Guest Editorial

Conflict of Interest
Douglas Myers

It's been over 30 years since I took a journalism course, and it was at Penn State, a university more known for its linebackers than it's journalists. An ethical standard then, and still a good idea today, was for a writer to disclose any personal interest he may have in an article. I have submitted such an article for publication in this week's edition of Fidonews - a news piece concerning the Zone 1 Echo Coordinator election. You should know that I intend to run as a candidate if the office is to be determined by a sysop-level election. I don't plan to campaign at the moment figuring such activity is better reserved until the election is actually set, but I do plan to inform.

That's my potential conflict of interest. Now let's discuss your conflict if you're a zone 1 sysop.

There may not be another election for this position where the zone 1 sysops may vote directly. The reason, if I may paraphrase the analysis of one particularly eloquent writer in the ZEC echo, is that the last one sucked. I've briefly discussed the last election in the article itself, but here I'd like to focus on one of the more significant objections: In the last ZEC election, only about 6% of the sysops in zone 1 cast a ballot. Opponents of an election for this office say it's because sysops are too apathetic to vote. Proponents claim that the "grunt" sysops just didn't get the word about the election.

The decision on how the ZEC position is to be filled rests in the hands of the Regional Echo Coordinator's Council. It's being decided right now, and there's still time for you, as a sysop, to have a voice in this decision. If you have an opinion right now, you need only to get it to your Regional Echo Coordinator (REC). If you don't know who he (or she) is, your own net's NEC or NC would be able to tell you. If you want to hear what others are saying about this election, or if you want to express yourself in an interactive setting, join the ZEC conference. ZEC (and all the other confereces mentioned in the article) are publicly available echos carried by the BACKBONE and FIDOSPINE and can be had wherever you get your echomail.

In my opinion, the upcoming decision by the RECC goes beyond merely filling the ZEC position right now. The ZEC is the only zone 1 office to ever be decided by a vote in which all sysops were elegible to cast a ballot. It was an experiment, and if the RECC decides that the experiment was a failure, then it's unlikely that "grunt" sysops will ever cast a ballot for a zone 1 office again.

So now we come to your own conflict of interest: if you've read this far, then you know what's going on. You know what's at stake, and you know what you can do about it. You can choose to act on it now, or simply let others make the decision for you.

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