Nominating Committee Report

[Pat Wilson <paw@coos.dartmouth.edu>]

[Forwarded from comp.org.usenix --paw]


Report of the Nominating Committee

The USENIX nominating committee (Trent Hein, Steve Johnson, Evi Nemeth,
Dennis Ritchie, and Margo Selzer) has beaten the bushes over the past
few months searching for a superb slate of candidates for the 2000
biennial election of the USENIX Board of Directors.  And we have
found them.  Our nominations are:

	Dan Geer, @Stake, for President
	Andrew Hume, AT&T Research, for Treasurer
	Kirk McKusick, Consultant, for Vice President
	Mike Jones, Microsoft Research, for Secretary

	John Gilmore, Electronic Frontier Foundation, for Director
	Jon Maddog Hall, Linux International, for Director
	Dirk Hohndel, Suse Linux, for Director
	Darrell Long, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, for Director
	Marcus Ranum, Network Flight Recorder, for Director
	Avi Rubin, AT&T Research, for Director

Two key positions on the USENIX Board are the President 
and Treasurer. The president must provide vision and guidance
for the organization, as well as interface with the staff 
and chair the board meetings. The treasurer is responsible
for not only keeping an eagle eye on finances but also for
advising USENIX on investing its endowment funds.

Andrew Hume has served as USENIX President for the last four years
Dan served as both Vice President and Treasurer (two years each).
We are nominating Dan for President and Andrew for treasurer.  Both
have done superb jobs in their respective positions, and it is our
hope that by broadening each of their focuses, the team can be even
more effective than it has been in the past.

Dan Geer is well known as a visionary, and we believe that the role of
President will give him an opportunity to do for USENIX what he has done
for any of a number of different organizations.  Andrew wrote the software
that gives AT&T real time auditing capabilities of all our long distance
phone bills, so we hope to take advantage of his expertise to maintain
and grow the financial stability of the organization.

In short, both Andrew and Dan have enormous skill sets and by changing
their positions, we hope to take even better advantage of them.

We are nominating Kirk McKusick to run for the position of Vice
President.  Kirk is a past President of the USENIX association and
represents both the academic community as well as the free software
constituency.   Kirk has a PhD in Computer Science and an MBA from
the University of California, Berkeley; he was the Research Computer
Scientist for Berkeley's Computing Systems Research Group (the people
who brought you BSD); and is now an instructor at both Berkeley and
UCLA.  He has recently been quite active in the development and evolution
of the Freenix track at the USENIX Technical Conference and is the program
chair for the Freenix track at the Annual Meeting in San Diego in June.

We are nominating Mike Jones for the position of Secretary.  Mike has
been an active participant in the USENIX community for the past decade.
He earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University working on the Mach project
and has been a researcher in Microsoft's Research Lab for the past several
years.  Mike publishes regularly in USENIX conferences, has served on a
number of program committees (both the Annual Technical Conference and
OSDI), was instrumental in starting the USENIX Windows NT Symposia, and
will be program co-chair for the 2000 OSDI.  Mike brings a strong academic
bent to the committee as well as boundless energy and a commitment to USENIX.

We have nominated six candidates to run for the four positions of
Director at large.  The most important criteria for board members is
their willingness and ability to get things done and work together
productively.  Your board does a tremendous amount of work for you and
for the organization, and we need eight actively engaged members.  For
each of the candidates we are nominating for Director at large, we outline
the constituency they represent and the particular strengths that led
to their nomination.  In a later issue of ;login, the candidates themselves
will issue statements describing their backgrounds and goals for serving
as board members.

Alphabetically:

John Gilmore was an early employee of Sun and Cygnus and is a founder
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has been very active in the
societal side of UNIX and the whole IT movement.  John has been outspoken
and effective at challenging things like the Computer Decency Act, the
alleged safety of 40 bit keys for cryptographic use, the export controls
legislation, etc.  He brings to the board a wider view than previous
board members.

Jon (Maddog) Hall is currently serving his first term as a USENIX board
member.  Maddog was a Unix supporter at Digital for many years, and now
is affiliated with VA Linux and Linux International.  He is a strong
representative of the Linux community and cares very deeply about the
interaction and relationship between the USENIX and Linux communities.
As a current board member, he adds an element of depth to the slate
of nominees.

Dirk Hohndel got started with UNIX as a sysadmin managing Suse Linux
systems while he was a Computer Science student at Wurzburg University.
After finishing his Masters degree he went to a startup, on to
Deutsche Bank and is now with Suse Linux in Germany.  He may be best
known to our community for his work on the XFree86 window system for PCs
which he did in his spare time and still helps maintain.  Dirk wants to
strengthen the bond between the USENIX and Linux communities.

Darrell Long is a Professor of Computer Science at the University
of California at Santa Cruz.  He has been a member of the board's
scholastic committee for the past few years, on several program
committees, and publishes at USENIX conferences regularly.  Darrell
adds academic representation to the board.  He is concerned with
maintaining the high quality of our conferences.

Marcus Ranum is well known in the security and SAGE communities and
a frequent USENIX tutorial speaker.  Marcus was program chair of the
Intrusion Detection workshop and on several program committees.
Marcus has been running his own small company, Network Flight Recorder,
that sells a security monitoring software package used by system
administrators.

Avi Rubin is a young researcher at AT&T and an adjunct faculty member
at New York University.  He has been program chair for both the
Security conference and for the General Conference.  Avi became
involved with USENIX as a student when he published his first
paper here; now 6 years and many papers later, he is ready to start
giving back to the organization.  Avi is a finisher, gets things
done, and will be a hard worker on the board.

We were fortunate to get a good mix of excellent, experienced
folks and some really terrific new folks.  The committee is aware
that the slate contains no women.  We approached several outstanding
possible candidates, but other commitments prevented their acceptance.

As in any selection process, we have surely overlooked several
well-qualified, capable and willing candidates.  Any USENIX member
can self-nominate for the board by petitioning the organization.
See http://www.usenix.org/whatsnew/election.html or contact the
USENIX office for the details and deadlines for self-nomination.

The USENIX Nominating Committee,
	Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado, Chair
	Trent Hein, XOR Network Engineering 
	Steve Johnson, Transmeta Corp.
	Dennis Ritchie, Bell Laboratories 
	Margo Selzer, Harvard University