I went looking through old e-mails to see if I could figure out where the current membership system came from. The earliest e-mail I could find outlining it was this:
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:12:26 -0500 From: Daniel Golding <[email protected]> To: Stephen J. Wilcox <[email protected]>, "Hannigan, Martin" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [nanog-reform] Draft List reform plan It doesn't have to be one person. Here's a possibility... - An elected NANOG committee. Merit would have a representative on this committee - They appoint a group of FAQ maintainers/list admins. Preferably they would have little to do, except for unsubscribing jabbering mail clients and what not. This is a group of volunteers. One member of the elected committee should be the lead. - They appoint a program committee to review presentations. This is a group of volunteers. One member of the elected committee should be coordinating this. Other members of the elected committee could work with hosts, "face" the conference, help steer the agenda. Merit would work with this group, handling registration, signage, room setup. I suggest an elected committee of 5-7 with staggered two or three year terms. Electorate would be anyone who attended a NANOG meeting in the last year (3 meetings). - Dan This looks looks a lot like what we ended up with. Steve Wilcox then wrote: "On a related note, I was just thinking.. someone mentioned before an issue with committee elections in that nanog doesnt have members as such. There is a possible solution.. an annual membership subscription, there may be other uses to being a nanog member but in this context i'm thinking it would give you an electorate. Of course we dont want to increase overall costs so soemthing like a $300 annual fee would be given back to you as eg $450 of discounts to nanog meets (ie a $50 meeting discount assuming 3 meetings/ann as an incentive)." And Dan replied: "Here's the issue with an annual membership subscription - the only benefit would be a vote. The result would be a few purchased votes and a non-representative Steering Committee. And its not like Merit needs more money :)" There was then a lot of discussion about how to keep the voting process from being hijacked by organizations sending too many people to the NANOG meetings. Dan suggested that the situation could be prevented by a secret ballot, such that employers wouldn't be able to check on how their employees voted. There were a bunch of proposals to prevent employees of equipment vendors from voting, to keep the vendors from taking over NANOG. Fortunately, that idea didn't go anywhere. Dan appears to have cut that discussion off with this: Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:03:56 -0500 From: Daniel Golding <[email protected]> To: Adam Rothschild <[email protected]>, Steve Gibbard <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [nanog-reform] Issues to address The easiest way to define the electorate is this: Any person who has attended at least one NANOG conference in the last calendar year is entitled to vote for steering committee members. - Dan That appears to have settled the issue. Skipping forward to now, I kind of like the idea of having a professional organization with a more formalized membership. At the same time, the current system seems to have worked remarkably well, and I'm not sure how much sense it makes to mess with it. -Steve _______________________________________________ Nanog-futures mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
