response 207 of 335:

Oct 26 21:05 UTC 2001

State the lie.  Make your case.

response 209 of 335:

Oct 26 21:09 UTC 2001

Court Jesters are allowed to say nasty things to everyone.  It is part of
their job.  Nobody takes this seriously.

response 211 of 335:

Oct 26 21:23 UTC 2001

OK...

here's a lesson for you...

CONCEDED... HE DID NOT SAY "KNOWS".  You said I had no experience.  I 
think this clearly implied that you were wishing to point out a lack of 
knowledge in order to discredit me.

There was no lie.

I did not quote you.  Beyond semantics, I still feel what I said was 
accurate.

response 215 of 335:

Oct 27 03:04 UTC 2001

I could see an arrangement where members of one system would get to be
non-voting members of the other for free.  So M-Net members could have
outbound net access from Grex.  If you wanted to vote on both systems,
you'd have to be a member on both systems.  I'm not sure I'm in favor
of the idea, but it'd be worth discussing.

response 217 of 335:

Oct 27 19:51 UTC 2001

I found a quote from Jamie in resp:178 which I think demonstrates
why he's completely unsuitable for election to the Grex board:
 
"* Feelings be damned.  This is business, not pleasure."
 
Someone who has more time than I have might try to explain to Jamie why
this is *such* a wrong attitude for a volunteer organization.

Unfortunately I think the attitude Jamie expresses carries a lot of 
weight on M-net.  It's reached the point where I start to cringe
whenever the terms "business" or "professional" start being thrown
around on M-net.  I think that attitude also explains why M-net has 
a volunteer shortage, and why so many former prominent M-netters
have ended up primarily as Grexers over the last ten years.

It's an attitude that Grex cannot afford, because Grex recognizes
that its volunteers are its most important resource.

response 219 of 335:

Oct 27 20:00 UTC 2001

Many new speakerphones are full duplex.  As a result, at the company I work
for, which practically runs on conference calls, I've never encountered the
problem gull reports.  Even the speakerphone on my desk at home is full
duplex, although I have a couple of older ones in other rooms that I never
use as speakerphones which aren't.  As I said before, I think not running into
people in the hallways and having casual conversations is a bad thing, but
for meetings it's a non-issue.  Since the Grex board doesn't tend to be in
the same place all at once not during meetings, that's a non-issue for Grex.

I've found the video conferencing stuff we have at work less useful for
conducting meetings.  Generally we're watching somebody on TV, having to
figure out which remote room to look at when somebody else is talking, and
so forth, and it's all quite distracting.  I've seen it used sort of
successfully for some presentations where something being demonstrated
visually was important, but even there there was only one direction in which
it was important for the video to go.

That said, the video conferencing stuff, complete with its remotely
controlable cameras that can be pointed out windows, is a neat toy.  People
eating at a Denny's in Tokyo late at night probably have no idea they're being
watched by bored geeks in San Francisco. ;)

My having mostly left Grex does have a lot to do with Grexers not being the
people I tend to run into in person anymore.  It no longer seems to me to be
a useful outlet for whatever social energy I have.  Still, Grex does have a
lot of users not in Ann Arbor, some of whom even spent time in person with
other Grexers in their area on a regular basis.  I'm sad to see that so many
of you in Ann Arbor seem to feel pretty strongly that those of us in other
places don't have much to contribute.  If the issue here is Jamie, who does
tend to be rather abrasive even when he's right, let the issue be Jamie, but
living somewhere other than Ann Arbor is a pretty poor issue to attack him
on.

There's also a point about the Grex bylaws that's been thrown around here that
should be cleared up.  There is no official rule that the board can't override
a membership vote.  The bylaws give board votes and membership votes, and in
theory the board and members could go back and forth reversing a decision over
and over again until the members get fed up and recall the board.  In
practice, the board recognizes that it works for the members, and that
reversing a membership vote would be pretty poor form, but that's driven by
either ethics or political survival, not by any official rule.  There is a
question of when membership votes are important, and when I was on the board
I tended to disagree pretty strongly on this with the rest of the board.  I
felt, and still feel, that the board is elected to study the issues, seek
input, and make somewhat difficult decisions.  Much of the rest of the board
felt that anything remotely difficult had to be voted on by the members, who
I felt hadn't committed to spending nearly as much time studying the issues.
In other words, I felt the membership votes were a cop-out by the board I was
part of to avoid doing its job.  Still, when a membership vote happened, the
board reversing it immediately would have seemed pretty arrogant.  The board
reversing such a decision a few years later, if circumstances had changed to
warrant such a reversal, seems to me a very different issue, one where the
board really ought to think again about whether it wants to do its job or pass
it off to the membership.  If the members strongly disagree, a membership vote
could then undo the board action.

It certainly does seem to me that Grex's decision making could be
"streamlined."  Often, when I was on the board, decisions that needed to be
made could get delayed for months because a single board member raised
completely irrational objections, and the other board members refused to act
without complete concensus.  Sometimes, as mentioned earlier, the board would
refuse to act at all, instead throwing issues at membership votes.  For the
last several months, the question or what to do about Grex's Internet
connectivity has been bogged down in petty arguments and ego contests, with
nothing actually being done.  I'm skeptical about whether one Jamie can fix
all of this, and don't even know if he would if given the chance, but
pretending the problem isn't there doesn't help anything.

response 225 of 335:

Oct 27 22:15 UTC 2001

I may not be remembering correctly, but I think cb311 is another 
satisfied M-net user.  :)   Grex is riddled with them...  most of them 
are a lot more polite than cb311, most of them are even more polite 
than me.

response 227 of 335:

Oct 27 22:50 UTC 2001

A serious philosophical query for Candidate Howard:
 
From the basic user perspective, M-net and Grex are about as alike
as two systems can be.  Both are owned and governed by member-users
who elect a board; both are Unix based systems, and the 
BBS and party software runs almost identically on each system.
Both are based in Michigan; historically, both were based in Ann Arbor.
Ten years ago, when Grex was started, the base of users was 
essentially the same -- most of us used both systems.

However:
  It's hard to figure out how to measure total users, but Grex has 
  about twice as many entries in its password file as M-net.
 
  Grex has roughly ten times the bank account that M-net has, despite
  the fact that Grex's operating expenses are much greater.
 
  Grex has roughly twice the number of voting members that M-net has.
  (Grex has roughly five times the number of voting members who 
  paid for their own memberships, rather than receiving them as gifts.)

  Grex still has a lively interactive chat culture in party; 
  M-net's party program isn't used very much any more.

The question for the candidate:  what do you think explains these 
different outcomes?