🚀 go-pugleaf

 
1.) Committee Work:
 
If the Freenet is to survive and prosper, it is vital that the Board
function, both as a whole and as a collection of working
subcommittees.
 
My committee work experience covers the span from high school UN Club
to work on the Professional Staff of the US Congress, and that at a
time when th staff was a quarter the size it is today, so that really
meant something.  :-)  At the scales in between I have been a member
of a number of community organizations and Boards, and remain so at
present:
 
In high school I was elected President of the Model United Nations
Assembly held in those days at Queens park.  This meant that I had the
fun and honour of presiding from the dais at the Legislature.  More
relevant here is the fact that it gave me a chance to carry out two
innovations: staff training, and a fund-raising campaign for the
African Students Foundation.  Staff training meant simply weekend
sessions where Penny Williams and I lead all the other kids in
responsible positions through UN structure, Roberts Rules, and the
skills of keeping meetings and work groups going.  People may, rarely,
function as groups if jut thrown together -- but it is a better
assumption to go forward on the idea that you _plan_ how you work
together, and that when you plan you take advantage of long known
methods.
 
When I worked for the US Congress, and subsequently for the
Administration planning group implementing the legislation I had
worked on, I learned a wry lesson: plus �a change, plus �'est la m�me
chose.  The kids in the committee rooms on the Hill are the same kids
you knew in high school.  We get older, and we maybe learn a little,
but we don't get any smarter, and we don't change much.  
 
In the real world of Washington, as elsewhere, there are people who
plan and budget, and there are people who don't.  The first often, but
not always, get stuff done; the latter spend an awful lot of their
time just blundering around.
 
My work there consisted of writing the house version of one piece of
legislation, H.R. 5606, which created the national Institute of
Education, precursor to the present Federal Department of Education.
It passed, substantially as I had written it, and with Congressional
Intent -- the agenda for the agency -- stated in an innovative way, in
a three volume collection of essays.  The idea came from my boss,
Congressman John Brademas (D. Indiana), a Rhodes Scholar and a bright
lad;  I edited the three volumes.
 
Apart from these, I have served on the executive of the Chartered
Accountancy Students Association of Ontario, 1987; the board of
directors of the United Nations Association of Metro Toronto, 1985-88;

Congregation Ohav Zedek, Hamilton, 1993 to the present.  

I am at present a member of the Internet Subcommittee of the National
Community Relations Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and am
Treasurer of Toronto Community Free Net.  #include <disclaimers.std>
In the latter position I have spoken little, but what I have said has
included the sentences "OK, how much money do we need?" which resulted
in the $2,600 budget on our site, and "Well, then, we'll have to have
a fund-raiser.  Dmytri, you're the guy who knows the bands..." which
resulted in our first and successful fund raiser, thanks to the work
of a number of people.
 
Platform stuff: a great deal of the weakness of the Freenet to now has
been the non-functioning of the committee system.  The Board should
have executive, fundraising, and public relations committees which
operate continually, indeed daily; and operations, research,
hardware/software, and party/happening committees which meet weekly.
These are needed to do the work of the whole.  The Board itself need
not meet so often, as its work is more sacramental. :-)  Perhaps
monthly, more often in the crisis-ridden near future.
 
2.) Order and Morale:
 
Order depends upon leadership, morale upon purpose.
 
A great deal of the failure of the Free Net to date, I am told, has
been simple lack of minimal order.  This must not be tolerated.  All
standard rules of order require a super-majority, 2/3rds or more, to
over-rule the Chair.  Thus the chair of any meeting has the ability to
suppress noise, confusion, and disorder.  I will support the chair,
whoever it is, in using this power.  All relevant views should be
considered on any issue.  On the other hand the time for position
taking, lobbying, dreaming and so forth, is over coffee or ber between
meetings.
 
Actual Board and subcommittee meetings shoul operate from an agenda,
and Board meetings in particular should be brief.  My qualifications
in all of this are pretty much the same as in the section earlier.
 
To these let me add a technical note: we are dealing here in hgh
technology, and we should be using it.  I persuaded Gard Abramsen to
run for the Board and nominate him because the system he maintains for
the T-FCN group is a good start on what a communications system should
look like.  People _do_ need to exchange both precise plans and
general ideas.  Net technology is the way to do it, and Gard is a
person with the skills to make this happen.  I encourage everyone to
vote for him.
 
