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Election2008

This page is for the election of the third Board of Directors of HCoop, Inc. Nominations shall be done in our usual wiki style. Voting shall be done through the HCoop portal. You may see last year's election results at ["Election2007"] or summarized on the BoardOfDirectors website.

This election is governed by articles 3 and 4 of our HcoopBylaws. All current members in good standing may vote for three candidates to replace the outgoing board, whose term expires on April 11, 2008.

Please list candidates to nominate below. You may nominate any current HCoop members, including yourself. Please list candidate names alphabetically by last name, and list your own name as the nominator.

Nominations may continue until March 31, 2008, 11:59 PM UTC. Voting on all candidates who have accepted their nominations shall begin on April 4, 2008 at midnight UTC and continue for one week through April 11, 2008 at midnight UTC.

1. Nominations

  1. DavorOcelic. Nominated by NathanKennedy.

  2. AdamChlipala. Nominated by FrankBynum.

  3. NathanKennedy Nominated by StephenTaylor.

  4. MichaelLeonhard, Nominated by RyanMikulovsky.

  5. JustinLeitgeb, Nominated by NathanKennedy.

  6. BjörnLindström, Nominated by NathanKennedy.

2. Candidate Acceptances

Nominees who accept their nominations must place their name here, along with any statement or links that they wish to make.

  1. AdamChlipala. Statement to follow Some Time Soon. ;-)

  2. NathanKennedy. I am a mathematics and computer science engineering graduate, a current law student, and a member of HCoop since January 2005. Since that time I have stepped up to do necessary tasks for the cooperative. I filed the necessary papers to incorporate HCoop, drafted our articles of incorporation and our bylaws, and have served as secretary on the board of directors. I helped negotiate our colocation arrangements at Peer 1 in New York, and have handled the hardware-wrangling end of things, from storing and moving various donated hardware components for several months, to installing and maintaining all our physical plant onsite at our current site at 75 Broad.

    • My current platform is an extension of my past platforms:
    • Keep entry-level dues to about $5/month--excluding subsidies from the current "pledge" scheme. HCoop has benefitted greatly by gifts from members, including these recurring cash gifts, but it is my goal to have sustainable entry-level dues remain at or less than $5 per month without subsidies. This will require expanding our membership base somewhat. We can do this by continuing to grow by word-of-mouth or other grassroots campaigns. I oppose spending money on conventional "push" advertising.
    • Move from the current system of bill-as-we-go to fixed monthly rates for fixed services. This will provide greater predictability, packages that can be compared to other providers, and a source of reserves for capital investments without begging or large, unpredictable charges.
    • Draft and implement the following policies:
      1. Privacy policy (already in progress)
      2. Conflict of interest policy
      3. Antidiscrimination policy. (Conflict of interest and antidiscrimination policies are important for compliance reasons, as well as generally avoiding liability, and just basic good governance.)
      4. Environmental policy--this is something I have been pushing for over a year now. As I pointed out on the list earlier, IT is now a greater contributor to greenhouse gasses than aviation, and businesses account for more than half of energy usage and carbon emissions. Even many of our commercial competitors have set extremely positive policies in this regard; Dreamhost is carbon neutral, for instance. We cannot as a cooperative afford to ignore environmental issues, especially with our growing amount of hardware and energy usage.
    • Maintain full compliance with all laws and regulations. In particular, implement better accounting policies. Move from our custom cash-based accounting system to an accrual-based, GAAP compliant system by the end of 2009. Have an independent audit in 2010. Be prepared to file a standard 990 in 2011 with audited books.
    • Make sure there full coverage with competent sysadmin staff. Look into a schedule for hiring paid staff. Plan for continuity for physical maintenance when I may no longer be available for this purpose after 2009.
  3. DavorOcelic. Statement to follow.

  4. JustinLeitgeb. I am a member of HCoop since 2005, and was involved with planning for the new infrastructure at Peer 1. I hold a BA in Computer Science, an MA in Sociology, and I'm currently finishing up coursework for a second MA in the Romance Languages. I also have experience working as a developer/admin for an internet company. Currently I dedicate most of my time to Ruby on Rails development for an academic project related to language study.

    • If elected as a board member, I would use my position to:
    • Support a hosting plan, or set of plans, which is sustainable for the Cooperative without the current system of pledges or subsidies. In the past I've made substantial donations to the Cooperative, but I feel that since we are a Cooperative, instead of a non-profit, we need to establish regular rates or packages that allow room for payment of our monthly fees, repairs, and upgrades for capacity and redundancy without having to rely on donations. By increasing membership, we can implement a program such as this without increasing rates by very much, or at all.
    • Lead initiatives to grow membership, though not through online advertising campaigns. Instead, I would help to organize educational materials on the unique services that HCoop offers and on our distributed configuration tools, and I would present this to a local Linux Users Group. I would help to organize and encourage others to give similar talks to local Linux Users Groups and students in Computer Science Departments, especially in areas like New York City where we could potentially use volunteers to provide on-site service. In this sense, I would use my board position to form a role for a "director of education" which helps to increase HCoop visibility while working towards increasing our membership base with technically-savvy and curious Linux users.
    • Support an environmental policy, including a carbon-offset program for our servers.
    • Help with plan for eventual hiring of paid staff.
    • Start discussions among members and the board, and begin to organize volunteers to design a web-based interface to manage domains through domtool. Having such an interface would be one of the best ways to make our services accessible to a broader audience, and we should be in a good position to do this with our new infrastructure and domain management tools that AdamChlipala created. I would be willing to initiate the design of such an application in Ruby on Rails, if there is enough interest and support for this direction among current members, board directors, and system administrators.

  5. BjörnLindström. Statement to follow.


Previous elections: