lepreau@utah-cs.UUCP (Jay Lepreau) (04/28/84)
Those of you who are members of USENIX who haven't yet voted in the current election for board members (ballots due May 15th) may find the following information relevant. I certainly do. Bruce Borden, a current USENIX board member, is running for a spot on the board again. It turns out that he is also running for president of /usr/group. (!) This was so as of three weeks ago, anyway; I don't know when their elections are. I have been told that this information is public, so I am not revealing any secrets. I see two problems with this: the foremost is the obvious conflict of interest, given the two groups' differing objectives and their very controversial and stormy relationship. I don't buy the argument that interlocking directorates is just what we need to resolve the problem: that smells of "merger" to me. The other is less inflammatory, but nonetheless very important: the board members serve entirely as volunteers, and bear an increasingly large work load, as they have often stated. (I can personally attest to the large amount of work inolved in programming just one conference.) Things have gotten to the point where the board is considering hiring a highly-paid, full time executive director to handle much of their current work load. Offhand, I can see several drawbacks in doing that, including the high cost and gradual loss of control which inevitably comes with executive staff in a volunteer organization. Someone on the board who by necessity will be devoting most of his spare time to leading another organization will only aggravate this situation. Jay Lepreau Univ of Utah Computer Science Dept. Program Co-Chair, Summer '84 (year of the flood) USENIX conference (Latest scare tactic: imagine all those vendor booths underwater!)