Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 04:27:50 -0600 To: "Jim Powell, Jr., USGenWeb Southeast/Mid-Atlantic Region CC Representative" <jpowelljr@gru.net>, "Teri Pettit, USGenWeb Southeast/Mid-Atlantic Region CC Representative" <pettit@adobe.com> From: C Hammett <CarHammett@mindspring.com> Subject: Commercial Abuse Grievance #1 Cc: TNGenWeb CC List <TN-All@egroups.com>, USGW-CC-L@USGenNet.Org In accordance with the USGenWeb Project Bylaws, Article XIV, GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES AND APPEALS PROCESS, this email is to request that the USGenWeb Project Advisory Board arrange for an impartial party to mediate the following grievance against the USGenWeb Project Advisory Board, National Coordinator Tim Stowell and National Webmaster Pam Reid; to wit: The USGenWeb Project is an unincorporated not-for-profit association (USGenWeb Bylaws, Article III), yet includes the following commercial advertisement on its main page at http://www.usgenweb.org/index.html: "...The USGenWeb National website is hosted by RootsWeb [http://www.rootsweb.com]. Please consider visiting them to find out how you can help keep genealogy on the Internet free and available to everyone." While a linked acknowledgement of a website's host is permitted by the Bylaws (Article IX, Section 2), the second sentence above is commercial advertising in that Rootsweb.com, Inc., a commercial corporation, solicits contributions from visitors to its site, based on the company's claim that contributions result in making "huge amounts of genealogical data freely available to Internet genealogists." Should the offending sentence be removed immediately, this grievance may be considered inactive so long as the sentence remains deleted. Carole Hammett Warren Co, TNGenWeb CC http://www.tngenweb.org/warren/