Diverse Neuigkeiten

11. Wahl des Anwender-Vertreters im ICOA muß wiederholt werden

Wegen Unstimmigkeiten wurde beschlosssen, die Wahl des Anwender-Vertreters für das "Steering Committee" des ICOA (Industry Council for Open AMIGA) zu wiederholen. Noch bis zum 30. Mai kann jeder, der in diese Funktion gewählt werden möchte, seine Kandidatur anmelden. Anschließend finden die Wahlen statt. Alle Einzelheiten sind der folgenden Information zu entnehmen:

»The 1998 ICOA User Representative election
An election was started at the beginning of March to appoint a User Representative to the ICOA's Steering Committee for the next year. The election was run by the Jay Miner Society, which was appointed by the Transitional Steering Committee of the ICOA to do this. Nominations were opened for a period of two weeks, and voting began a week after that for another two weeks.

It was clear from the beginning that this was a tight schedule, and a number of mistakes were made. The nomination period was too short and not sufficiently well publicised. The voting was also poorly publicised. As a result, several potential candidates were unable to complete their nominations in time, and others may have unaware of the election until it was too late. A disappointingly small number of votes was cast, and three of the candidates were all but tied, with several fraudulent votes making it difficult to decide clearly whether any had won.

After consultation with the candidates, the Steering Committees of the ICOA and the JMS decided to begin the election again. The JMS will be working closely with Team Amiga, the User Group Network, and Amiga magazines to make as many people as possible aware of the election and able to vote.

Nominations
Nominations will be open until 30th May. Please make your readers aware that they can nominate candidates if they are quick!

Here's the text from the original press release about the role of User Representative:

"The User Rep will have a full voting seat on the Steering Committee for a period of one year, alongside the four seats for those elected by ICOA members and a permanent non-voting veto seat occupied by an Amiga Inc representative. This position, combining the roles of consumer advocate, opinion-gatherer, strategist and community liaison, will require a serious commitment of time and effort. The JMS and other user organizations will provide support for this. The Committee will have face-to-face meetings roughly every 3 months, and will also attend selected Amiga shows. Expenses incurred by the User Rep in attending these events will be paid for by the ICOA."

Postal nominations require:

Nominations should be sent to:

USA/Canada Andrew Bienhaus 90 Farr Crescent Cambridge Ontario N3C 1R6 Canada

UK Ben Hutchings 19 Lewell Avenue Marston Oxford OX3 0RL

Voting
The list of candidates should be announced on 2nd June, on the JMS web site, other Amiga news web sites, newsgroups, and BBSs. If your readers can get access to the WWW, USENET, or Fidonet, then they should be able to get the list of candidates and their statements.

Please print some kind of distinctive voting form in your magazine. This should limit the potential for voting fraud (which, as I said, did occur in the previous cancelled election). I've attached a grey-scale copy of the election logo to this message; perhaps you could include that in the form?

Postal votes must include:

It will also be possible to vote on the WWW or by e-mail (Internet or Fidonet). Details will be announced later through those networks.

Election web site
The URL is . This is where the full rules of the election, statements, press releases, voting forms, etc, will be available. Please include the URL in your report.

Ben Hutchings -- should be revising | Jay Miner Society:
http://www.jms.org/ m95bwh@ecs.ox.ac.uk   |
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0223/   |   IRC: Womble Never put off till
tomorrow what you can avoid all together.«