[volunteers] SVLUG elections

[Ron Guerin]

Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ron Guerin (ron at vnetworx.net):
> 
>> We're in a heated discussion over in #nylug on Freenode about the recent
>> coup at NYLUG
> 
> No need to brief me, actually.  I see the battle craters in the
> nylug-talk archives, now that I look.  Jeez, lying to the membership and
> claiming that you resigned as a director?  How could Brian Gupta
> possibly believe that would end well?

Well, I think the goal of the coup will be realized.   Those involved
don't much seem to care about how it all looks in public and now have
their incorporation to claim legitimacy.  I think the only good thing
that can come from it is that it should serve as a warning to others.
Your group can be misappropriated at any time unless you've got
mechanisms to prevent it, and people who care enough to stop it.

I have gotten enough private mail from volunteer organizers of user
groups to know this sort of thing happens all too often.

> I just wanted to add that I see you've started to have contention over
> a fuzzy concept of 'member'.  SVLUG had the same problem.  Originally,
> the member-vs-not-member matter was both unimportant and relatively easy
> to resolve.  The same 30 people showed up every month at the small side
> community meeting room at the north San Jose Carl's Jr., and that was
> SVLUG (or, I should say, of the SVCS PC Unix SIG).
> 
> Then, several guys at Cisco created the majordomo mailing list 'svlug',
> which two years later was converted to GNU Mailman, and the newly
> elected leadership of Ben Spade and Chris di Bona were tempted to
> reconstrue 'member' to mean 'subscriber to the mailing list', because
> that let them claim the group was bigger.  In July 1998, they had one of
> the Web Team members write an 'actually, it's both' piece for the Web
> site:
> 
>   if you join one of our mailing lists or attend an SVLUG meeting, you
>   are welcome to call yourself an SVLUG member
> 
> http://www.svlug.org/membership.php
> 
> Ian Kluft was, once again, the main force behind membership maximalism,
> even getting into a rather ludicrous online argument in 1999 with 
> Sk�ne Sj�lland Linux User Group (SSLUG), over which is the largest LUG
> in the world:
> http://www.svlug.org/editorials/orig-19990130-largest-lug.php
> http://www.svlug.org/editorials/19990130-largest-lug.php
> (Nobody else cared, and people here pretty much just rolled their eyes
> at Ian.)
> 
> After that, nobody much sweated the fact that membership was in practice
> undefined (or, if you consider the above to be a definition, not
> recorded and monitored enough to consider it _meaningfully_ defined).

As NYLUG was essentially SVLUG circa 1998 exported via Jim Gleason,
NYLUG's definition of membership was deliberately lifted from your
policy.  I'm trying to give the members under the existing definition a
say in the matter, but I'm not that hopeful.

- Ron