polygon
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Statement from polygon
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Dec 1 10:30 UTC 2003 |
Hi, I'm Larry Kestenbaum (polygon), and I've been nominated for the board
of directors. I live in Ann Arbor and would be able to attend meetings in
person.
I have been an active Grex user since the beginning, and served for a
while as co-fairwitness of Agora. I have also been an M-Net user since
1990, though I'm not as active there as I used to be. I have also been a
user of shell accounts on other Unix systems, including the server where
my web sites reside.
If I'm elected to the Grex board, I will be an advocate of responsible
stewardship of the organization's resources, respect for the user
community, and appreciation for the volunteer staff.
I'm a research specialist at the U-M Institute for Social Research, and
the webmaster of PoliticalGraveyard.com. I am also an attorney licensed
in Michigan, though I'm not in active practice these days.
I have a great deal of experience in committee-type work, including
service on elected county boards in Ingham (1983-88) and Washtenaw
(2000-02) counties, as well as numerous committees to those boards. I was
also a board member for the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, the
Capital Area Substance Abuse Commission, the Capital Area Transportation
Authority, the East Lansing Planning Commission, the Ann Arbor Historic
District Commission, the East Lansing Historic District Study Committee,
the Wayne State University Planning Committee, and quite a few others.
I have served on the boards of several nonprofits. When M-Net was
imperiled in the early 1990s, I was instrumental in creating Once and
Future Systems (OAFS), and later negotiating its merger with Arbornet Inc.
I was also a board member for the MSU Student Housing Corporation (housing
co-ops), the Ann Arbor Historical Foundation, the Lansing Area Folksong
Society (Ten Pound Fiddle), and the Looking Glass Music and Arts
Association.
In addition to being a board member, oftentimes I held offices such as
chair, vice-chair, secretary, or committee chair. Over the last thirty
years, I have chaired hundreds of meetings.
In addition to The Political Graveyard, a popular political history site,
I have also created the Nigerian Fraud Email Gallery. I write all my own
HTML, and the only web-page-generating programs I use are the ones I
wrote myself.
I have a B.A. in Economics from Michigan State University, and a law
degree from Wayne State University. I did graduate work at Cornell
University in City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation. I have
taught graduate courses in Historic Preservation Law, and in Data
Management for Social Science Research. I also did many lectures on
computer related topics (particularly computer security and viruses) in
the MSU School of Criminal Justice; I also helped organize training for
police personnel in computer related crime, and assisted in the creation
of a degree program in industrial security.
It wasn't my idea to be a candidate for the Grex/Cyberspace board. I do
expect to be pretty busy during the coming year. However, I don't
currently serve on any other boards, so I'm pretty sure I can fit this in.
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mynxcat
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response 7 of 20:
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Dec 1 23:06 UTC 2003 |
"I think it's a valid point to make, since electing a remote candidate
will result in extra complications and quite possibly extra expenses."
I think this is the point other tried to make in another item. When
you're electing a board member, you want to elect the best person. And
subtracting points based on localness isn't fair. The fair way to go
is to come up with a solution that makes the factor of whether a board
member is local or not a moot point in deciding whether or not to vote
for him. However, ignoring the issue about how to deal with remote
board members, and not coming up with a solution is going to prevent
remote board members from being voted. It makes the whole policy
amendment process moot.
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