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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 335 responses total. |
pthomas
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response 69 of 335:
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Oct 24 21:23 UTC 2001 |
Grex has policies that directly violate Federal and international
law, and that open it to a lawsuit that could result in the dissolution
of the company...are you sure your money would be well-spent?
As a matter of fact, I would ask whether the current regime is "serious"
when they continue to support policies which they have been told by people
much more knowledgable about copyright law than I are illegal.
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krj
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response 70 of 335:
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Oct 24 21:47 UTC 2001 |
So, Jamie and Phil, you see it as the place of the board to override
a membership vote?
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jp2
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response 71 of 335:
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Oct 24 21:53 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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tfbjr
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response 72 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:00 UTC 2001 |
re #68: It should be clear that I'm not questioning legitimacy. I'm
questioning your ability.
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senna
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response 73 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:00 UTC 2001 |
Jamie is not saying the same things as Phil. I wonder if Phil knows any of
the board members...
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jp2
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response 74 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:04 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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jp2
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response 75 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:17 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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jp2
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response 76 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:19 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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pthomas
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response 77 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:28 UTC 2001 |
Well, whatever they're serious about, it obviously isn't the law.
Is this a "principled stand" against capitalistic copyright laws that the
Board is undertaking?
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krj
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response 78 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:40 UTC 2001 |
Ah, yes, the state of Arbornet is a testimonial to Candidate Howard's
abilities. A snapshot:
The size of the active voting/supporting user base:
Number of currently-paying Patrons: 11
Number of Citizens (low-cost voters): 36
Number of Citizens who paid for themselves: 3
(summary: there are 15 people who think M-net deserves
their financial support)
Money issues:
Contributions from users, June 2001: 0
(but they got all excited because they moved money from one
account to another)
Contributions from users, July 2001: $158
Contributions from users, August 2001: 0
Contributions from users, Sept 2001: 0
Arbornet bank balance, September 30: $515
Number of active BBS participants who have
started in the last 3 years or so, since
jp2, styles and pthomas: a small integer
approaching zero
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krj
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response 79 of 335:
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Oct 24 22:46 UTC 2001 |
my resp:78 was a response to Jamie's resp:74, on how his
service on the Arbornet board demonstrates his ability.
Many responses slipped in.
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scg
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response 80 of 335:
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Oct 24 23:20 UTC 2001 |
It's probably not fair to blame Jamie for the current state of Arbornet. As
scary as those numbers are, they look a lot better than they did a few years
ago. I'm amazed it's still around at all.
I was once skeptical of having meetings via a conference call. After I
started working for a multi-national company, in a department that has people
on multiple continents, I started "attending" a lot of meetings like that.
There are a lot of drawbacks to working with people far away, mainly in terms
of what gets missed in informal hallway conversations and the like. Since
Grex doesn't have any sort of office where people run into eachother
regularly, that's a non-issue. As far as having actual meetings goes, doing
them by phone works as well as in person.
Long distance phone calls tend to cost around 5 cents per minute these days.
A two hour meeting would cost $6 for a remote participant. That's a non-issue
too.
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jp2
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response 81 of 335:
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Oct 24 23:32 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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krj
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response 82 of 335:
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Oct 25 00:09 UTC 2001 |
Which of those Arbornet numbers are "up over the last few years," Jamie?
People willing to pay to support the system?
August 1999 35 paying Patrons and Members
January 2000 28
April 2000 31
September 2000 24
January 2001 15 (Jamie's Arbornet term starts Feb 2001)
April 2001 18
May 2001 13
July 2001 11
September 2001 11
Current donations from users?
Zero dollars from users in June, August and September 2001 is up
from what figure, exactly?
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pthomas
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response 83 of 335:
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Oct 25 00:28 UTC 2001 |
There were donations in August and September not cashed because of a
dispute as you, with your infinite knowledge of Arbornet operations, must
know.
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pthomas
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response 84 of 335:
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Oct 25 00:29 UTC 2001 |
Plus, the list in 81 does not include "pure" donations. I think if you
were to compile those you would see an increase in donations.
