[Fwd: [SAGE] re: SAGE Voting Site]

Thu Jun 23 17:40:17 PDT 2005

FYI, if you are a current SAGE member, please take a moment to vote for the new 
board.

Voting ends this week, on Friday at 5pm PDT.  Details are at 
http://www.sage-members.org/election/

cheers,
Strata

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SAGE] re: SAGE Voting Site
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 16:27:12 -0500
From: David Parter <dparter at cs.wisc.edu>
To: sage-members at sage.org

Some questions have been raised about the SAGE voting site, and I think
I should clarify the situation. It is unfortunate that this information
was not presented in advance.  It is one of those things that is obvious
after the fact, but slipped through in the run-up to the election.

First, it is important to understand that the SAGE Interim Board, as
candidates (and the other candidates) have taken as much of a hands-off
approach to the election logistics as possible, in order to avoid the
appearance of any conflict of interest or election improprieties.

I also have been reluctant to get involved in most of this discussion
while the election is in progress, because it might seem to be an
attempt to gain an unfair advantage during the election. However, I've
been asked by enough members to explain things, so here it is.

My role in this was as the coordinator/contact to the volunteer tech
team that was recruited a few months ago to help the Interim
Board/Transition Committee deal with IT/technical issues.

There were a couple of issues regarding hosting the election at www.sage.org:

     1) In the past two SAGE STG online elections, the election was
        hosted at a "neutral" site -- one not connected to any of the
        candidates, Board or staff -- for the same reason that the
        candidates took a hands-off approach: to avoid the appearance
        of any conflict of interest or election improprieties. We felt it
        appropriate to continue that approach

     2) Asking a volunteer to undertake a substantial and critical
        technical task, but making them do it on a site that they do not
        have access to, and are not familiar with, is a recipe for
        disaster. Any sysadmin who's ever tried to install something on
        someone else's system should understand the issues. Add to that
        the known complexity and fragility of the existing SAGE web site,
        and the need to coordinate with the USENIX staff several times
        zones away if there were any issues, and it does make sense.

        Instead, we asked our volunteers (SAGE members Jesse Trucks and
        Matt Okeson-Harlow of Cyberius' network) to meet certain criteria
        for a fair, secure election, including assurances about the
        security of the site, the integrity of the election, and making
        the source code available for inspection.

After recruiting Matt and Jesse, the coordination of the technical
aspects of the election site was between Matt, the Leadership Committee,
and staff (especially Jane-Ellen Long) in the USENIX office who provided
the membership data used for authentication and authorization.

The sage-members.org domain was already owned by a SAGE member, who
gaciously volunteered to let the Interim Board use it for our interim
internet needs, including the Board's wiki, mailing lists, and
eventually the candidate's wiki (which was opened to everyone instead of
copying the material to another site) and the election information site.

The content of www.sage-members.org/election, including the description
of the voting method, was left to the Leadership Committee.

I'm sure that future boards will apply the lessons learned from the
election in organizing future elections.

Thank you everyone who has participated in this discussion for their
concerns about the organization. If you haven't already, please vote for
the candidates of your choice (ranked from 1 to N, of course!), and
please pass the word on to other sage members who may have missed the
announcements.

	 --david

David Parter
SAGE Interim Board
SAGE Board candidate

-- 
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Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
VirtualNet Consulting                            http://www.virtual.net/
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