Nominations are open now through the end of the day (EST) on
November 15 for the Cyberspace Communications Board of Directors.
The following current board members were elected in December 2009;
their terms have one more year to run:
STeve Andre (steve)
Denise Anderson (denise)
Chuck Martin (unicorn)
Kent Nassen (kentn)
Under the bylaw amendment just passed, the Board is to have five
members (reduced from seven). Therefore, there is one open position
to be filled at this time.
Board members whose terms are expiring are Dan Cross, Joe Gelinas,
and TS Taylor. Dan has served two consecutive terms and is
therefore ineligible to run this time; the other two are eligible
for re-election if they choose to run.
Nominations close on November 15; voting takes place via the online
vote program beginning on December 1 and ending December 15. In
order for a nominee to appear on the ballot, they must have entered
a statement in this item accepting the nomination and be a member
in good standing at the time voting begins.
Nominate somebody by doing so in this item. Nominations do not
require seconds. Self-nomination is allowed. Terms run for two
years.
123 responses total.
I nominate anne/jadecat. She has now moved back to A2 and hasn't been on the board in some years. Maybe she'd even brimg Kyle to the meetings :)
I really hope Joe decides to run again. He is thoughtful and ends up with helpful and sound suggestions. He also plays well with others. Ann would be a wonderful board member - I hope she jumps in.
I nominate tsty and gelinas. And I agree that jadecat would be good, too. :-)
TS was willing to pick up the treasurer's job. I don't suspect he had to fight anyone for that responsibility. I hope he runs again as well. And thanks for that, TS.
I nominate Joe Gelinas. Or, rather, second Denise's nomination.
i accept the nomination, tnx.
Reminder: Nominations close in three days, on November 15. Nominees have through November 30 to accept. Voting starts on December 1.
Final reminder: Nominations close at midnight tonight (EST). Nominees have until the end of the month to accept, and voting begins December 1.
So the nominees are tsty, gelinas and jadecat? And, so far, only tsty has accepted?
That's correct.
why not extend the nomination period and postpone the election date in an attempt to gain some more interest?
We have what, ten, members right now? I'd guess we have all the interest we are going to get.
Perhaps it is time to go to annual meetings?
I give everyone willing to run for the board this time around a huge vote of thanks. We're going to have to be making some pretty big decisions over the next 12 months. And they won't be easy decisions. I don't think fewer meeting would help. The board needs to be looking ahead and planning 8-12 months out.
A couple of years ago, Arbornet had the same problem and moved to a single annual meeting, with no requirement for physical attendance by the Board members. Conference call meetings worked fine as a replacement, in my opinion. Arbornet also streamlined the by-laws, and trimmed the Board to 5 directors. It just plain didn't need all the structure that had built up over the years.
I was thinking of Arbornet's choice to go that way when I made the suggestion. I think it can work and special meetings can be called if needed.
Maybe it's time for a *serious* overall and simplification of bylaws.
resp:12 Also, I feel compelled to point out that Grex has done, as far as I can tell, essentially no advertising...
There are 10 members. Is it worth all that? You can probably streamline the by-laws enough to make them workable for the current Board without much effort, but revising them completely might be a lot of work.
I'd say it's worth it in the sense of making the organization more nimble, which in turn would hopefully make it more viable, which in turn would hopefully inspire people to join, which would make it worthwhile.
11 members ... jadecat joined on 14nov. and re 20 ... i like bootsgtrapping.
A single annual meeting doesn't encourage keeping up with technology (or socialology, for that matter).
Arbornet went to on-line meetings because we didn't have enough members to fill the Board from the Ann Arbor area. Having them on-line, we were able to have Board members from Canada, North Carolina, and even England. The current president of Arbornet lives in Montreal.