On morale and purpose, a couple of notes.  First, purpose: 1.)
Survival, 2.) Technical advance, 3.) Expansion.  I'll deal a bit with
survival under Finance, below, but it's important to say that the
present operation is being held together with baling twine by Ed
Carriere. I think that "the laborer is worthy of his hire," and Ed is
underpaid.  The suggestion that he be fired or that he can be replaced
at half price is both ridiculous and offensive.
  
3.) Survival and Finance:
 
Survival may mean finance, but before finance it means gaining
community legitimacy.  By "community" I mean Lions clubs, trade union
locals, librarians and teachers, dog fanciers, gardners, gay
activists, tropical fish collectors, and politicos of all stripes.
Community may include half a dozen beer-drinking freeks and weirdies
like myself, but it is not limited to us. It includes all the axe
grinders, of whom I am so frequently one, but axe-grinding is a minor
part of human life.
 
To achieve such legitimacy and community support, the FreeNet needs to
make itself public in a way that is grown-up, positive, demonstrably
of value to the community.  It needs to speak with a voice that can
hold an audience in a box at the SkyDome, not the yowling of
obscenities of the street mumbler.
 
Assuming the FreeNet can assume such a stance -- and this may depend
upon who is elected -- then finance will be an immediate and difficult
challenge.  I propose a working subcommittee to look for line
sponsors, corporate and public donors, and other sources of funds.
These will include counter-top can collections, high school button
sales, and lotsa other stuff that people will come up with when w tell
them their help is appreciated.
 
The membership should be informed of the actual cost of operations,
and encouraged to contribute.  Monthly parties and events like the one
just past and the one being planned for December 14 should be an
institution.  Amnesty International holds fund-raisers at Thompson
Hall, but this ought to be too small for the FreeNet's 37,000 members.
Filling the SkyDome before the year 2000 seems to me a reasonable aim.
  
A bit about my qualifications here: I'm underqualified -- as is
everybody -- for the problems at hand.  On the other hand, I have
helped to run two cross-Toronto fundraisers, the African Students'
Foundation collection in high school, and the African Students' Car
Wash in university, these back in 1960 and '61, when the $5,000 and
$1,500 we raised was serious money.
 
This isn't much, but over the years I've audited a bank, investigated
a $700 million government agency, and even handled a few million  in
money that was my own for the while.  I'm smart, honest, competent,
and confident that the need can be met.  And share Honest Ed's
humbility.
 
Technical Competence:
 
Owned a Sinclair 1000 handheld -- and debugged the Moon Lander code so
it worked.
 
Build my own first desktop PC, a wire-wound 6502-based kludge in 1977
(when Dr. Dobbs' Journal was still in mimeograph!).
 
Operated a Fidonet BBS, "dlj toronto," 1986-87.  Brought the UN
newsfeed to Toronto, via Waterloo, for local BBSes.  Held good GT's in
Chinatown.  Played Pyroto. Was briefly the local Corewars champion,
until Peter de Jager nailed me real good!  In Unix class sat next to a
guy who ground his teeth all through class and muttered "Goddam users,
goddam users, always get in the developer"s way" fairly continuously.
You all _know_ I am not making this up!
 
Did some of the early applications/example coding, and much of the
early documentation of Logo, the educational computer language
produced at MIT and BBN (then Bolt, Beranek and Newman).  Wrote the
English language manual for the MSX (imitation BASC) Hit-Bit computer;
Sony sold 600,000 of these.
 
Much Japanese-English computer documentation translation.  One of my
fifteen-minutes-of-fames was when I translated the two pages of
documentation for a DEC protocol converter written in Japan for the US
market; I gave it back to them translated -- and with an error in the
machine code corrected.  This made me friends, famous, and a lot of
money.
  
Today I program at various levels in Delphi, C, Borland C++, Java, and
VBASIC, and, if you call it programming HTML, CGI, SALT, Lotus 1-2-3
scripting. I've forgotten, but in the past have used, Fortran, DDT,
Teco, SNOBOL, and some other odds and ends.  Onward to Smalltalk and
Eiffel. 
 
Enough for today!  More, no doubt, tomorrow.
 
                               Cheers,
 
                                   -dlj.