Please don't mix topics.

1.) Steem Alliance aka a community foundation is currently being developed AFAIK and is very, very new. @aggroed has also been working on a similar concept, so I hope they can merge in some way or another.

I currently don't have too much information on the planning, but I think most of it will be public.

2.) The "leaked slack server" you're talking about is simply a slack server designed for Steem Witnesses to have communication with each other. Over the last week, it became a bit chaotic as more and more people were invited (stakeholders & others).

Now everybody could suggest people to invite and that you didn't get invited would mean that nobody was suggesting you - even though you should have been there from the beginning as you're a witness. Sorry about that.

However, as you can see, it wasn't closed off - everybody had invite rights. And it was far from being a secret society. Again, there were preperations to present our topics to the public in a structured manner, but things span out of control very quickly.

On that server, there was the #steemit-stake channel created, simply to have an overview of Steemit Incs stake. I can understand how it can be interpreted as a threat, but at no time, there was a majority consensus in favour of doing anything in that area - there wasn't even a plan in place. At least not from my perspective.

Now as you can see, the "leak" of data without any context has done more harm than good. I can understand that transparency is important and a lot of people have worked on providing those, but I don't see a reason why everything should be publicly visible. Sometimes people are cautious of speaking the truth of what they really think in a public forum. Especially when things are interpreted the wrong way.

Fact is, Steem has a lot of different people. And many times there are discussions where people have different opinions. It was the same way on the slack server. Few were hugely in favour of the PR HF21 for their own reasons and many were against it. But that doesn't mean people should be banned from the slack just for having a different opinion.

And since they weren't banned, discussions arose. Which from the outside looked like people in that slack were staging a coup. Where in reality, people (especially longtime stakeholders & witnesses) were very frustrated about the direction Steemit Inc was taking. And when people are emotionally upset, I guess things are said which they don't really mean.

But anyway, I'm repeating myself.

I hope this made things clearer, but I personally had enough drama.