response 78 of 335:

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

response 80 of 335:

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.

response 82 of 335:

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?

response 84 of 335:

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.

response 86 of 335:

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.

response 90 of 335:

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.

response 92 of 335:

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.

response 96 of 335:

Oct 25 02:56 UTC 2001

Sinking to the level of other parts of the "real world" is not necessarily
one of my goals for Grex.

Becoming a member is a signal that you are invested in the community. 
Different people want different things from the community.  If what you want
is to push your personal agenda and to attract storms of attention, then there
is certainly no compelling reason why you should ever have wanted to become
a member up till now.

Of course, lots of people don't become members because they simply can't
afford it, so it would be wildly wrong to assume that the mere fact that a
person isn't a member means that they don't care about Grex's community.
However, Jamie's responses suggest that he was looking for a different
kind of pay off from membership.