We amended the bylaws to facilitate out-of-town Directors several years ago. We have had Directors living in Japan and other parts of Asia. I don't know that we have had Directors living in other parts of the US. One of the two most recent amendments to the bylaws allows online meetings. The problem is NOT the Board of Directors, how many or how often or even how they meet. The problem is that the membership can no longer support the organisation. I don't like it, but nothing I've seen in the past year has given me any reason to question the conclusion. I'm still considering whether to accept my nomination to the Board.
Have all users been approached to join and support Grex? Many may not follow the conferences (where there is not much persuasion to join, anyway). What are the member only "perqs", for that matter?
Voting. Really, should there be anything else?
Re #25: what users? *sigh* *in a slow dr0ning voice* You need to get people interested in Unix and the Grex community. To do so: 1. First you need to attract people here by offering things not found elsewhere. Firewall-checking scanner (wrapper around nmap), ping, traceroute, whois, dig, host, nslookup - with wrappers around all this. Geek magnet. 2. Customized domain name with web-space and e-mail: april.cyberspace.org with homepage templates - Chick magnet. 3. Create CSS flyers for easy printing so people can advertise - Chick magnet. 4. CGI/MySQL - Geek magnet. 5. Google access to forums and party - Chick & Geek magnet. Also attracts old ladies and, i guess, old geezers. Lots of advertisement with niche groups (gay forums, computers for kids, lifehacker, make magazine, IRC, wannabee hackers, Facebook, etc) 6. reduce the waiting time to a couple of seconds. --------- None of them will pay.. when you have 50 people in 'who': 6. Some geeks will volunteer to help out, to impress the chicks. They may be conned into paying because they can stick it on their resume. 7. Take on 25 paying 'volunteers' and you can rest in peace, especially if you have 25 female volunteers. This may sound ridiculous to you BUT I TOLD YOU SO years ago! (and i can dig out the posts if you are so inclined) Check this out: http://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?nullogic@sdf http://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?blakkat@sdf http://hapiworm.feckov.org/me.jpg http://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?ellainix@sdf and they have a facebook page with a few 100 more that are even hotter. here are some more uglies: http://sdf.org/?sdfers To do all this, you should have started building up "volunteers" when csmcgee was on the board. Instead you hold stupid meetings where you rub each others toes and gloat about stupid bylaws!! Gahh! SDF CHARGES MONEY! You need to pay to take a dump (quite literally)! And they have more hot chicks than Arbornet AND M-Net put together! In case you guys don't remember (because you were too busy stuffing your faces [a good thing imho - a army never travels empty] and wondering which bylaw to screw) we had chicks like bipolar, nevi, barnali, zoezig, and others logging in! And they actually stayed for some time - like a year at least. ---------------------------- Simple question: since csmcgee came AND left.. and now kentn.. how many new features have we added.. umm.. actually better yet.. do we have as many features as we once had? No CGI (we used to have that), tel/write are off by default, mail was off until some time back, web-site still not fully functional, validation makes it harder to do work, newuser was AWOL for what I assume was a large chunk of time, no wiki page because we aren't notable - neither is SDF BUT SDF works and now he's got that bsdtalk interview.. gahh! Even SDF's restricted shell has more commands even if it's buggy (as in.. you can get arpa-crap for free) http://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?erinb@sdf http://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?sah@sdf http://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?phm@sdf
And SDF has all sorts of lame games.. but that appears to be very popular for some weird reason.. people are always playing netris and comchess (did i mention a certain eclipse.cs.pdx.edu 7680 with no users who we could talk to. yes i did! when csmcgee was in town! so did anyone contact them?)
