Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 13:44:46 -0500 
From: Nanci Ann Miller <nm0w+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: The INL council (was about INL scheduling)
	<1eq4rmINN3d3@agate.berkeley.edu>

tom@soda.berkeley.edu (Tom Holub) writes:
> There are solutions to this that should be worked out in council, not
> on the net.
> 
> Before I go on with this post, let me say that I think it's really 
> stupid to take a proposal that's before the INL council, and to which a 
> number of INL council members have provided objections, and posting
> it to the net as if it's a brand new thing, and failing to attach
> any of our arguments.  Public discussion is fine, but self-serving
> propaganda is not what the INL needs.

The council as I (and I'm sure many other people) see it is a
representative group of netrek players who organize and make the rules for
the INL.  They have the final say for how things work so that we don't
argue about everything on RGN for the whole semester.  However, I feel that
others should at least be able to give their input and to know what
decisions and propoaslas are currently before the council.  How can council
members vote on things fairly if they don't know what the genereal opinion
is?  Obviously discussing every single little thing that comes up on RGN is
counterproductive but I think that major things like the scheduling system
deserves input from people who are in the INL but not on the council.  For
those who weren't around when it happened (or don't remember) I will tell
you how the council was created.

Near the end of the summer last summer (when many of the people who are in
school were still away for summer vacation), Tom posted to RGN that anyone
who wanted to be on the INL council should send him mail and he would pick
the councilmembers from those who expressed an interest.  Rob and I (and I
assume there were others from CMU) sent mail saying that we were interested
and somehow Tom decided that Rob was the bast pick (I don't resent this, I
think Rob is a very good person to have on the council - but I don't know
how Tom decided this).  If other people would have been back, it is very
possible that others would have been interested.  I realize that it was
probably done this way because the council was needed quickly and Tom was
the best person to put it together since he had done the bulk of the
organizing in the first year of the INL.  However, since the council and
INL has been so successful, perhaps we should try to make it a bit more
representative.

An idea of how to do this would be for interested people to submit their
names and then each school (or region or whatever) would vote on who they
want as their councilmember.  We could put restrictions on the people who
sign up saying that they have to be around for the summer, etc....  We
should probably vote in a new council once a year or so just to get some
new faces involved.

This should NOT be done during the summer when fewer people are around and
people who submit their names should be those who feel they can be
impartial and not vote down things that come out of one particular place
not because it isn't a good proposal but because it came from that place.
(If the ladder proposal had come from somewhere other than CMU - Berkeley
for instance, would Tom have shot it down so vehemently?  I wonder....)

I realize that there are a lot of things that need to be solidified and
clarified about this (like how the votes/proposals will be taken and
counted, etc...) but what do people think of it as an idea?

Nanci