Yes, I woke up the other day and realized that it is almost election time again - March. As most of you will recall, elections last year were sort of like an anarchist's vision of democracy: tortured and surreal. Anyhow, the big pledge of your current board (aside from my own free coffee and donut shameless campaign promises) was to get on with incorporating SCOUG and dealing with any tax issues.

To date, our results are mixed. On the plus side we do have a CPA and the tax folks have been contacted and have either forgotten us or moved on to bigger targets like Enron. But we have yet to incorporate. However, Robert Blair (thanks, Bob!) has taken on that thankless task, and we're optimistic this legal hurdle will be completed within a couple of months.

If last year is an any indication, until incorporation is completed, I somehow doubt that anyone is going to be too seriously interested in having elections and running for office. (Go ahead, prove me wrong; I'd love it if you did.) So, I'm proposing the following interim plan:

1. The current board agrees to stay in place and gets "re-elected" on a 'white ballot' in March.

2. Anyone who would like to be on the board is more than welcome to volunteer before then; just contact one of the current Board members and we'll include you in the March election process. As you can surmise, we aren't anticipating a flood of volunteers.

3. After all the incorporation stuff is done we can revisit the issue of elections and have another - and formal - election if people want to at that time.

Your board is proposing this course of action for several reasons. Attendance is up, we have a good speaker lineup for the spring, and folks just seem to be enjoying themselves. You could say, we're in the zone. We don't want to lose this momentum by becoming embroiled in interminable debate over the intricacies of the various flavors of nonprofit incorporation or what forms the CPA should file. Hey, we're OS/2 computer geeks, and proud of it!

Think about this proposal and then contact me or any board member with your comments. We can talk about this a bit at our February meeting, and then if you all concur, we'll implement it in March.

Now, let's get back to what's important - having fun!

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