@{d E6F8FF} The Transitional Steering Committee for the Industry Council Open Amiga is pleased to welcome Harv Laser as the first ICOA User Representative. Harv is well known in the Amiga community having been the moderator of PLink, Portal, and now AmigaZone. Harv is frequently on irc, in the newgroups, almost everywhere else Amigan's can be found. Harv will also be making an appearance at AmiWest 98 July 10-13. Harv Laser will take his place on the ICOA Steering Committee On Monday 20 July, 1998 when the balance of the Steering Committee is announced. ____________________________ Harv Laser ŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻ Election statement by Harv Laser Harv Laser, 48, resides in Torrance, CA. USA and has been an Amiga owner, user, sysop, writer and advocate since he bought his A1000 on Oct. 7, 1985. His current stable includes an A1200/030, an A2500/060, a CDTV, and a mountain of peripherals, add-ons, accessories, and software. Harv has run the AmigaZone, an online service for Amiga owners since 1985. (The Zone resided on the People/Link service from 1985-1991, then moved to Portal from 1991-1996 and is now hosted by CalWeb Internet Services.) During those years, Harv has met, corresponded with, chatted and interacted with and helped literally tens of thousands of Amiga owners learn more about, and get more pleasure and productivity out of their computers. He's a frequent poster to Usenet newsgroups, and a frequent denizen of the #amiga channels on IRC. Harv's written a couple hundred Amiga articles, reviews, columns and opinion pieces for over a dozen Amiga-specific magazines including Amiga World, .info, Compute, Amazing Computing, Amiga+, AmNews, Amiga Computing, CU-Amiga, Video Toaster User, AmigoTimes and many more. Besides the just plain folks who own Amigas, Harv has known, dealt with, beta tested for, and written manuals for many Amiga development and product companies, and has met hundreds of developers over the years, at the Amiga expos and shows he's attended, and at Amiga DevCons. The ICOA User Rep should not only be an Amiga devotee and advocate, but be familiar with the developer community, and know the products, what they can do, and the people who create them. The ability to hear a user's problem or complaint, and then quickly point them towards a solution is one of Harv's specialties. The User Rep should have lots of contacts and associations, be able to communicate effectively and with ease, and be a name familiar to the Amiga community. Harv qualifies on all of these counts.