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Club Annotations

You may provide information on clubs as long as you provide your full name, address, phone (home and work), and paid-for e-mail address contact information. Only your name will be posted but the other information will be available to anyone having a legal need for it. Other's, of course, are free to post a differing opinion or impression of "facts." I reserve the right to edit, limit, post, remove, etc. any annotations as I see fit. The posting of any annotation does not mean it is a verified fact, the party that provided it is responsible for its correctness and content.

COLORADO, "The Inventors' Roundtable" (This material was updated 4/28/07 at the request of Deb Carney, Attorney for Rita Crompton.) (The above material has been further edited on 4/30/07 at the request of Raymond P. Burrasca, Esq. of New York, attorney for Rita Crompton and The Inventors' Roundtable.) If in any way my posting of the prior information was unjustly unfavorable to The Inventors' Roundtable, Warren Roh, The Idea Place LLC, Rita Crompton, or FLeCusa International I sincerely regret it. The material presented only my opinion and what I believed to be facts. Now I'm not so sure about the specifics of the facts. See below.



The following is an e-mail message directly from Rita Crompton and is placed here to present her statement as to what the facts are. She may very well be right, I don't know, but am in the process of continuing to collect facts. Anyone with additional facts is encouraged to send them.


----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 2:31 AM
Subject: Defamation

Dear Mr. White,

 

Out of courtesy for a fellow professional (which is more than you have granted either me or my colleague, Warren Roh), I thought I would share with you the true state of affairs as they exist, rather than the wildly inaccurate set of facts which you believe or, as we suspect, with which you were conveniently provided.

 

First of all, most professionals verify facts before going to print.  In our case, you clearly did not.  In addition, the changes you made to your website in response to the notice from one of my local Colorado attorneys clearly does not express your regret or any sort of apology on your behalf for your injurious and defamatory statements.  Your “corrected” website continues to contain defamatory implications  and substantial distortions.  Moreover, on your website,  you  state  that "the posting of any annotation does not mean it is a verified  fact,  the person that provided it is responsible for it's correctness and content."  Since you did not identify the person who  provided the annotation, I can only assume that you, and not a third party, is the author of, and responsible for, the defamation.  Secondly, even if it was derived from a third party, as I’m sure you know given the fact that you are in the printing business, printing defamation, by itself,  makes you responsible for its correctness and content, particularly were you have not verified the information and where you neither indicate the source nor print the defamatory statement as a "quote" from someone else and then identify the person who made the statement.

 

 

In this regard, it is important for you to be apprised of the actual facts here.  You are clearly under a misimpression about us, our organization and the value that RMIA provides.  In fact, not only are your facts inaccurate but the implications you create by disparaging us and The Inventors’ Roundtable while, in the same breath, praising RMIA, clearly disserve your readers and the inventing community in Colorado as a whole.

 

Here are the verifiable facts.

 

RMIA:

 

  • I was asked to be on the RMIA Board.  At first, I accepted, but then resigned after being told by people within the organization who I respect that it was a foolhardy move for me to serve on the RMIA board, given the prior history of the organization, the fact that there was no liability insurance for the board members in place and some concern about matters at the executive level being previously mishandled.
  • Before I was ever a member of RMIA, there was a mass resignation of Board Members.  I have been advised this was because of concerns about liability created for the organization by certain acts of one or more of the prior board members.
  • The overarching motivation within the RMIA (which I both observed while there and was repeatedly advised about from existing and former RMIA members ) was their singular focus on gaining new members (and, therefore, membership dues) rather than giving value to those who were already there and regularly attending their meetings.
  • Warren Roh was a very respected member of the board for many years.  He left along with several board members, two of whom were attorneys, in 2002.  Some of the board members who left at the same time served on the board  for nearly twenty years.  When Warren and I left the RMIA completely in 2006 it was to form a free inventors organization to serve the Colorado inventor community.  The fact that The Inventors' Roundtable is not membership based and is free to all ruffled a lot of feathers in the RMIA since that organization relies heavily on dues from its members.
  • I have been advised that despite their 501(c) status, there are not regular financial audits being conducted of the organization’s books.
  • RMIA previously had a relationship with the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce (perhaps the most admired and productive civic business organization in the Rocky Mountain Region) and lost that connection through the behavior of one or more of the RMIA officers/board members after the mass resignation of board members in 2002.
  • When I last checked, the RMIA members did not get to elect the officers.
  • There has been a persisttent lack of change at the Board level within RMIA.  The same people have been elected year-after-year. Recently, a new member of the Board, was forced to resign after one month as President because he wanted to make changes and insist that elections of officers be opened to consideration by the membership.
  • While I and other former members attended the meetings, meetings essentially served as a “classroom” for the Board members.  There was no open discussion.  The Board only allowed people to speak if they raised their hand and were called upon by the President.
  • The RMIA Board (an institution that you, in other places on your website, insist on as being in place in organizations which practice good corporate governance) consists of basically three service providers.  None of these providers render their services on a regular pro bono basis; all of them charge.
  • We have recently been advised that RMIA charges all non-member visitors to its meetings a fee of $25.00 just for attending.  In addition, we have further learned that they charge $60.00 for a service provider consult.
  • The basic, undeniable and entirely supportable fact is that The Inventors’ Roundtable owes it existence to the failures of RMIA; IRT was started because the RMIA grossly underserves the inventing community’s needs in Colorado.

.

 

Inventors’ Roundtable:

 

  • Endorsements:  Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce 

                              State of Colorado Small Business Development Centers

                              University of Colorado—Leeds Business School

                              Advancing Colorado

                                    CTEK

                                    Governor’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

 

  • The Inventors’ Roundtable has no membership fees and no fee for attending a meeting.
  • Our quarterly meetings are held at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce with a mini inventor showcase for inventors which is free.
  • Service providers DONATE their time to work with (not talk at) the inventors in a workshop environment every month in several locations.
  • Inventors can post their invention on the website for FREE for as long as they like.
  • Meetings are open discussions and the inventors talk more than the service providers.
  • There is no income from inventors for the regular, quarterly or annual meetings;  the one-day bootcamps we conduct charge $39.00 per person and provide a full lunch, a notebook with loads of useful (not promotional) materials, and both classroom instruction by knowledgeable instructors as well as the ability to network and have private conversations with both experienced and inexperienced inventors.
  • The Denver Metro Chamber and the Inventors’ Roundtable started the Inventors’ Focus Group Program.  The Inventors’ Roundtable was offered part of the fee from the focus group charge and declined it in order to maintain our status as an advocate for the inventing community without trying to profit off of it.
  • We are featured on NBC’s, local affiliate, KUSA Channel 9, as well as on other media outlets, on a regular basis.

.

The next time you decide to defame either an individual or an organization, I strongly suggest you verify your facts.

 

You will be hearing from my New York attorney shortly.

 

Sincerely,

 

Rita Crompton                                 

                                   

P. S.  Feel free to publish this in full on your website. 

 

 

F LeCusa International Logo

FLeCusa International

Rita Crompton, Managing Director

3140 S. Peoria St. #212

Aurora, CO 80014

cell - 303-910-8889

fax - 720-535-5220

e-mail: rcrompton@flecusa.com

http://www.flecusa.com

 

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