From merope@Radix.Net Tue Jun 19 12:28:15 2001 Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 12:28:13 -0400 (EDT) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show, 6/19/2001 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: Numerically challenged...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! [We apologize for the lack of a DBS this past weekend; we were called suddenly out of town.] Friday 15 June 2001: New Board Secretary Sundee Maynez posts a "weekly report" that summarizes recent Board business. In her report, she too notes there is a vacancy on the "Grievance Committee." Joe Zsedeny reports that "The application process for our service mark has been completed. The PTO has acknowledged receipt, assigned a processing number and now we await their decision." We've paid off the attorney and an accounting is available at: http://home.kscable.com/jschunk/servicemark.html Joe thanks all volunteers who send money, John Schunk, Teri Pettit, Holly Timm and Tim Stowell. Sundee corrects her reference to a "Grievance Committee" to "Mediation Panel". Sundee posts a message from an unhappy CC from the NMGenWeb who feels that the SC and ASC from that state are engaging in slanderous personal attacks against him. He asks the Board for its help and advice. Saturday 16 June 2001: Some late votes on Motion 01-20 and 01-21 are posted. Monday 18 June 2001: Tim declares Motion 01-20 passed with 11 yes vots and 1 abstention. Holly Timm moves that Shari Handley take her place as ex officio member of the Election Committee. Richard Harrison seconds the motion. Tim gives it number 01-21 [*sigh--the Board Secretary motion was 01-21] and opens the floor for discussion. One Board member votes before the vote is called and then apologized for "jumping the gun". Barbara Dore calls the question. Tuesday 19 June 2001: Tim calls for a vote on "Motion 01-21" [sic]. [Oddly enough, he does not call for a vote on the call of the question, as he did for Motion 01-20. Wonder why not?] Thus far, six Board members have voted yes and one has abstained. Sundee publishes another update, which continues the misnumbering of the new motion [and we all thought having a BS would fix this problem]. Tim, noting that "It has been brought to my attention that we've already had a motion 01-21," renumbers the EC replacement motion to number 01-22 and transfers all votes to that number. [It is a sad thing when the oppostion press has to remind the National Commander what motion number they are on, but there you have it.] === Election News: The nominations period has closed. Please visit http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgwelections/nominations.html for a list of current nominees. The list may change; there are still a couple of days in which people can accept nominations if they wish to run and have already been nominated. We note some interesting things about this year's slate of candidates. A very large number of current and former incumbents are running for seats. Rich Howland, who could not manage to fill out his last term, is running for another seat. Maggie Stewart, who was "elected" to the seat she currently holds although she was not qualified to run, is running for a new seat. Holly Timm, who just three short weeks ago said "When my term is over August 31st, I will probably retreat from the national level lists and activities totally and following that gradually divest myself of most if not all of my state/county activities as quickly as I can find suitable replacements" is running for NC. All three of the newly appointed replacement Board members are running. Given the current slate of candidates, it looks unlikely that any real change in Board membership will be occuring this time around. There will be a little bit of seat shuffling and then it will be Business As Usual for the Board. Yours truly will be running for At-Large Representative this time around; wish me luck! Free Speech Corner: A new forum has opened for USGenWeb CCs. It is a message board type system and is located at: http://members3.boardhost.com/genwebCC/ === "Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberate forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government...they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." ---Justice Louis Brandeis This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved. From merope@Radix.Net Wed Jun 20 13:14:44 2001 Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 13:14:43 -0400 (EDT) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show, 6/20/2001 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: None of the above...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Tuesday 19 June 2001: An additional yes vote is cast on Motion 01-20 [to overturn the Executive Order]. Wednesday 20 June 2001: Sundee Maynez posts an update on Motion 01-22. Voting continues on Motion 01-22, with 13 Board members voting yes and one abstaining thus far. === "Power is so apt to be insolent, and liberty to be saucy, that they are seldom on good terms." ---Lord George Halifax This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved. From merope@Radix.Net Thu Jun 21 11:44:46 2001 Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 11:44:45 -0400 (EDT) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show, 6/21/2001 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: Huzzah!...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Wednesday 20 June 2001: Tim Stowell announces that Motion 01-22 has passed with 12 yes votes and one abstention. Shari Handley is now an ex-officio member of the Election Committee. === Election News: What is apparently the final list of candidates is now posted at: http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgwelections/nominations.html. These are the candidates for each open position: NC: Phyllis Rippee, Holly Timm, Richard Harrison At-Large: Maggie Stewart [at least she's qualified for this seat], Richard Howland [who recently resigned another seat for unspecified reasons], Teresa Lindquist, Bill Oliver Archives Rep: Vicki Shaffer [winner] NE/NC SC Rep: Nate Zipfel, George Waller NE/NC CC Rep: Lorraine Newsome, Tina Vickery [both winners as there are two seats available] NW/P SC Rep: Joy Fisher [winner] NW/P CC Rep: Michael Irwin, Kathy Heidel, Sundee Maynez SE/MA SC Rep: Tim Stowell [winner] SE/MA CC Rep: Diane Parsons, Geri Newton, Ron Eason, Tom Parker, Terria Baynor SW/SC CC Rep: Jana Black, Roger Swafford, Don Tharp, Edward Hayden Several races are essentially over. Joy Fisher, Lorraine Newsome and Tina Vickery will retain their seats. Tim Stowell will be returning to the Board in a new position. Vicki Shaffer