grrr! *bops rane on his thick skull* let me see now: blbtq, strcpy, jhesse, pbbl, vvg - and this is WAY too many. prolly because it's 1.30 am here and i should be sleeping. *grumbles* 5 guys with weirdo logins! i'm sure they'll gladly signup if you ask them. USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT blbtq p0 ohai004.lava.net 1:05PM 23 /usr/bin/lynx strcpy p1 109.109.54.82 10:40AM 4:09 -bash cross p2 ip-66-80-251-66. Fri11PM 0 -bash jhesse p3 c-66-41-158-63.h Fri10AM 0 elm kentn p4 24-231-194-179.d 1:43PM 37 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/fronttal cross p5 ip-66-80-251-66. Mon07AM 0 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/fronttal pbbl p6 pool-74-106-22-1 Fri11AM 37 alpine rcurl p7 c-24-11-168-114. 2:37PM 0 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/fronttal tod p8 web60.justhost.c 2:48PM 0 gate /a/t/o/tod/.cfdir/ft.buffer blbtq p9 ohai003.lava.net 2:57PM 0 /usr/bin/lynx veek pa 117.192.27.111 3:00PM 0 w vvg pc 93-127-18-143.st Tue08PM 23:51 -bash
Rane, you don't need permission or sanction: feel free to contact any one you want to ask them to become members. Once upon a time, outbound Internet access was limited to members, who had offered identification we could use for net hygiene, which other users had not. I'd be satisfied if just every participant in coop would renew their membership. We need more than that, but it's like a lawyer at the bottom of the ocean: A start.
Most non-profits that depend upon membership have active membership campaigns, usually appealing to people to support whatever good purposes they have. Grex doesn't even have a membership committee, working on ideas to gain members, especially from users.
re #31 thats an idea, have a subgroup of board members form a membership committee that would research ideas and report their findings to the full board.
Subgroup of what, five people? How about some volunteers from the community for that?
I had a idea, instead of all this: I'll create a 'volunteers' account (already done). Then I could stick a volunteers home page in it - just like any normal user (I'll use the Grex template - just color it blue and say this is 'un-official'). Then a small form, so volunteers can add register projects - i could run this off Arbornet for the time being. Once we have enough completed projects and volunteers staff can just merge the projects with the main web-site, OR link to this from the main web-site with a disclaimer. It's useable straight away, when things stabilize we can merge which creates little work, and it's safe from lawsuits because you haven't linked to it from the main website.
the main site has to be formal but this can be anything.. I'll stick huge disclaimers all over about it being insecure code and run at your own risk..
btw, one thing i'm still not sure about.. would it be a good idea to go with 'Grex'? I mean, on the one hand there's talk of moving to the cloud and using cyberspace.org as a cool domain to lure users.. anyway for now i'm using grex.
resp:34 Why don't we just create a directory under the main WWW repository for that? It seems like a good idea; it would be easier to use and manage if it didn't rely on the existence of a specific account, though. resp:36 Use grex. Grex is the name of the service; cyberspace is the name of the parent organization.
this is kind of what I was thinking of (it's very much work in progress): http://m-net.arbornet.org/~veek/index1.xhtml 1. random guy sees the volunteer-page and wants to add his fav project so he adds it to the "brown/red" colored part in the middle via a form. 2. then he works on it, finishes it, and marks it as finished *Tor - tutorials. 3. then some other volunteer sticks it in the right pane after checking it. 4. When sufficient material is finished.. it's moved to regular grex whenever by staff. --------- resp 37: well.. simple really :p Main reason 1. It's very likely to end in abject failure because of a lack of volunteers :( right now, it's in some ordinary grex account so if it fails, I don't get red in the face :) MR 2. Random ppl who I don't know will be doing (i hope) most of the work.. think shady characters like Chad. I will then proof-read (or he will proof-read the C tutorials).. lets say someones account gets hacked because of my mistakes.. i get red-faced IF it's under main/official www. In some random low-lvl account :) I don't care a hoot. 3. +i was hoping this would not be an official Grex thing just yet.. i have no idea what sort of scumbags will be contributing.. it could work to our advantage if it's unofficial.. and if it doesn't Grex isn't made any worse off :)
I've decided to accept the nomination. Y'all can decide if you want me on the Board. :)
good, now we've got two nominees, thats a competition. Now TS and jgelinas can have a debate
Thanks, Joe.
Oh my, more than one candidate. Now I'll have to, like, fire up the vote program and stuff. ;-) Seriously, I'm glad we have folks running.
