At 11:41 AM 6/10/00 -0400, Debbie Barrett wrote: >To any board members out there (Holly, Tina, Tim), I have some questions >regarding the upcoming election. I understand the renaming of the USGenWeb >Archives project, that's no biggie, but what about the recall and States >Rights issues. Don't understand what is to be accomplished with these, nor >the reasons behind them. Could one of you give us some insight into these >issues? short break over.... ice cold RC Cola at hand (it is in the mid 90's out there!) The so-called States Rights amendment..... This monster is too huge! There is no way to I want to spend your time and mine discussing every line. Unless and until it actually makes it on to the ballot I am going to restrict my remarks to just a few points. Again, I refer you to the full text at: http://www.usgenweb.org/official/amendments.html Right off in the introductory paragraph, I see factual mistatements intended to imply that national has run amuck. I quote: "threats of removal of more than one State Project (including OHGenWeb and NEGenWeb" ---- yes, a board member made a motion to "accept the resignation of OHGenWeb" it never made it to discussion and vote as it was withdrawn approximately 14 hours afterwards when the situation was corrected. What was this situation? The OHGenWeb SC had links on the main page reading USGenWeb, USGenWeb Archives and the USGenWeb logo. BUT, these links did not go to those locations, they went instead to: http://www.radix.net/~merope/usgwcd.htm A page which is still there as I write this. Now, protest is one thing but not only did this involve any visitors to the OHGenWeb main page in internal USGenWeb politics making us all look bad no matter what out involvement but the links weren't going where they said were. This was done without any input or knowledge by Ohio CC's and as soon as they were aware of it and put up a protest on their mail list, the page was corrected which is when the motion was withdrawn. --- sorry, guys but putting this up as a "threat to remove a State Project" ???? [I can be real explicit about the events there because I am an Ohio CC]. At no time was NeGenWeb threatened with delinking. A motion was made and passed regarding pages being out of compliance and not in good standing for flying the illegal blackened logo, no mention or threat of delinking. The balance of the statements in that section of the intro are just as skewed and anyone who wants to may write me and I will discuss those points, I'm just not gonna spend everybodies time on them. Into the amendment itself.... basically what it does is change USGenWeb into 50 XXGenWeb state projects... oooops, 51 counting DC... with a national page linking to them all. A national webmaster is to be elected (the Board etc is GONE) ... a webmaster who can not change anything on the pages without a vote, not even correct a link if a site moves, technically, the way it is written the webmaster can't even change a typo without a vote although that may be *winked at*. The Special projects are reorganized in the same manner with national webmasters but again, they are operated and controlled at the state level, the present ones are done away with, split up amongst the states. So each and every state would now have the responsibility (burden?) of maintaining and managing any and all Special Projects --- Archives, Census, Tombstone, Maps, Pensions whatever. Is Wisconsin ready to do that? Maybe.... Wisconsin is fortunate to already have a good representation in the national level ones and maybe Wisconsin could and would be able to do this. But think of the researcher, think of other states where you yourself are researching, what if they can't or don't want to? Anyway... long enough for now but again, feel free to communicate any questions... I did try to keep it short <grin> Holly