will be joining the Board as the Archives representative. Board members who will definitely not be returning are Joe Zsedeny [Archives], Shari Handley [SE/MA SC rep], Teri Pettit [SE/MA CC rep], and Barbara Dore [SW/SC CC rep]. We suppose one must take the bad with the good; we are deeply disappointed that Teri won't be returning to the Board, but our sorrow is somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that Babs will be out of there in just a couple of short months. We will take the opportunity to note here that the nominee "None of the Above", submitted for each race by our National Commander [or so says a little bird who knows], will not be included on the ballots. After much discussion on the -ALL list, it was decided it was just rather silly. And There Was Much Rejoicing Corner: Our Esteemed National Commander has announced that he has declined the nomination to run for a third term, thus ending an era where the single most prominent position in USGenWeb was held by a man who could and would say something like this: " because unlike some AB members, I believe in the Project - don't go off starting new groups, lying in bed with the ones who wish to tear the Project down. members of this Project - have started other competing projects, yet remain here to stir up trouble - ie AHLN, AGHP, Migrations and other riff raft groups - sorry but that's the way i see these spin-offs that some AB members support these troublemakers..." on an open chat line. We can only hope that someone with a modicum of understanding of what it means to conduct oneself professionally is elected to that position. Tim has instead chosen to run for the SE/MA SC representative position, a race in which he will be unopposed. [How lucky for him the EC declined to place "None of the Above" on the ballots as a candidate.] I imagine Our Tim took one look at his opposition for the NC position, realized he could never beat Holly Timm and headed for the relatively safer and more assured waters of the regional seat. Our condolences are extended to the SE/MA region. === "It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all." ---George Robert Gissing This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved. From merope@Radix.Net Fri Jun 22 14:03:39 2001 Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 14:03:38 -0400 (EDT) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show, 6/22/2001 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: Your very own Woodward and Bernstein...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Friday 22 June 2001: Richard Harrison points that with the current changes to GenConnect [see below], "GenConnect has been combined with (absorbed into?)Ancestry's own query system. Visitors to the many USGW sites that used GenConnect will be required to establish an account at Ancestry.com and to provide an Ancestry.com UserID and Password in order to access or post queries. Once they do this, they will no longer be able to respond directly to the poster! They will only be able to post responses to the Ancestry.com board. This goes against the grain of the kind of researcher to researcher communication that USGW has always promoted." He moves "that the Board immediately establish a committee to improve the QueryExpress system and to implement changes in it to make it at least as user friendly as GenConnect was, and that the Committee and the Board promote its use by all USGW state and county sites." Barbara Dore tells Richard that she has a different impression of the new boards and suggests that he may have "jumped the string" a bit. She notes "The email addresses will look and work much like those on GenForum, if I understood correctly. Every time there is change, the rumors fly." Richard says he tried the system himself, found no way to directly access the email address of the poster and asks "Do we want visitors to USGW sites to be required to sign up at Ancestry in order to view and post queries at our sites?" He thinks now is a good time for USGW to move toward developing its own query system. Joe Zsedeny seconds the motion because he feels "there does need to be discussion on the issue." Tim Stowell gives it number 01-23 and opens the floor for discussion. Joy Fisher updates the Board on the status of Query Express: "1. QE was written in C++ (just stating a fact here) C is a complex language and there are a lot of things that should be improved in the original code...2. QE is "joined at the hip" to Surname Helper, which is maintained by Rootsweb - I spoke with Randy today to see if Surname Helper will continue to be supported...I will be getting together with Rootsweb ensure that SH will survive. If it doesn't, the re-write will be much, much more work. 3. The sign-up page is very techie oriented. Newbies are intimidated by it...4. We need to know how many CC's can program in C++ to form a committee to re-write the program(s). This would be a working committee and not one that comes up with some wish lists for others to do." Richard notes that "GenConnect Boards each had a place for a link back to the USGW county site...The new Ancestry.com system doesn't provide this." === Changing Times Corner: We are pleased to note that both USGenWeb Census Projects are prominently linked smack dab in the middle of the USGenWeb home page. All Shiny And New Corner: Following the receipt of several messages from some Root$web mailing lists and some complaints on the -ALL list, we hied ourselves over to the newly merged Ancestry/Root$web Message Boards. They are generally unremarkable and inoffensive. If you don't like message boards in general you won't like these, but they have a fairly pleasing layout and maneuvering around them is generally intuitive. However, beware of a few things. You must log in as an Ancestry subscriber to use the boards and that has proven very difficult. The current system is apparently both overwhelmed and buggy. This is of particular concern to admins who must re-signup for their boards in ordre to retain them. Root$web staff expect the problems to be resolved sometime today. Both Richard and Babs are correct about the email issue. There is no way to _directly_ contact posters. However, if you use the "print message" option in the upper right corner of the message, you will be taken to a printable version of the message that does include the email address of the poster [not as a direct link though]. This is similar to what GenForum does, but GenForum makes it a hell of a lot easier to find the email addresses. IIRC, Root$web is claiming this is an anti-spam feature; we will point out only that it is also a great way for Ancestry to pad its subscriber rolls