[volunteers] SVLUG elections

[Rick Moen]

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?

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, that was the SVCS PC Unix SIG).

Then, several guys at Cisco created 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 
Skane Sjaelland 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).