May be you did not realized that I wrote more squeak books than pharo ones. So what is your problems? I do not have any and if you feel better because you have nice words against me then I'm at least useful for something. Stef On Sep 7, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

Ah, a good old-fashioned "Stefane Ducasse is pissed" post. Hadn't had one in a while. You really need to *read* the Wikipedia article on conflict of interest before sending one of your hate mails. Conflicts of interest happen everywhere, to me, to you, to many people. The important part is to recognize them and to act accordingly. Here is the second paragraph from Wikipedia:

"A conflict of interest can only exist if a person or testimony is entrusted with some impartiality; a modicum of trust is necessary to create it. The presence of a conflict of interest is independent from the execution of impropriety. Therefore, a conflict of interest can be discovered and voluntarily defused before any corruption occurs."

It should be obvious that a person who is both organizer of a contest as well as participant is in a potential conflict of interest situation. If you recognize the conflict you can deal with it. It can be as simple as being explicit that you expect others to spread the invitation, for example by including "please redistribute this announcement as widely as possible in the Smalltalk community".

Having said all that my original point still stands, namely that your invitation of the Pharo community specifically to vote is a clear expression of an unrecognized and unmitigated conflict of interest. You need to learn to recognize such situations and to act less emotionally. Conflicts of interests happen to all of us, they can be dealt with calmly and reasonably. And I expect the president of ESUG to be able to act in such a way.

Cheers, - Andreas

On 9/7/2010 12:51 AM, stephane ducasse wrote:

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Dear all,

for some more or less conceivable reason, this hasn't made it to the Squeak list yet.

like what? I'm curious to learn.

Like "conflict of interest"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest)

"A conflict of interest (COI) occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other."

Given that you're both the author of half of the books as well as president of ESUG (the organizer) it's pretty clear that you're stuck in a conflict of interest situation. Inviting the Pharo community to participate and not others only shows how deep the conflict of interest goes - the president of ESUG shouldn't favor individual communities, should he?

Thanks andreas for this welcome mail. of course that esug does not something is not the wish of everybody. And people will vote not us. And this is not my fault if I spent my nights trying to get better a smalltalk world. Everybody can write books: a book is a word + a word + a word a lot of time, even you can do it. Now yesterday I had a difficult day - five visitors (one chilean, one argentinian, noury, luc, mariano and a team of 9 people to synchronize). You see I even forgot to send the mail to the seaside mailing-list.

Thanks again for such encouragement.

Stef (talking small).