response 205 of 271:

Jul 8 21:47 UTC 2002

Thanks Dan.

My question now is:

What is the question that staff is divided on?  Can a staff member write a
relativley simple statement of that question for the rest of us.

response 213 of 271:

Jul 9 03:16 UTC 2002

Apparently Marcus isn't an adherent of the philosophy that anyone who's a
regular participant on Grex is a Grexer.

I appreciate the kind words about my support of M-Net, but I'm certainly not
the only person who's stepped in with large donations to keep it running in
the past.  Draven and jerryr have both given at least as much as I have, and
there are plenty of others as well.  M-Net has more broad-based support than
you might think, and it looks like we're currently running in the black.  Just
for the record.  (I was surprised, too.)

But we're talking about Grex here, and I guess the best way to increase
membership is to yell at people and rag on M-Net, so keep up the good work.

response 217 of 271:

Jul 9 03:37 UTC 2002

Jamie drags out whatever seems most likely to wind people up.  I'm not sure
what your point is supposed to be, or why this discussion is better than the
one about "the next Grex," but since you apparently do, I'll go with the flow.

response 219 of 271:

Jul 9 06:56 UTC 2002

All of us (except perhaps Jamie) have multiple affiliations and
loyalties.  Those loyalties change with age.  The challenge that faces
m-net, grex, and indeed any organization that hopes to have any sort of
persistance, is how to recruit new people.  For grex, that includes
members, users at large, staff, and other positions of responsibility.
The reason to be concerned about the shrinking membership is not just a
financial issue, indeed, perhaps that's the least of it.  The other
reason to be concerned is that historically at least, the membership
pool is the pool of interested people from which board and staff people
materialize.  A shrinking pool leaves us with fewer recruits, fewer
people who understand what it really takes to keep grex running, and if
it shrinks enough, it won't matter how effectively we're fulfilling our
501(c)3 mission, there won't be enough qualified people who care to keep
things going.

This is certainly an area where grex really differs from m-net.  I think
m-net inherited some bad traditions from the past.  Early on, the
tradition that staff & administrations were separate & disjoint got
started; eventually this lead to a situation in which an enormous
bureaucracy evolved to deal with staff at arm's length, as a consequence
of which many good technical people left or never got involved.  From
arbornet, m-net learned 2 further things: it started to forget how to
recruit and keep new users, and it learned to separate "m-net the bbs"
from "arbornet the corporation", which lead to a schism and mutual
distrust between the users paying for the system, and the board who was
evidently busy spending the money.

So, that's the mold we're trying to break here on grex.  We don't want a
"us vs. them" attitude for the board; we want our users, and our members
in particular, to think of the board as "some of us" who have been
entrusted with the responsibility to run the system for the good of all
of us.  We don't want staff & board to be disjoint.  We want staff to be
just more members, and we want some overlap between the board & staff,
because that gets rid of so much friction and opportunity for
misunderstands and mistakes to happen.  The most important group in
*all* of this is the membership, because they are the ones that are
ultimately responsible for the success of this system, for all our
users.  We also want our membership to be as representative of our users
at large as possible; not just "the old guard".  While we value our
traditions, they're no good if they don't truely reflect the interests
and beliefs of as many people as possible on grex.

response 221 of 271:

Jul 9 11:21 UTC 2002

[pulls on her waders, and wades in]
I don't want to see the Garage discussion here.  I do want to see a
summarized, plain-English version of the two sides' position so that I
can understand why we're not moving swiftly to next-Grex. 

If, as someone stated above, this is stalled because two "tribes", or
"sects" or whatever cannot reach agreement, then the better the rest of
us understand the basic problems, the sooner the non-technical Grexers
can add their input.  Perhaps there is a consensus outside of "staff"
that would move us ahead.

Consensus decision making is not meant to be used to bring an
organization to a standstill.  Staff, on Grex, is not meant to bring the
organization to a standstill.  It seems like it may be time for those of
us who normally "leave it to staff" to get involved.

In order to do that, I need to understand the basic dilemma.  Not the
vaporware possibilities of next year, but the off-the-shelf possibilities
of this year.  If the only question is "Should we wait for the
nearly-ready vaporware" versus "Should we adapt the nearly-ready
shelfware" then, by dragging their feet, the vaporware proponents are
making a decision by fiat.  

I want Grex members to make that decision, not a split staff.  Most of us
go "yeah, yeah" if staff reaches consensus.  This decision has been
flaring up for months.  Looks to me like it's time for members to
understand the problem, not just leave it to staff.