I'm still hoping jadecat joins the fray. :)
The more the merrier!
And jadecat has indeed decided to join the fray. :) I accept my nomination.
Lovely. Thanks, Anne.
so which of these three candidates has the best ideas for the future of grex? time for a candidate forum
I'm pleased to see three candidates running for the open slot. Reminders: (1) Voting begins December 1 and runs for 15 days. (2) A candidate can optionally have a "campaign statement" that is shown on the ballot. Just create a plain text file named "statement" (file name must be in lower case) in your home directory and the vote program will display it.
The polls are now open for the election. To view the ballot, and optionally vote, visit https://grex.org/cgi-bin/pw/voting-booth. Voting ends at the end of the day (EST) on December 15.
Is this link on our web page?
Wait a minute. We have three good candidates for just one position. I don't know who to choose. :(
Yeah, it IS tough to choose [which is why I haven't voted yet but will, eventually].
this is why a candidates forum was needed. Now its just a popularity contest.
What sort of "candidates forum" were you looking for, exactly? If you're interested in some topic, why not post an item here in Coop and ask the candidates to comment on it?
well maybe just candidate statements then
Also the ballot lists Mooncat as running. Actually Jadecat is running this time. Her evil twin. Not that its going to confuse anyone here though :)
resp:55 You could always ask them what they are.
Well, our voting membership is so small that votes aren't *really* anonymous. And fwiw, I know all of the candidates and don't really need statements from them. I might end up pulling a name out of a hat. So, candidates, if I don't vote for you, it isn't a statement about how fit I believe anyone is to be on the BOD.
Most members might be able to use information about what background and skills caondidates can bring to the board. "Statements" are often pap. Facts can be informative.
resp:59 Dude, we're talking about a community of, like, 12 people here, all of whom know each other very well. Do you *really* think a simple statement wouldn't suffice for this election?
I know of the community here what they divulge, but seldom do they divulge their training and skills, and even occupations, related to the corporate matters with which the board is concerned.
resp:61 I really think you're reaching here. You've interacted with these people for many, many years, Rane. If you can't decide which of the three individuals running are qualified for the board based on that, and maybe a simple statement, then I just don't know what to say.
Re resp:56 - Thanks for the correction re 'jadecat', Richard. I've updated the ballot accordingly. Yeah, no statements from the candidates so far. I reminded them all via email how to do it, but no takers so far. If any of them creates a statement before the polls close, the vote program will automatically start displaying it.
You know, since gelinas and ts are running for re-election and want to serve, I say retract the previous board amendment and keep the board at seven members as long as there are seven willing to serve. This way TS and Gelinas can keep their seats and Jadecat can have one and that makes seven. Grex is in no position to be turning away people who want to serve.
Just postpone completing the voting and have another bylaw amendment that simply says that the board can be *either* five or seven members depending on how many people are available/willing to run in a given cycle.
I don't think anyone is being "turned away." Changing it now seems, frankly, impractical.
Re #62: I don't know the occupations, education, and long-term volunteer capacities on Grex of most everyone I "know" here. Some things related to these get mentioned by some - infrequently - and I admit I don't try to memorize the information unless I have some direct personal knowledge of the persons.
So let me get this straight: after the many, many years you've spent on Grex, what you're telling me is that you don't feel you have sufficient information about the three candidates to make an informed decision as to which would be best to fill the one vacant board position? Frankly, I find that incredible.
he's making a valid point regarding lack of information but it's kind of weird because :) board may propose but staff disposes <g> i mean.. it's not like former board members didn't try to get things done! It's just different from being on the board of Intel in the sense that Grex requires more of weirdo technical skills and point of presence right now.. it'll be important later on though.. once we have something to present to ppl. so what country club do ppl belong to :p
(I admit, I've learned more about Rane here than I did on Confer, way back when.)
re #68 this isn't about now knowing any of the three, its about which of them has any good ideas about what they'd like to accomplish on the board.
