Hello Everyone,
It’s been a year since our current board members were elected, so it’s time for new elections.
As a quick recap for folks that haven’t been around, or need a reminder:
Board member positions last for one year.
Any supporting member is eligible to vote for board members.
Any supporting member is eligible to run for a position on the board.
There is no limit on the number of board members, so if you want to run and participate, you’re not taking a spot away from anyone else.
There is a minimum number of 3 board members.
Supporting members are those who have contributed at the Basic level ($20/mo) (or more) for the last 6 months.
Voting is open for 7 days.
Each board member is a separate “election”, IE you don’t have to choose one person to vote for, you choose Yay or Nay for all individuals.
Please respond to the list with your votes, the list serves as our public record.
Here’s our current list of supporting members (the folks who are eligible to vote on directors, or run for director themselves) (Thank you Cory for pulling this together):
Bart Kus
Bob Edmiston
Carl Leon
Cory Johnson
David Giuliani
Doug Kingston
David Yost
Dylan Ambauen
Ian Gallagher
Jim Hudspeth
Kenny Richards
Marc Lacy
Mark Sheppard
Mikel Shirley
Nick Hall
Nigel Vander Houwen
Robert Salsgiver
Ronald Zuber
Ryan Cukierman
Ryan Turner
Terence Chan
Tom Hayward
Randy Neals
I’d like to thank everyone for contributing to the project, and helping us grow. We’ve seen a handful of new members added this year, in addition to quite a few new non-member users/orgs. This speaks greatly to the massive efforts of a number of folks in the project doing installs, giving presentations, and talking about HamWAN.
We’ve seen a lot of great progress over the past year, not to mention a number of new users on the network. Here’s a small sampling of some of the things accomplished over the past year.
Quite a handful of new Network Operations folks have been brought on, and are quickly tackling issues and making improvements. Thanks team!
A couple visits to our Capitol Park site saw new backbone links installed, sector upgrades, and additional batteries in case of power outage.
Phone adoption has been taking off considerably with ACS and other emergency services folks on board.
Gear installed at Buck
Gear installed at Beacon Hill
Gear installed at Larch
Work at the Seattle EOC
Upgrade work at Snohomish County DEM
Upgrade work at Haystack
Upgrade and repair work at Gold
New edge router at FMT as a partial replacement for Tukwila, which gives us internet facing redundancy
Aiming visit to Baw Faw
Probably a bunch more that I forgot or managed to scroll past in my emails.
All of these things and more have been the results of massive efforts of a whole lot of people this year. Thanks to every one of you for making this happen. HamWAN is entirely volunteer driven which makes such an enormous undertaking even more remarkable. Whether your contribution was in time onsite tightening bolts, or with a few dollars that helps us buy new modems and dishes, it’s all been valued. Thank you.
So, to the final point. It’s time to vote again on the board directors. For the past year Bart Kus, Cory Johnson, Rob Salsgiver, Doug Kingston, and myself have acted as the board for HamWAN. I have appreciated their work over the past year, and if they choose, I hope to continue doing so this year.
Cory Johnson - Cory has graciously handled HamWAN’s financial and legal filings and reports. I’m incredibly grateful for his efforts. Thank you Cory!
Bart Kus - Bart continues to put enormous effort into the physical aspects of the network, particularly in his gracious hosting of our site at Haystack, some software projects, as well as acting as an administrator for the Puget Sound network day to day. Thank you Bart!
Rob Salsgiver - Rob has been a significant driver in terms of organizing what work needs to be done in the network, and making sure it gets taken care of. In addition to that, he has been coming up to speed as a Network Operations member, and has been tackling a number of issues.
Doug Kingston - Doug has been part of a number of big wins for the network over the past year, both in terms of new sites, as well as getting projects done and maintaining existing ones. He has additionally been working on Network Operations and has jumped in to tackle issues that the rest of the team hadn’t been able to get to.
Nigel Vander Houwen - (me) I handle much of our contract work, and record keeping around technical aspects like LoAs, I serve as a day to day network administrator, and have helped deploy and maintain some of the on-network services, occasionally I manage to make a site visit to help out, and I handle things like the email you’re reading now.
I have spoken with Bart, Rob, and Doug with regards to serving on the board again this upcoming year. Rob and Doug have graciously offered to continue serving. Bart has chosen to step away from the Board work and focus on the other aspects of HamWAN and I look forward to our continued work.
For anyone who wishes to run for the board, please send an email to the mailing list announcing your intention to run (You’ll see mine momentarily as an example). The voting period on your election will end 7 days after your announcement. Duties are not time intensive, and mostly consist of being available for occasional calls to approve expenses, and assisting HamWAN in whichever ways your time and/or skills/knowledge allow.
Thank you all for reading this rather long email, and I hope to work with you all here in this next year.
Nigel Vander Houwen