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danr
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response 85 of 335:
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Oct 25 00:48 UTC 2001 |
<satire>Ohhhh, that explains it. You guys over on M-Net are just a
money machine! That's just what we need here on Grex.</satire>
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krj
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response 86 of 335:
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Oct 25 00:58 UTC 2001 |
Phil is correct, my count of M-net patrons and members does not include
people who made pure donations.
Unfortunately for Phil's argument, I reviewed the M-net financial
reports looking for pure donations. Pure donations were lavish
in 1999 and the first half of 2000, but they pretty much stopped
in July 2000. This means that the decline in the number of people
willing to give M-net money is even steeper than my chart shows.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt, Phil. But go ahead, I'm
looking forward to more spin about how the state of M-net reflects
your abilities as an Arbornet board member, and ditto for Jamie.
And this is only relevant because it was Jamie who brought up
the issue of the ability he'd demonstrated on the Arbornet board and
staff.
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pthomas
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response 87 of 335:
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Oct 25 01:07 UTC 2001 |
I made no claims about my performance in this regard. I would remind you
that we are having no serious problems meeting our operating expenses at
this time, so we have not recently put out a call for donations. Generally
when a call is put out for donations, our users respond.
Now with regard to the "gift memberships." You cannot assume that no-one
would have purchased a membership who was purchased one. I, for example,
would have.
Your consistent libels aside, our financial position is relatively stable.
We are in no imminent danger of bankruptcy or dissolution.
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jp2
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response 88 of 335:
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Oct 25 01:34 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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pthomas
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response 89 of 335:
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Oct 25 01:58 UTC 2001 |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Phil Thomas
23 October 2001 pthomas@arbornet.org
THOMAS REPUDIATES HOWARD CAMPAIGN
NORTHWEST WASHINGTON, DC - Phil Thomas, newly announced candidate for the
Cyberspace Communications Board of Directors, today distanced himself from
the campaign of James Howard.
"I cannot believe the duplicity of Mr Howard," Thomas said. "After I
bravely raised a message of opposition to the shameful status quo on Grex,
he leaves me hanging. Is this really the sort of individual Grex wants on
its Board?"
Thomas went on to condemn the new appeasement tack of Howard's campaign.
"In the interests of straight talk, I decided to speak truth to power."
said Thomas. "Mr Howard decided to appease the reactionary forces on this
system in a classic act of cowardice."
Thomas ended his statement reiterating his commitment to positive change
on Grex. He declared that "Churchill, Reagan, and Ayn Rand stood up to
collectivist evil, and I will do the same."
ABOUT PHIL THOMAS: Phil Thomas recently declared his pre-candidacy for the
Cyberspace Communications Board of Directors.
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janc
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response 90 of 335:
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Oct 25 02:02 UTC 2001 |
Jamie is, of course, welcome to run. All he has to do is send in his
money before the election and he'll be on the ballot.
I happen to agree with Jamie that the censor log policy here is
unfortunate. I would have liked to see it changed. However, Grex's
board does not have the power to override a member vote under any kind
of normal circumstances. Thus being on the board isn't going to help
Jamie change this policy. The only way to change this policy is to
convince most members that it should be changed. Jamie claims that
the board could override the users because the policy is illegal.
I do not believe it is illegal though it is dumb. Convincing people
that the policy is illegal is probably more difficult than convincing
them that it should be changed. If he can't convince people that the
policy is illegal then he can't act as a board member to change it.
If he can convince people that it is illegal (or even just undesirable)
then he should be able to do so equally well without being a board member.
Though Jamie can certainly be legally elected, if he becomes a member,
being able to serve is going to be a problem. He will either need to do a
substantial amount of travelling, or we will need to amend the by-laws.
I have doubts that Jamie's popularity is high enough that 3/4 of the
Grex membership will be wanting to change the bylaws so that he can be a
board member. TwinkieTime is going to have to do some pretty impressive
campaigning to pull that one off.
The prudent thing for Jamie to do would be to try to get a bylaw amendment
voted through before the election. He can send in his membership a bit
early, and be able to propose it himself.
However, Jamie aside, I think it would be neat if Grex could dispense
with the locality requirement for the board meetings. The decision-
making method we have now is actually really good in many ways - endless
discussion on-line, followed by decisions made face-to-face. On-line
is great for brain-storming, bringing out every side of every issue.