The bylaw amendment changing the size of the board from seven members to five stipulated nothing about when such change takes effect. Therefore I think the board would be within its legal right to vote that the bylaw change shall take effect with next year's election cycle and not this one. This would allow the board to stay at seven for another year and all three candidates can have their board seats. If Grex is around a year from now then go forth based on five seats.
When a by-law doesn't say when it takes effect, it takes effect immediately upon passing. The Board discussed the timing several times and the purpose of running the by-law amendment voting when we did was to have it completed prior to this year's Board elections so we'd know how many seats were open. Thus it was explicitly planned to go into effect this year. No mention was made of having 7 board members at this election, in other words.
Correct: bylaw ordinarily goes into effect when adopted, but a change in the size of the board can't occur instantaneously, unless provision is made for that (like, saying who will be tossed off to go from 7 to 5). I didn't think of this at the time (probably because it was pretty moot), but it should have included an effective date, say "for the election of 2010". However it would certainly go into effect at the election following enaction, which is now.
Just curious: what happens to votes cast before the change from mooncat to jadecat? I don't know that there were any, or any affected by such a change, but I'm still curious.
re #75 good question, I mean it wouldn't be good if Jadecat loses because technically Mooncat's votes (before the ballot change) can't be put under her totals. Not that one would assume Mooncat would have voted for Jadecat anyway. I mean who knows if they even get along :)
The mooncat/jadecat change won't affect the result. Any votes for either 'mooncat' or 'jadecat' will be counted towards Anne's total. And the way the votes are stored, there wouldn't be any double-counting.
frpom 48 (2) A candidate can optionally have a "campaign statement" that is shown on the ballot. Just create a plain text file named "statement" (file name must be in lower case) in your home directory and the vote program will display it. my statememt is now posted.
tnx remmzie ...
what if a candidate inadverdently named a very personal file as "statement" ?
If it's not world readable, I doubt it will show up.
Right, for the vote program to see a statement, the file has to be world readable and stored in a directory that is world searchable.
my satemnt is avalaible ... and i fixed all the tpyos.
oh, here;s how: grex% more ~remmers/ts-statement from putty anyway.
Your statement is also appearing on the Board Election web page, so that's good.
Okay, the polls are closed now. I've requested an up-to-date member list from the treasurer, and as soon as I receive it, I'll tally and post the results. (Subject to possible slight delay, as I'll be traveling tomorrow and unable to get online at times.)
Um, TS, are you not receiving your mail? I've asked you a couple of times for a member list so that I can report the results of the Board election, but no response. But I see you posting in BBS, so I'll ask again here.
re #87 perhaps ts thinks he's going to lose the election, so he's laying low in order to prevent the results from being certified. Is TS the only one who can provide a member list?
he wouldn't have stood for elections if he was worried about defeat
The Treasurer is the only one can certify the member list, because the Treasurer is the one who receives the dues payments.
resp:88 You take Grex way too seriously. TS has provided the list to the board.
Okay, I received the list of eligible voting members from TS and can now
report the election results. Ten of twelve eligible members voted,
results as follows:
gelinas 5
jadecat 4
tsty 1
Joe Gelinas has been elected.
(Unofficial non-member votes: Four non-members voted.
gelinas 2
jadecat 2)
Congratulations, Joe.
Thanks to all three candidates for being willing to serve on the board. That's a generous offer.
Half of you voted for me. I appreciate the confidence. :)
I hope you can still appreciate it in another month, or six. ;-)
congratz gelinas....
I'll say it again here- Congrats Joe. :) And thank you to everyone who voted for me. Maybe we'll try again next year!
darn if tsty hadn't voted himself (presumably) there could have been a runoff
Perhaps it's time to remove the link to the voting booth from the home page?
Yes, it is. I have a patch for it if any root wants to apply it to the subversion repository and regenerate the web site. Let me know if you want it.
