2013 Elections and My Endorsements

 

    It is Election time again and this year there are six people running for five seats. I want to speak about the incumbents. This endorsement does not mean any non support for the other candidates but I want to show my support for William, Dan and Ski. The three of them do a lot of work on the board over and above the quoted "5 hour per week" involvement you are told when asked to run for office. I still do not know how they handle their day job as well as the other duties they perform on the board.

     Before I get into that I have to bid a Fond Farewell to Jesse Trucks and Philip Kizer. Jesse stepped down earlier and Philip has chosen not to run for re-election. Both were a  great asset to the LOPSA Board. Although they may be leaving the Board I expect them to be very active volunteering their time somewhere or in some project.

     Ski is out there in the Seattle area and handles the Communications of the Organization. He has been trying to jazz up the LOPSAgram for the past year. His goal is to make it an exciting document and has been trying to automate the data input from the locals. He is very active in the education side of LOPSA. One of his goals was getting a System Administration Curriculum at Colleges and Universities. A bold task but he has stayed on the task. He is the person behind all of the LOPSA posts in the Social Media sites.

     Then there is Dan. Dan is the person behind our membership mechanism (CiviCRM). He has also been working hard on getting behind our membership numbers and benefits. It is a chicken and egg type of problem. We need more benefits for our members and we need more members to draw in better sponsors or gain more benefits.  You have seen his surveys to the membership asking all of us what we want as a benefit for being a member of LOPSA. In the grand scheme of things we are a fledgling organization and things take time to get in place. Dan is on the verge of attaining his goal of additional benefits for our members and hopefully these will drive up our member numbers. Besides him being our Civi Guru he is also the go to person for rules and standards when it comes to Non Profit organizations. There are different rules when it comes to a true Non Profit and Dan has been the person who has been able to keep the board informed of these nuances.

     Last but by all means we have William. I first met William when PICC first started. I saw the call for volunteers to help produce the conference and I threw my keyboard into the mix. Truthfully there have been Chairmen of the PICC/LOPSA-EAST conferences but William has been their right hand man and without him there would not have been any PICCs or LOPSA-EAST. He is a one man wrecking crew when it comes to conferences. He also handles all of the Training that LOPSA is involved with each year whether it be LOPSA-EAST or Cascadia even down to the Southeast LINUX Fest in the Carolinas. Add to that what he has been doing with our Tech Team and all of the servers behind the scenes that handle lopsa.org and the Wikis. He has been working with the Tech team to get us moved from our old provider BitPushers. His big task now is to revamp the lopsa.org website.

     In all that has been said my three amigos (Ski, Dan and William) are a busy group that helps keep the organization moving and improving. I think they spend so much time doing their job that they never get out in front to be recognized for what they do.

     Our election structure is one that I could never understand, sorry to whomever wrote it or selected it, but certain solutions just don't jive to me. But hopefully the three of them will gain your support and get the correct votes to serve another term.

     The key is to vote and to be informed. Get on the LOPSA-Live sessions and ask the candidates that tough question. Contact them offline if you think you need to. The key is to make an informed decision when you make your choices.