to be in the loop you can become a campaigner yourself, or regularly check the messages we create in the Campaigners group inbox.
As part of the community activities we will determine what help we would like to receive from the CHT, and place well-formulated requests on a case-by-case basis, so they do not strain their workload too much and thus are most likely to be honored.
I realize, thanks to you Kingi, that the wording in the forum header statement “we will eventually merge in our quest” is wrongly chosen, as it implies the merger of the 2 entities to one. This cannot happen unless the CHT adopts the same transparency and public domain / open-source approach. I’ll think about a different formulation. Full alignment is a better term in this regard.
Hope this makes things clearer to you, but don’t hesitate to discuss further.