response 85 of 90:

Dec 31 16:40 UTC 1999

I never saw the application form for the K-12 project, so I don't know 
what it said, Richard.  I can say this, though: the $7500 grant was from 
the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, a non-government non-profit 
which receives it's funding from private donations and public grants.  
It's budget is a lot larger than $7500, but I don't know how big 
exactly.  (It makes a couple of hundred thousand dollars of grants per 
year.)  The Board didn't know what the interest level was from the 
users, or what participation level would be needed from them.

Arbornet's charter, as filed with the IRS in 1985, called for it being a 
source of community information as well as discussion.  The Arbornet 
that was created 14 years ago was supposed to be a lot different than 
the Arbornet which actually existed in 1993.

M-Net merged with Arbornet because it was severely short of money and in 
immediate danger of dying, and because those of us trying to keep it 
going expected wonderful things to come from being part of a 501(c)(3). 
We were naive without question.  Everyone is naive about a thing when 
they do it for the first time.

response 87 of 90:

Jan 1 20:58 UTC 2000

It was me, not Marcus, that mentioned the grant proposal.  At the time I
was involved only with M-Net, not Grex, but I was seriously pissed at
the Arbornet board of that.  I don't remember if Arbornet actually did
submit their own grant proposal, they did secretly submit their own
separate letter of intent (which had to be sent long before the proposal
could).  They then participated in joint planning meetings, and then
announced that they weren't going to continue in the joint proposal, but
where submitting their own separate competing proposal.  I had no
personal involvement with the other systems, but felt it was disgraceful
for "my" system to behave that way.

I also never believed there was a conspiracy of board members.  I
believed that the level of poison and acrimony directed at the board
members was so great that they didn't dare make themselves larger
targets by saying anything.  There were periods of years where most
board members never said anything subtantive in the conferences (jep
was, as I recall, the single exception).  Not that saying anything would
have accomplished much except having people beat on them personally
instead of on the board in general.  The atmosphere there was really
bad.  The board failed to save a bad situation, but I don't really blame
the board very much - I'm not sure I could have done much better (though
if I hadn't been in Texas at the time, I might have tried).

response 89 of 90:

Jan 3 15:56 UTC 2000

Apologies to Marcus.  I read back, and he's right.

Arbornet didn't plan in advance to submit it's own grant application as 
far as I know.  We heard of the grant because Valerie Mates invited the 
Arbornet Board members to get together with the HVCN folks, and I became 
Arbornet's representative.  We all discussed things for several months, 
over a number of meetings.

I made it pretty clear what I thought Arbornet would be willing to 
participate in.  I missed the final grant application meeting, during 
which the final decision on what to apply for was made (I was in Paris 
at the time), and the decision was to focus on things I had said many 
times Arbornet wouldn't support.  (Kiosks, specifically.)

Arbornet had a Board meeting the following weekend, and at that Board 
meeting, the various views of the Board members came out.  Everyone was 
opposed, but everyone was opposed for a different reason.  It was 
awfully chaotic.  It was also a big surprise to me.  I think even if the 
joint grant project had been something I would have supported, the rest 
of the Board wouldn't have wanted to participate.

I'd been posting about the discussions in the policy conference through 
the entire process, but there was no participation from *anyone* else.  
Not the Board, not any other users... the item looked like a log file 
from me, more or less.  So I didn't have a clue as to what anyone 
thought.

Anyway, I made the Arbornet Board's motion to withdraw from the grant 
project.  You can be mad at me for that, Jan, but as I said, the focus 
of the grant was made to be something I didn't think Arbornet should be 
doing, and I'd made that clear to the rest of the participants in the 
grant project.  The motion passed unanimously as I recall it, because of 
a lot of different reasons -- everyone had their own.  No one ever 
discussed their reasons with me, before or after.  I also told the grant 
project that Arbornet was withdrawing, at a meeting.  I'm sure some of 
those people are still mad at me about it, but I think withdrawing was 
justified by the circumstances.

The Board did say it was going to do it's own grant proposal, and that 
was stupid, because it was far too late in the proposal process.  It may 
have been unethical as well.  I guess I won't argue that if anyone says 
it was.