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?

response 229 of 335:

Oct 27 23:34 UTC 2001

Back at Candidate Howard:  Overall, it's an entertaining response
which totally ducks the question:  why have Grex and M-net reached
the state they have in October 2001? 

1)  Yes, I was surprised to see M-net's /etc/passwd file up to 12,000.
    What I'd really like to see is trex's wtmp numbers, to get a feel
    for how many of those entries are active.  The classroom support
    is a nice coup for M-net, granted.
 
2)  Entertaining spin.  Of course M-net has reached its measure of 
    financial stability through a 40-50% budget cut around the end 
    of 1999 (colocation) and a similar cut around the end of 2000
    (discontinuing dialin lines).  
 
    Hey, that's another interesting question for Candidate Howard.
    Discuss your feelings about Grex's collection of dial-in lines
    and their cost.  :)
 
3)  Ooooh.  Spin won't help you on the question of voting members, 
    I've got the numbers cold on that one.  *Do* let me know how 
    you paint those numbers in a positive light.

4)  No doubt that M-net's General conference generates more text 
    than Grex's Agora conference.   And quality (*coff, coff*)
    is a purely subjective judgement.  Interesting objective 
    measures would be:
    a)  how many different people are participating in 
        M-net General and Agora?
    b)  how many new users are participating?
    c)  how much of the text is wholesale cut & paste 
        copyright infringement from news media sources?

response 231 of 335:

Oct 28 00:09 UTC 2001

Back at Candidate Howard in resp:230 ::
 
 3)  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your first sentence meant to be
     "The obvious answer is that Grex offers voting privileges much 
      cheaper than M-net."   Forgive me if I have put incorrect words
     in your mouth in attempting to correct a simple miswrite.
 
The problem that argument is that it's not true.
Forget about the $15/year citizenship:  for years, up until this month, 
M-net has offered a $50/year "membership" category, which is slightly
cheaper than a Grex membership, and which is well publicized in 
M-net's !support command.

If I am putting incorrect words in your mouth and then arguing against
them, PLEASE correct me.

----------

As for M-net's problem in publicizing the $15/year Citizenship option:
Geez, you know, you've been staff there, and you are currently a board 
member.  Why can't you do something about this?  Is there a bylaw 
which says that only the Treasurer can draft the changes to the !support
command?  This sure seems like a symptom of the M-net volunteer shortage,
a problem which you claim does not exist.

Jamie writes:
> Further, no
> information about our price cuts has been posted yet, either.  As has been
> established elsewhere, our Treasurer is rather lax...)

So if you don't like how the Treasurer is working out, you should get a 
new one!  M-net doesn't have a volunteer shortage.  Of course, it had 
little to no performance, of any kind,  in the treasurer's position 
from June 2000 until about February 2001.

The current treasurer bailed out M-net's tuckus by agreeing to take
the job; and in the M-net policy conference, Jamie has been harrassing 
and abusing him.  But, as Jamie wrote earlier:

 "* Feelings be damned.  This is business, not pleasure."

Heh.  tonster is the second most important volunteer on M-net right 
now, after trex the sysop.    

Let me go over this again.  It took M-net eight months to get someone
to operate the treasurer's office properly -- to collect and deposit 
checks, pay bills, and file financial reports.  And Jamie is 
complaining and sniping at the treasurer...        

response 235 of 335:

Oct 28 03:44 UTC 2001

Grex has benefited from being more stable than mnet the last few years
and having very little staff turnover.  Most of grex's staff has been
around from years, and at least four or five are founders.  M-net can't
say that-- does mnet have even one staff member current from even five
years ago?

But honestly sniping between the two boards just obscures the fact that
both places arent growing.  Both mnet and grex have become stagnant and
nobody seems to have ideas on how to reinvent these places for the
current era.  These unix boards are old fashioned and quaint, but both
mnet and grex must become fully web based in the years to come in order
to survive.  Otherwise the core users will get older and drift off and
these places will either die or whither into oblivion.  On both grex
and mnet are dozens of conferences that are ghost towns.  Some that
havent been touched in years.

It is not enough to survive.  Both m-net and grex should strive for 
relevance and meaning in the new age.  Give users reasons to come to
these sites.  

response 241 of 335:

Oct 28 04:16 UTC 2001

Oh, and demands will get you nowhere.  You'll have to ask nicely.

Yes, you should buy a bowler, and go bowling in it.