and acquire lots 'n' lots of email addresses and encourage lots of posts so they can continue to claim an ever-increasing number of "names". If you visit the boards you will note that all the different types of GenConnect boards have been lumped into one big general board. You can search the board by message category, which corressponds to the old baord type [obits, cemeteries, wills, etc], for every board type but Query. We understand that when the boards were combined, the person administering the query board for the suite was given the new combined board by default, but from what we have read, many of new boards will be up for grabs since their admins have become either frustrated with the buggy and overwhelmed re-registration system or tired of working for free to maintain Root$web's business. Several are threatening to remove their submitted materials and post them elsewhere. Now that the boards are only nominally part of Root$web [they have a RW logo at the top, but are at an Ancestry address] it seems a little foolish to continue to promote board administration as a service to the volunteer community. What it is, more or less, is free labor to a large corporation that really ought to hire and pay sufficient staff to maintain the Boards. We don't know how far Richard's motion will get, but whatever happens with it, we recommend that USGenWeb immediately stop promoting these message boards as the preferred query system for use on our pages. They are fine for what they are, but our continued strong promotion of them will only make us look like corporate hacks. [Also, the page at: http://www.usgenweb.com/volunteers/querymgmt.html seriously needs updating] Kicking And Screaming Corner: I have received notice from the Evil Empire that it will be shutting down the Listbot service in August 2001. So the DBS is in search of a new home. We don't have to move immediately, and we'd appreciate any suggestions for a new home. We may even apply for a Root$web mail list! === "When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free." ---Charles Evans Hughs This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved. From merope@Radix.Net Sun Jun 24 16:19:58 2001 Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 16:19:57 -0400 (EDT) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show, 6/24/2001 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: Singing like a canary...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Friday 22 June 2001: Teri Pettit suggests that Joy Fisher should chair any committee to look into updating Query Express and asks if she is willing do so. She also asks for a "refersher course" on QE and notes, "The vast majority of CC's are going to prefer a system where queries can be directly and immediately posted without any action needed on their part. The ideal would probably be some system that let the queries RESIDE on each county site, to address concerns about control, harvesting, etc., yet indexed them all in a central search engine." She regrets that her schedule does not allow her to lend her expertise to reprogramming QE. Holly Timm does not like the idea of forming a committee "to examine a predetermined system", but she agrees that "a query system committee should be formed to explore the various options available to a CC and even explore the possibility of no longer requiring a hands on CC *owned* query system but perhaps consider altering the option to require one or more links to available query *boards*." She is reluctant to support any single system. Joy says she is willing to chair the committee if she can get enough support from others. She also describes the functions and features of QE. Maggie Stewart believes that CCs should be able to choose the query system they use and thens spends considerable ink shilling for Ancestry/Root$web's new boards. She posts the following from the "team at Rootsweb": "We do value the CCs and the efforts they make to have the boards working to help them---we want that also. Our goals are the same. So please let them know that if they are a bit patient we will address any issues they have and either fix things or explain why that can't be done and work around it in the best manner for all concerned." Shari Handley agrees that "we should do something to provide an alternative to GenConnect/Ancestry." She is uncomfortable with CCs using the GenConnect boards, since queries are ultimately of their control, and feels "the GC boards only minimally satisfied the requirement that every site must provide a query page." She'd "like to see something that requires a minimum of time to manage, is customizable and editable, in which the queries are automatically and immediately posted (but may be edited or deleted later) and that is under the sole management of the individual CC." She will be happy to sit on any committee to explore it further. === Who Is Cindy Dahl? Corner: The minor furor over the new Ancestry/Root$web message boards proceeds apace. Root$web staff are taking their usual approach and begging our patience while they fix the more obvious problems all while assuring us that this is not the final setup and everything will be wonderful in the end. A few readers have noted to their dismay that Ancestry will not let you access the boards at all unless you accept all cookies. This seems a bit unnecesary and intrusive from a user's perspective, but it probably affects Ancestry's bottom line and so is not likely to change. The most interesting thing of all however has not been addressed by Root$web staff to my knowledge. Who is the mysterious Cindy Dahl? A number of users have reported that all GenConnect posts that were made originally without an email address have shown up in the new version as being submitted by someone named Cindy Dahl. This is rather upsetting to the large number of people who submitted transcriptions to the boards; their work appears now attributed to someone else. One user reports that over 7000 posts can be found attributed to her; most are transcribed original source records in which the email was left off deliberately. The only locality that I know the name of and which reported the problem yesterday appears to have been fixed; a search of the board turns up no posts by "Cindy Dahl". Hopefully this unfortunate little glitch has been fixed elsewhere as well. But it would be interesting to know who she is and how it happened that her name was affixed to all those records. === "... even a rebel grows old, and sometimes wiser. He finds the things he rebelled against are now the things he must defend against newer rebels..." ---Louis L'Amour This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved.