please vote for new SPI Board members

I gather that we haven't yet met quorum for the Board member election.

It is very important that SPI's contributing members vote. I saw a lot
of passion on this list back in December and I personally would not like
to see that momentum get lost.

If you were unaware that there was an election underway, please take the
time to subscribe to the spi-announce mailing list.

http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-announce

Here is a part of Wichert Akkerman (the SPI Secretary's) call for votes
message:

At its January 7, 2003 meeting the board of directors accepted
resolution 2003-01-06.wta.1, which details the procedure for extending
the board with three new members.

During the period from January 25 to February 7 (UTC) contributing
members can cast their vote online. People who become contributing
members during this period are also eligible for voting. The voting
system can be found at the following address:

https://members.spi-inc.org/vote/

Votes will be counted using the "Concordet" election method system which
will be used to select the most preferred candidate. Conceptually, the
election will be broken into a a series of pairwise races between each
possible paring of the candidates. If one candidate beats each of the
others in pairwise races, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the
"Cloneproof/Schwartz Sequential Dropping" method is employed to choose
the most preferred candidate from those remaining.

As such, vote preferences should be made by ranking the candidates. A
vote that simply specifies "X" is does not imply preference. Your
preference will be shown best when you specify all candidates in order
of preference (i.e. "XYZWTUV"). Voting "XY" implies that you prefer
candidate X to candidate Y but will not affect the races between X and
the other candidates or Y and the other candidates.

Some background reading on preferential voting and Concordet is
available online at http://www.electionmethods.org/ .

Please participate! SPI is *your* organization.

--
G. Branden Robinson, Treasurer
Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
treasurer(at)spi-inc(dot)org
http://www.spi-inc.org/