(It really shouldn't be that hard to comment out a single line of the page. Just do it, already.)
if someone is patching stuff.. i have a patch in ~veek/latest.diff
The patch I sent does comment out the line of code. Please patch the related file in the repository so we can keep all the changes in in sync and up to date.
(Re resp:102 - I agree, seems like overkill.)
I disagree. It is not overkill.
(Bureaucracy will kill us yet.)
If the benefits of version control aren't clear, then I'm left to wonder how much programming project experience staff have in a multi-programmer and multi-file environment.
Yes, the benefits of version control are clear to me. However, we are talking about simply adding <!-- and --> around a block of text. If they get lost, it's a simple matter to re-add them. For that, version control, of any kind, is overkill.
So, you'd use version control for some changes and not others? That makes no sense. And not using version control at all makes less sense.
resp:109 the difficulty might be in synchronizing stuff? If you add comments by bypassing svn, when you next rsync, won;t those comments get clobbered?
Minor stuff that didn't really matter if it got clobbered, I'd simply
make sure that all concerned knew about them and worry about
version-control later. ("We don't need no stinkin' source!" as one
programmer of my acquaintance once put it.)
Make this trivial change on the fly, then patch and submit a
version-controlled copy.
If I were doing this stuff regularly, I might even batch up a bunch of
trivial changes. If they got clobbered, I'd cuss at myself and submit
my updates. :)
So is Dan Cross intent on maintaining his seat on the Grex board? I ask this because he stated emphatically last month that he would leave Grex if there was continued discussion citing the leaked wikileaks documents, as he said it could be problematic to his military status. Then Mary said she was going to enter yet another wikileaks item in the new agora and he responded that he was in fact leaving, and hasn't posted since. It reasonable to ask if he intends to continue being part of the board of the corporation that sponsors grex when it is clear that the wikileaks items will continue. If Dan has in fact gone away for good he should at least go ahead and resign his seat rather than create needless potential quorum problems at future meetings.
Why should Dan give a rats ass about Grex at this point? It would be *nice* of him to resign formally if he really doesn't intend to come back. But if I were treated the way he was treated, I would just leave and not concern myself with the problems of the assholes I left behind.
Read resp 0 again: "Dan has served two consecutive terms and is therefore ineligible to run this time..." As it is January, his term has expired, therefore, no need to resign.
See there you go. Problem solved.
Dan said he would be traveling in India and would not be participating on Grex for a month. I hope he will return and continue working as a staff member after his vacation is done. If he doesn't, I think it will be sad for Grex and possibly disastrous. I have no idea who else will do all the work he has done.
resp:117 Over the holiday, I spoke with my brother about this stuff since my brother is a federal employee. He said that even though he actually has the security clearance necessary to view the Wikileaks documents, he also has been forbidden from viewing the wikileaks sites or any mirror sites. So Dan has a legitimate issue. However, when I explained the technology and forgetting items, he said he thought that would be ok. He has not been banned from reading news articles, even those that quote from the Wikileaks site. So if Dan wants to return here after his holiday, forgetting the items probably will be sufficient to protect him but, of course, he would want to talk to his direct supervisor about it since that is who would make the call.
From talking to folks I know in the military that's my understanding as well. They are using their personal computers to read the news on the web and working on disks that have been exposed to WikiLeaks. Not sure how you could avoid that, actually, unless you disconnected from the internet, for starters. I expect Dan is on vacation and will be back soon.
re resp:119: If he does come back, it was a dirty, rotten, scummy trick that didn't cost someone else what it could have. If he doesn't, then it's the same but it costs Dan and all of us. Unless, of course, you replace his skills and contributions yourself, then it just cost us Dan. It did make your point, I suppose. You don't care about other people.
I don't think anything was done to Dan (apart perhaps from some intemperatre language). Nothing has been said here concerning or from wikileaks except what is in the public media, and no legal actions have been taken against any of the public media. How can such public media be verboten?
(( Just for the record, I removed the announcement of the 2010 election results from the MOTD today. ))
(( Thanks ))
You have several choices: