Re: [SAGE] Alternative Nominations for USENIX Board of Directors Election

[Andrew Hume <andrew@research.att.com>]

Uli Weis wrote:

>The report of the "official" nominating committee shows, IMHO, that alternative
>nominations are really necessary (too much biased on research, who is really
>in touch with systems administration on that list?)
>
>
>Thanks for your work! I believe it will be positive for the whole
>organization.
>
uli,

    i am puzzled by these statements of yours. it is almost as if you 
weren't
aware that this election is for teh USENIX board. USENIX is the
advanced computing systems association; its conferences and publications
are where academics and researchers share their research, people talk
about how the research works when put into practice, and sys admins
talk about how to manage and deploy those technologies.

    where do you think we would be without strong representation from,
or visibility within, the research and academic communities? through years
of hard work, by the USENIX boards, by dedicated program chairs, by the 
staff,
we are in the enviable position where the USENIX name on a proceedings
almost guarantees its quality. in fact, if you order conferences by 
number of times
papers from those events are cited, USENIX runs 3 of the top 4 (OSDI, USITS,
and the Annual conference); in fact, if you group all the General 
Technical conferences
together, we have the top 3 [see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/impact.html].

    apparently you don't know the nominated candidates well, either. 
loosely speaking,
i think it would be fair to roughly group them as
        a) academics: honeyman, long
        b) researchers: jones, rubin
        c) sys admins: bennett, darmohray, moskowitz
        d) working stiffs: cole, t'so
        e) others: gilmore, mckusick
i note that sys admins are in fact the largest subgroup. and even if you 
combine
researchers and academics together (and throw in mckusick for good measure),
all of those together are 5 of 11, or less than half. (i would also note 
that
honeyman, cole and mckusick, at least, have long experience with system
administration, even if that is not their primary job.)

    as for greg's group's work being good for the organisation, how can 
you tell?
his motivation, as he said, was to to correct the mistake that no 
"SAGE-positive"
were nominated at the last USENIX election, without over-correcting. (i 
have no
idea what this means really; i was nominated and i have worked my butt 
off working
with the SAGE Exec (for several years) and helping with Certification. 
my intent and effort
have always been for teh good of SAGE. i, and others nominated, are SAGE 
members
as well.) he plowed into this activity without waiting to see who was 
nominated,
and the end result was a slate of 9 candidates for 8 positions. (i have 
trouble imagining what
over-correcting would look like!) i note also that maddog is 
characterised as not SAGE-positive
(because he was nominated last time) but is "sympathetic with the goals 
of SAGE"; this
seems contradictory to me.

    to the extent that greg is somehow helping people participate in the 
democratic process,
that's great. to the extent that greg is helping politicise the 
elections, i think that's bad
for all USENIX members.