[svlug] The purpose of the Picnic is to Have Fun.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Heather Stern (star at starshine.org):

>   I see that a certain cheery soul decided to remind folks of his two
>   cents worth on the nature of how picnics work.

This is of course not correct.  I was not addressing "how picnics work".

And it is indisputable that your ham radio group unilaterally decided it
was going to kick all of the Bay Area Linux groups out of picnic
governance and put itself in sole charge -- and, when challenged about that, 
attempted to avoid any talk about it in public and lied (claimed nothing
had changed) in private.  _And_ enacted draconian rules about the 
(highly private and hyper-controlled) picnic mailing list.  _And_ 
decided it would henceforth select picnic coordinators and treasurers
unilaterally without consulting the Bay Area's Linux groups any more.
_And_ pocket all leftover sponsorship money into your own treasury 
after the event.

_And_ SVLUG's condition of participation and (considerable) assistance
with the publicity, last year, that the picnic continue to be run
jointly by all the sponsoring Bay Area groups, and no one of them in
sole charge, was openly violated.  Which may be why there are none -- no
sponsoring Bay Area Linux groups, zero -- listed this year, and it's
become the Sbay picnic.

You can't reasonably deny any of that -- so you talk around it a great
deal and call me names for lack of a real reply.  OK, fine.   No offence 
taken (though I really don't like being blatantly bullshitted, as it's a
bit insulting).

Anyway, a picnic _indeed_ should be fun, and I do encourage everyone to 
come and enjoy Sbay's:  It's very nice of Sbay to put on a picnic for
the Bay Area Linux community, and especially nice of them to staff it
_without_, naturally, our help.  

I'm reserving my volunteer energy for a summer picnic _by_ the Bay
Area's Linux groups, which I think remains a good idea -- as it was 
when such picnics were held in years past.

  

>   Rick made an eloquent note at some point in the past, defending my
>   personal good will and honour because I've been a good volunteer
>   to SVLUG.  This was about some pasky DNS thing after some pesky
>   vote thing.  He addressed a question of my motives with the fact that
>   I've consistently done the Right Thing, that needed doing.  

This appears to be a reference to
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/volunteers/2007q2/000261.html , in which
I was pleased to be able to debunk a non-sequitur and scurrilous
argument against your role as svlug.{org|net} trustee-owner (Registrant)
that Alvin Oga had repeatedly posted to the _prior_ incarnation of the
Volunteers list -- the one that, over my objections, had been
established by the Reed/Ward administration as a private mailing list.

I pointed out that you had consistently carried out that role with 
absolute good faith, including attempting to comply with SVLUG President
Reed's order to transfer ownership of the domain to the presidency, and
contrasted that with the bad faith of the prior trustee, with which
Alvin had attempted to smear you by association.

The nice thing about avoiding backroom politics and debunking such
allegations in URL-pointable format (as above) is that it does away with
them for good.  I notice that Alvin's rhetoric on that point vanished
immediately and from that moment onwards.


> He decided that this argument wasn't strong enough, and continued on
> to give an example of the wrong thing he felt I'd stood in the place
> of.  His facts regarding me were fine and true - I do what I can for
> SVLUG - and his facts regarding others were not.

Oh, really?  (Only) since you insist, let's look at those facts.

Immediately after the independence vote, in May 2006 J. Paul Reed asked
for svlug.{org|net} registrant Ian Kluft (dba Thunder.Net Consulting)
to reassign ownership to SVLUG, and CCed the Volunteers mailing list
(now reachable as http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/volunteers-old/ 
as a non-postable archive -- we split off the old-postings archive in
order to honour past posters' privacy when the list went public at the
end of the Reed administration; so, you still have to "join" to read
the archived postings).

Ian made _no answer whatsoever_ to that request.

Instead, he moved the domain from DomainDiscover to new registrar
Joker.com (an action irrelevant to the ownership change request), and
immediately announced that he was completely finished dealing with all
SVLUG domain issues and will ignore all future communications about them
-- with himself still as Registrant (domain owner).  A short while
after, he reassigned domain ownership to you, his own group's
vice-president at that time, and continued to ignore Reed's request.

Now, you said to me last night, in-person, that the reason you believed 
my facts were incorrect is that Kluft had repeatedly attempted to
telephone Reed, and never was able to reach him.

I certainly do believe you, about that, and Reed's habit of being
deliberately difficult to reach was always annoying:  Just one problem.
It's pretty much irrelevant to the matter at hand.

The request was:  Please transer ownership.  All Ian had to do was
create a DomainDiscover accout for SVLUG, hand over the domains to it,
and let us know we can pick it up whenever our then-president bothered
to return his call.  How do I know it is?  Because I tested it for
myself.  I reactivated my old DomainDiscover account, created a second
account with a different password, registered a domain, and transferred
ownership of the domain from the first account to the second.  

Such matters were discussed at the time, CCing Ian -- who of course
ignored that, too.

When the group says "Hi, we want our domain back", you don't just
attempt to call the president a few times, reach voicemail, and then 
just hand the domains to your _own_ VP and declare yourself finished and
intending to ignore all future communications.

When SVLUG asked _you_ for its domain back, you immediately moved in
good faith to comply.  Ian didn't -- and it would have been really
simple for him to _even_ do so much as say "Hi, I want to transfer
back ownership; how do I do that since I can't seem to reach your
president by phone?"  But he couldn't be bothered to even do that much.
That's all.  That was my sole point.


> The actual question raised, however, was to my *motives* and I do thank
> Rick for his confidence in me, but he really has no authority to speak
> on anyone's motives but his own. 

I described actions, not motives.  You acted in a good-faith manner;
the other guy didn't, and the contrast seemed worth mentioning.  That's
all.

I didn't make any kind of big production over that; I just mentioned it
in passing, it being a non-controversial point.  You've just now made a
big production of it in public, against my advice.  Your choice.

Do you want to also talk about Ian's _other_ actions with our domains
at that time that were obviously in equally bad faith, such as telling
us on Tuesday, May 2nd that he would be shutting off all of our DNS 
at midnight, Saturday may 6th, at a time when he was still in sole
control of all of the nameservice?  No, thought not.