It's typically not so good for converging on a concensus, which works
far better in a face-to-face environment.
But for all the advantages of the current arrangement, I think it is kind
of a wimp-out. We are, among other things, advocates of the power of
electronic communications. We are supposed to be exploring the medium
and pushing it to it's limits. I'd love to see some experimentation
with holding board meetings on-line. I'd think the ideal medium would
fall someplace between "bbs" and "party" - oriented toward paragraph
sized chunks of text, and with some form of moderation - one speaker
has the floor and other people are limited to interceding with asides,
possibly non-board members can only speak when recognized by the
moderator. I don't know exactly. It'd need thinking about. It'd be
a cool direction to try to go, and I think there are lots of remote
users who'd potentially have a lot to contribute to Grex Board meetings.
It'd be possible for all Grex members to attend the meetings.
The "telephone" option is more boring, and doesn't do much to facilitate
attendence by more people. Still, it might be viable. Most decisions
made at Grex board meetings are already pretty much made in advance in
the conferences. If the process gets contentious, we usually just bounce
it back on-line. It's rare that any hard decisions need to get made.
So I think a less-than-optimal medium (like conference calls) might be
adequate to get the job done.
I'd probably support a bylaw amendment that would open this up.
I'd prefer one that allows the Grex board to experiment with alternate
methods of holding meetings. Say it allows the board to decide by a
majority vote to hold the next meeting in some non-face-to-face medium.
This would give us the chance to try things out, without committing us
to something that doesn't work. A clause allowing emergency meetings to
be held in some non-face-to-face manner would also be extremely useful.
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jp2
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response 91 of 335:
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Oct 25 02:14 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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mdw
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response 92 of 335:
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Oct 25 02:16 UTC 2001 |
All of this depends on *how* you view the board. There are 2 ways to
view it: (1) as a sort of caretaker organization responsible to the
membership, and (2) as the central power *in charge* of the members. If
you go by the former view, the important thing is to make sure the board
works as effectively and with as little friction as possible -- and ftf
meetings make a natural and effective complement to the online
discussion in co-op. If you go by the latter view, then, well, I guess
what happens in co-op isn't really at all relevant and maybe it is
reasonable to change things to make it easier for out of state persons
who haven't been actively involved in the conferencing to participate in
board meetings.
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janc
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response 93 of 335:
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Oct 25 02:31 UTC 2001 |
I hadn't released that Jamie considered a non-local amendment part of
his campaign platform. Again, I note that board members can't amend
the bylaws. Any member can propose an amendment, and the membership
votes on it. The board is pretty much out of the loop.
Being a board member is pretty much irrelevant to being a leader on Grex.
Being a board member is sort of a honorary position assigned to people
the membership trusts not to do anything rash in an emergency (about
the only time the board really makes decisions on its own) and to act as
spokespeople for the organization. Newspapers like to interview people
with titles like "president".
To actually lead Grex in any particular direction two methods are most
effective - persuasion and work. Jp2 talks a lot, but has not been very
effective at persuading a lot of users to go his way. Quite the contrary.
I think if he had opposed the censorship log thing, we'd have had a better
chance of passing it. I'm not impressed by people who vote issues like
this on personalities, but lots of people do.
Work is the other one. When I first got on board, one of my main
missions was to get 501(c)3 status. That required some persuasion
because there were people who were afraid it would cause problems, but
mostly it required sitting down and doing the work to get all the forms
filled out in a way that was pleasing to both the Grex membership and
the IRS. Mark Conger set the direction for a Grex a lot - for example,
he instigated the meeting to discuss new hardware. His ability to do
things like this has more to do with the amount of work he does for Grex
as quasi-perpetual treasurer than it does from just being on the board.
And you can exert a little bit of influence simply by becoming a member.
There are only about 100 members, and many of them don't vote in any
given election, so a Grex member with an opinion has substantially
more influence over the direction of the system than, say a US Senator,
has over the direction of the nation.
Jamie talks a lot about how the censor log policy offends him, but he
didn't care enough to become a member and cast a vote. Instead he argued
that he couldn't become a member while such an offensive policy existed.
So he's willing to support Grex only if Grex will accede to his terms.
A little dim on the concept of democracy.
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