Nominations and academics

[Rich Salz]

This is the promised followup to an article I posted at the beginning of
February.  That article was titled "Any academics interested in being
nominated?" with Message-ID <362 at fig.bbn.com>.  Since then I've had a
number of interesting email exchanges with a variety of people.

In that article I said I was bothered by the lack of "academics" in the
slate presented by the nominating committee.  That was poorly worded,
even though I reviewed my writing a couple of times.  A better way of
phrasing it is that almost all the nominees (all but one or zero,
depending on whether you consider UCB a vendor or not :-) have strong
commercial involvements in Unix.  Academia and research are under-represented.

Given that, I volunteered to collect names and and get the minimum number
of signatures needed to add people to the slate.

Unfortunately I blew it:  I started too late.  It's all my fault.

At any rate, since there was interest, here are the people suggested to me.
Their appearance on this list will be news to almost all of them.
	Scott Brander, John Chambers, Peter Honeyman, Mel Pleasant, Clyde
	Pool, Barry Shein, Gene Spafford, Henry Spencer, Chris Torek, Len
	Tower, Bob Webber

Other people mentioned in the (quasi-, at least) commercial arena where:
	Doug Gwyn, Ron Heiby, Mark Horton, Larry Wall

PLEASE!  Don't comment on the appropriateness of anyone mentioned!  I am
just forwarding suggestions I received from other people!  It's too late
to do anything about it this year, anyhow (deadline was two days before I
posted this; on purpose).  If you want to do anything about it, watch
for the nominations call next year, and contact folks then.

So, what can be done for next time?  Well, I have a couple of suggestions,
which I'll present to the board later.  Basically, a rough outline of what
a board member does should be posted in ;login: when the call for
nominations is set, as well as contact points for how to get involved
with the nominating and conference program committees, etc.  Also,
I think five signatures is too easy to a nominating requirement.

Finally, I want to re-emphasize that I don't intend to put down any of
the current or previous board members or nominees; I'm a real Usenix
fan, and this whole thing started because I got involved too late.
I'm gonna work on changing that this year, and I encourage everyone
else to do so, also.
	/r$
-- 
For comp.sources.unix stuff, mail to rsalz at uunet.uu.net.