[volunteers] SVLUG elections

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ron Guerin (ron at vnetworx.net):

> Can you point me at a page that describes how SVLUG elections work?
> We're in a heated discussion over in #nylug on Freenode about the recent
> coup at NYLUG, and I would like to refer to how SVLUG conducts elections
> since SVLUG and NYLUG have similar definitions of membership.

There are two separate (successive) ways in which SVLUG has held elections.

The first ten years (1988 to 1998), there were no elections.  It was
just a group founded by Dan Kionka that he ran.  Nobody felt any
inclination to vote about this.  Dan just did most of the work, and so
by a functional definition was head of the group (which was then the
Silicon Valley Computer Society (SVCS) PC Unix SIG).  

In 1995, when AT&T shut down its local offices promoting and selling
SysV Unix (losing the SIG its meeting place) and then 386BSD getting
overshadowed by the AT&T/Berkeley lawsuit, and more presentations to the
group about Linux, the SIG renamed itself SVCS Linux SIG -- and then in 
1997 it renamed itself again to match the name of a majordomo mailing
list ('svlug') set up by Rob Walker and other Cisco people to benefit
the group.  

Late in 1997, the most active members were Ben Spade and Chris di Bona,
who had some very mild friction with Dan Kionka, who was still chief
cook and bottle washer.  In a moment of irritation, Dan said 'If you
guys think you could run this group better, why don't you take it over?'
To his astonishment, they said 'OK'.  

For no especially good reason, because there was no contention, the
SVCS SIG called 'SVLUG' held in-person, first-past-the-post elections
for SIG leadership on December 3, 1997.
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/1997-December/000076.html
Since Dan was construed to have held the office of President, the office
of Vice-President was made up on the spot so that the two guys
interested (Ben and Chris) could each have one.  I can't remember
whether Ben became President because he got slightly more votes than
Chris (think so; I was there but it's a long time ago), or whether Ben
and Chris just divided the offices between them.

Another Cisco employee, Ian Kluft, later wrote a Perl CGI implementation of
the 'single transferrable vote' (STV) algorithm of ranked-choice aka
elimination voting.  For no special reason, Ben and Chris decided that
they'd been elected for two-year terms, and also decided that their
successors would be elected via electronic voting using STV.  This decision
also raised the thorny question about who is and isn't an eligible member
and why, but nobody especially cared.  

In subsequent years, the term of President and VP changed at one point
to one year, and then back to two.  There was exactly one contested
election for President, ever.  The STV script was also used a few times
to poll the 'membership', about where to go for after-meeting dinners
and about whether to have the Pres. and VP have one-year or two-year
terms of office.

In 2005, Ian Kluft had a political fight with SVLUG's elected leadership
(J. Paul Reed and Micah Dowty).  After that was done, Ian not only
refused to do anything more with SVLUG, but convinced his personal
friend Heather Stern to retroactively delete from the SVLUG Web site all
past lecture material that mentions him, all election files he'd been
involved with, and all Web pages that mention him in any way or had any
connection with him.  (In carrying out this request, Heather in fact
deleted entire categories of the Web site.)  I was head of the Web Team,
and was not consulted in any way about this, so when I uncovered this
mass-deletion I recovered the files from backup, then warned the
volunteers (without pointing fingers at Heather) that this sort of
destructive action is unacceptable.  I very recently found, however, that
the same mass-deletion had been carried out a second time, and so with
regret removed Heather's login account from our Web server.

In consequence of my resurrecting and revamping those things, the STV
materials (Perl script and example election material from several elections)
are again available on our Web site, and can be adapted for anyone wanting a
well-tested online voting system.  http://www.svlug.org/stv.php  However,
the STV system has not been used since 2004, mostly because Ian was the only
person who was that into electronic voting and, without his initiative to
run it, nobody cared enough to make it happen.

When it was time for new elections again in 2006, and once again (as
usual) there was only one candidate each for Pres. and VP, SVLUG went
back to in-person, first-past-the-post elections by show of hands.  This
happened again in 2008.  When this last set of two-year terms was up, 
another in-person first-past-the-post election occurred, but nobody
present was willing to run for either seat.  So, by default, for lack of
interest in holding those offices, SVLUG's active volunteers have run
the group since then on an ad-hoc basis.  (The offices are deemed
available if anyone wishes to run.)