[SAGE] Alternative Nominations for USENIX Board of Directors Election

[Greg Rose <ggr@qualcomm.com>]

Dear SAGE and USENIX members:

As I announced on the sage-members@usenix.org mailing list, I have formed 
an "alternative nominating committee" with a view towards coordinating 
nominations, principally for the officers positions. What I was afraid of, 
in the heated environment after the USENIX Board's action in dismissing two 
members of the SAGE Executive, was that many people would self-nominate for 
the election
(a) without understanding their obligations and duties
(b) without considering the overall slate of candidates, electability, and 
so on.

I'm pleased to say that we succeeded in discouraging a number of potential 
candidates -- but don't take that the wrong way, all were well-meaning, and 
we very much appreciate their involvement and interest. Some, in 
retrospect, felt that they really wanted to be more involved with the SAGE 
executive anyway, so I think we've helped towards filling those vacancies.

As I said at the outset, one thing we were not going to do was fail to 
nominate anyone who remained wanting such a nomination. So our task, 
really, was just to ensure that no vital talent was wasted because of the 
structure of the election itself (remembering that a person can only be 
nominated for one position).

So, for the officer's positions we are nominating:
Kirk McKusick for President
Trey Harris for Vice President
Lois Bennett for Treasurer
Steve Simmons for Secretary

You'll notice that two of the people above were already nominated by the 
(Real) Nominating Committee. Lois specifically asked us to nominate her, 
before the outcome of the Nominating Committee's deliberations were known, 
and reaffirmed that afterward. Since we are bound by my statement that we 
wouldn't fail to nominate anyone who wanted to proceed, and since we found 
Lois to be a perfectly good candidate for that position, we have no problem 
nominating her. There were other acceptable candidates for that position, 
but avoiding what we consider to be useless competition was the whole 
point. We did not, however, find any candidate we wanted to run against 
Kirk for the position of President. But we didn't want people to think that 
we didn't like Kirk for the job either. So I asked Kirk if he would object 
to us nominating him, to avoid this perception, and he agreed.

The other candidates we are nominating for 4 positions as 
Directors-at-large are:
AEleen Frisch <aefrisch@gaussian.com>,
James Yaple <james3678@hotmail.com>,
Jon (maddog) Hall <maddog@dtype.org>,
Melissa Binde <binde@terindell.com>,
Peg Schafer <peg@eecs.harvard.edu>,

AEleen is another special case -- she's already lodged her own nomination, 
but asked that we include her on our forms too. It can't hurt.

At this time we are not endorsing any particular subset of the above five 
candidates; this has not yet been the subject of discussion between us. We 
can state, though, that we have no reason to doubt the candidacy of the 
people we are nominating. Not surprisingly, all of them are sympathetic 
with the goals of SAGE.

By the USENIX by-laws, the election has to commence by April 1, and 
nominations close 10 weeks before the election date, which makes January 21 
the close of nominations by my counting. (The Nominating Committee, by the 
same by-laws, had to have their report to the membership 16 weeks before; 
since they were a day late, I assume it's safe to rely on the April 1 
date.) There's still time!

sincerely,
Greg Rose (for the "alternative nominating committee")

Greg Rose                                       INTERNET: ggr@qualcomm.com
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