On Jan 7, 2011, at 5:30 PM, Aaron McCaleb wrote: > As I remember it, we were originally supposed to retain the name > "SAGE". As the proposed date of separation began to approach, there > were beginning to be breakdowns in negotiations between "new SAGE" and > USENIX.
Correct. What was then the recently elected SAGE Board wanted to do a lot of things for their membership that USENIX had no interest in doing, could not see the value in doing, or actively wanted to avoid doing. So, the idea of what was thought to be an amicable split was conceived. But then the cracks started developing. > At the 11th hour, USENIX > advised the "new SAGE" board...perhaps with apologies and regrets, and > perhaps not...that their legal counsel was not certain USENIX could > legally release or license their copyright or trademark on the SAGE > name or acronym without potentially threatening their non-profit > status. IIRC, there were a lot of claims made in the ultimatum that came down from USENIX, but the biggest one that had any possibility of any factual basis was their concern about keeping their tax-exempt status, and how long it normally takes to get confirmed tax-exempt status for a new entity, and how much longer the process to get tax-exempt status had recently gotten due to problems inside the IRS, etc... as compared to when the "new SAGE" organization wanted to be in existence. > Upon receipt of this news, for whatever reason, "new SAGE" proceeded > with establishing the new organization. I don't know if they had no > choice but to proceed. It was proceed or die. USENIX completely killed off the STG known as SAGE, and brought all responsibilities for everything in-house. It is now nothing more than a label, because all the same work is done by all the same people, regardless of whether the hat they are wearing at the moment officially says SAGE or USENIX on it. > So the new organization was to be established NOW, but "SAGE" couldn't > be used, so a new name had to be chosen on the spot and "LOPSA" was > it. I don't remember any discussion on the lists. There were no mass > emails. Nothing. All that discussion happened internally to the "new SAGE" board, because they were still in the process of getting the new resources online and didn't have a way to communicate with their members that did not depend on USENIX, and there were certain deadlines that had to be met for the new organization to be created, if it was going to exist at all. In essence, we were given an eviction notice by the old management, and the police had already shown up to throw us out the door. You're under the gun -- what do you do? > Now, from my perspective, I knew SAGE was working to become it's own > organization. My understanding was that we were retaining "SAGE" as > our name. "Guild" was a little wierd, but I knew of the Screen Actors > Guild...and, well..."Guild" does satisfy a certain geek sensibility, > so I'm good with that. There was a desire to license the SAGE intellectual property (including the name), but USENIX has never responded on that issue. So, we had no rights to any of that property and although I'm sure they've gone back more than once to find out if we could now go ahead and get it since we have spun off and we now have confirmed tax-exempt status. So, at this point, USENIX has pretty much guaranteed that there will never be a transfer of that intellectual property to LOPSA, and we have no choice but to continue to try to forge ahead as best we can without it. > So I'm sitting here in Houston. The closest member of which I'm aware > is in Austin...which isn't exactly "close" at all. That was probably Travis Campbell, or maybe me. >From my perspective, when I was interested in co-founding a LOPSA local >organization here in Austin, I didn't want it to be state-wide. Texas is not >New Jersey, and is too big to assume that a single LOPSA local organization >would be sufficient to cover the entire state. So, LOPSA-Austin was >appropriate for us, but Houston being three or four hours away could very well >reasonably have their own local group. > I'm worried about whether this is > going to be a repeating pattern...namely, that further decisions > governing "our" professional association are always going to be made > by handful of folks that, for all I know, are half a continent away, > with vague apologies on the lines of, "Oh...you had an opinion on > that? Oops. Sorry. We didn't have time." (Note: That worry has NOT > been justified.) When you hire someone to do a job for you (including acting as the board of directors of an organization of which you are a member), one of the things you are hiring them for is their ability to do things in the best reasonable manner they can, when there is an emergency or other tight time frame and there is no option to contact other people and to see what they want to have happen. If you can't trust them to do that, then you have no business hiring them for that job. > And I can't sell the organization to new members if I don't really > understand what shared, pervasive problems the organization can > address now, or wants to address in the future...and when I personally > haven't experienced any tangible benefit. Yup, that's the problem in a nutshell. > And yet, I know from > members of _other_ professional associations that there are many > possibile benefits to being a member of a viable association. So, out of curiosity -- What benefits do you see as being valuable that other associations provide and which LOPSA does not? -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
