> Assuming the leadership will allow it, how hard is it to arrange a vote by
> members on the name change?

It's not so much an issue of 'allow'.  It's more a question of how can we do 
it in a reasonable and generally agreeable fashion.

First, before there can be a vote, there must be an agreement of the choices, 
and also a solid plan on who will do the work.  

As for voting, we thought about all of this a while back during the planning 
meetings:  whether we could organize tclug as a real organization, how voting 
could be done, etc.  

To allow voting, and to keep it fair, we would want to allocate one vote to 
each email address on the list (excluding addresses freshly registered during 
the balloting phase).  

One way is to have everyone send their votes to the list.  It could work, and 
would be transperant.  It also handles people who want to switch votes, and 
it leverages the mailing list to handle authentication.  

Otherwise, there's the old fashioned paper ballot, which requires meeting in 
person (and which skews the demographics to those who attend carbon-based 
meetings).  We could also create an 'electronic voting machine' with ruby or 
php, but that would be a PITA to do it in any fair way.

I think the list traffic caused by voting would be less than the traffic 
generated this week debating the issues, so I would be partial to that 
method.

Here are the questions:

1)  Do we want to take a vote?
2)  what are the choices to be considered?
3)  for each choice that requires action to be taken, who is implementing the 
solution, and how?  
4)  Shall we vote by replying to the list with a msg header that indicates the 
vote clearly,  or via some other method?
5)  Lastly, when is the deadline to begin voting (after which time the options 
should not be changed)?  And when do the polls close?  
  
If we have that info, we can do a vote right here on the list, with no 
additional software to write or ballots to print.  We would all see if it 
passed or not, and those who are implementing the solution could then 
proceed.

Jeremy


On Tuesday 07 October 2008 3:40:37 pm Mike Miller wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Jeremy wrote:
> > There is a difference between 'no leadership', and decentralized
> > control.  If there were no leadership, none of those things would get
> > done.  In some ways, it reflects the FOSS community, where everyone
> > pitches in to help.
> >
> > This is also why a name change is difficult.  For instance, when we
> > update the website, will we do more than change the logo and text, such
> > as modernize it? We've heard proposals about rewriting the website in
> > drupal, or rails, and all sorts of fancy stuff, but who will support it?
> > And I mean support it for many years.  RIght now it is stable and well
> > supported.
> >
> > From an operational point of view, If we change the name the risk of
> > disrupting the balance that supports tclug.  Yes, the switch sounds easy
> > on paper, like most projects, but I've thought it through, and it would
> > not be trivial.  And that assumes we can reach consensus one way or
> > another.
>
> Thanks for this info, Jeremy.
>
> Here's what I think:
>
> First, modernizing the web site is a separate issue that can be dealt with
> anytime or never.
>
> Second, I think we can continue to use the abbreviation TCLUG even if we
> choose to call the organization "Twin Cities GNU/Linux User Group."  I was
> the one who wrote about TCGLUG, not Stallman; he only said that he would
> meet with us if we changed the name to GNU/Linux User Group instead of
> Linux User Group -- he didn't say anything about the abbreviation.  I
> think the abbreviation is a secondary issue and the more important idea is
> to add "GNU" to the official name of the group.
>
> Third, I think a change to "Twin Cities GNU/Linux User Group (TCLUG)" will
> not be that hard to do if we retain TCLUG abbreviation.  Someone
> volunteered to update graphics for the web pages.  For web page text,
> something like this will probably work for you if run in appropriate
> directories:
>
> perl -pi.bak -e ''BEGIN{undef $/} ; s#(Linux\s+User)#GNU/$1#g' *.ht{m,ml}
>
> After that we'd probably want to add a few words about GNU and the
> goodness of Free Software.
>
> Assuming the leadership will allow it, how hard is it to arrange a vote by
> members on the name change?
>
> Mike
>
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