Letters to the Editor

By: Michael Grant
To: Warren Bonner

WB> I suggested in the distant past, that a "Election Chairman Office" be established on a permenamt bassis to handle elections. An ECO echo. The duties of this office could be handled by a designated RC, by the collective wisdom of the RCC.

MG> I like this idea, Warren, but would take it a step further, and say why should a possible Election Chariman have to be an RC? It seems to me this is a very different thing from the duties of an RC, and could be handled quite aptly even by someone with no experience in nodelist processing. All that would be required would be some prior experience in running an election, and knowledge of the accepted guidelines. Furthermore, I feel if an RC were to take on this role, it could tend to be a fair-sized distraction to his RC duties.

WB> Point well taken. Sysop be appointed by collective consensus of the RCC.... would that work?

By: Tony Campbell
web: http://www.fidotel.com/public/fidonews
FTP: ftp://ftp.fidotel.com (comprehensive archive of every Fidonews ever published)

Thank you, Shannon Talley 1:275/311 sysop@fidotel.com

-=ALSO=-

Ahem, the ONLINE readable complete collection is at:
http://www.TheLitterBox.org/fido [faulty URL [jb 4/25/01]] update: http://www.thelitterbox.net/fido/.

Thank you Tony.

By: Darrell Salter

No one's blaming you for that and no one can predict the future. At least FIDOPOLS would have been a public forum where interested parties could have voiced their opinions. As the moderator you could have kept the threads on track and progress could have been made by involving the right people, the sysops. Dave Hamilton pointed me towards the echo some months back and I 'fixed it, but it was too late apparently.

Just thinking out loud here but I still maintain that too much is expected of *Cs and there is not enough sysop involvement. *Cs should be left to tend to nodelist duties and the real direction and decision making should be left to the sysops of which there are many capable ones. A *C with too many responsibilities can quickly become overwhelmed with work and expectations no matter how hard they try. Besides their nodelist duties a lot of them pull extra-duty as mail movers, representatives, arbitrators, bean counters, new- sysop advisors, moderators, etc. with the result being that few of these jobs get done as well as they might and the *Cs and the sysops lose sight of the hobby. *Cs get super-experienced and the sysops get left out and disinterested.

If David had stuck to tending the nodelist would he have been able to serve out his term? I don't know but I'd guess he probably could and if he couldn't, wouldn't it be great to know that there are lots of sysops around with experience tending the nodelist? David could have come to the sysops and said 'hey guys, I'm just too busy these days to carry on in this role'. The sysops could have selected someone and sent him on his way. Done deal! Same goes for any *C. But when you've got a *C that has hung on to the job seemingly forever like Satti did, and when *Cs pass the jobs amongst each other instead of bringing in new faces and fresh blood, it appears to me almost everyone around them drops off and loses interest.

Most of the sysops here are involved in the jobs of Fidonet to some degree. If each of us did a job for a while and handed off that job to someone new fairly regularly, in a few short years you'd have loads of involved, knowledgable, sysops. You wouldn't have the large gap of sysops that know what's going on and ones that don't. Sure there'll always be those that simply don't want to get involved but there's no way that every capable sysop in this hobby is being given the opportunity to contribute and without those contributions this network is going to continue to falter.

Darrell
darrell@sprk.com
http://sparkys.dyndns.org
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