Report of the Nominating Committee

Chair, USENIX Nominating Committee

The USENIX nominating committee has beaten the bushes over the past few months searching for a superb slate of candidates for the 2000 biennial election of the USENIX Board of Directors. And we have found them. Our nominations are:

Dan Geer, @Stake, for President
Kirk McKusick, Consultant, for Vice President
Andrew Hume, AT&T Research, for Treasurer
Mike Jones, Microsoft Research, for Secretary
John Gilmore, Electronic Frontier Foundation, for Director
Jon "maddog" Hall, Linux International, for Director
Dirk Hohndel, Suse Linux, for Director
Darrell Long, University of California, Santa Cruz, for Director
Marcus Ranum, Network Flight Recorder, for Director
Avi Rubin, AT&T Research, for Director

Two key positions on the USENIX Board are the President and Treasurer. The president must provide vision and guidance for the organization, as well as interface with the staff and chair the board meetings. The treasurer is responsible for not only keeping an eagle eye on finances but also for advising USENIX on investing its endowment funds.

Andrew Hume has served as USENIX President for the last four years Dan served as both Vice President and Treasurer (two years each). We are nominating Dan for President and Andrew for treasurer. Both have done superb jobs in their respective positions, and it is our hope that by broadening each of their focuses, the team can be even more effective than it has been in the past.

Dan Geer is well known as a visionary, and we believe that the role of President will give him an opportunity to do for USENIX what he has done for any of a number of different organizations. Andrew wrote the software that gives AT&T real time auditing capabilities of all our long distance phone bills, so we hope to take advantage of his expertise to maintain and grow the financial stability of the organization.

In short, both Andrew and Dan have enormous skill sets and by changing their positions, we hope to take even better advantage of them.

We are nominating Kirk McKusick to run for the position of Vice President. Kirk is a past President of the USENIX and represents both the academic community as well as the free software constituency. Kirk has a PhD in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley; he was the Research Computer Scientist for Berkeley's Computing Systems Research Group (the people who brought you BSD); and is now an instructor at both UC Berkeley and UCLA. He has recently been quite active in the development and evolution of the Freenix track at the USENIX Technical Conference and is serving as its program chair at the USENIX Annual Conference in June 2000.

We are nominating Mike Jones for the position of Secretary. Mike has been an active participant in the USENIX community for the past decade. He earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University working on the Mach project and has been a researcher in Microsoft's Research Lab for the past several years. Mike publishes regularly in USENIX conferences, has served on a number of program committees (the Annual Technical Conference, OSDI and Window/NT), and was instrumental in starting the USENIX Windows NT Symposia, and will be program co-chair for OSDI 2000. Mike brings a strong academic bent, as well as boundless energy and a commitment to USENIX.

We have nominated six candidates to run for the four positions of Director at large. The most important criteria for board members is their willingness and ability to get things done and work together productively. Your board does a tremendous amount of work for you and for the organization, and we need eight actively engaged members. For each of the candidates we are nominating for Director at large, we outline the constituency they represent and the particular strengths that led to their nomination. In the election materials that members will receive in March, the candidates themselves will issue statements describing their backgrounds and goals for serving as board members.

Alphabetically:

John Gilmore was an early employee of Sun and Cygnus and is a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has been very active in the societal side of UNIX and the whole IT movement. John has been outspoken and effective at challenging things like the Computer Decency Act, the alleged safety of 40 bit keys for cryptographic use, the export controls legislation, etc. He brings to the board a wider view than previous board members.

Jon (Maddog) Hall is currently serving his first term as a USENIX board member. Maddog was a UNIX supporter at Digital for many years, and now is affiliated with VA Linux and Linux International. He is a strong representative of the Linux community and cares very deeply about the interaction and relationship between the USENIX and Linux communities. As a current board member, he adds an element of depth to the slate of nominees.

Dirk Hohndel got started with UNIX as a sysadmin managing Suse Linux systems while he was a Computer Science student at Würzburg University. After finishing his Masters degree he went to a startup, on to Deutsche Bank and is now with Suse Linux in Germany. He may be best known to our community for his work on the XFree86 window system for PCs which he did in his spare time and still helps maintain. Dirk wants to strengthen the bond between the USENIX and Linux communities.

Darrell Long is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has been a member of the board's scholastic committee for the past few years, served on several program committees, and publishes at USENIX conferences regularly. Darrell adds academic representation to the board. He is concerned with maintaining the high quality of our conferences.

Marcus Ranum is well known in the security and SAGE communities and a frequent USENIX tutorial speaker. Marcus was program chair of the Intrusion Detection workshop and has served on several program committees. Marcus has been running his own small company, Network Flight Recorder, that sells a security monitoring software package used by system administrators.

Avi Rubin is a young researcher at AT&T and an adjunct faculty member at New York University. He has been program chair for both the Security conference and for the General Conference. Avi became involved with USENIX as a student when he published his first paper here; now 6 years and many papers later, he is ready to start giving back to the organization. Avi is a finisher, gets things done, and will be a hard worker on the board.

We were fortunate to get a good mix of excellent, experienced folks and some really terrific new folks. The committee is aware that the slate contains no women. We approached several outstanding possible candidates, but other commitments prevented their acceptance.

The USENIX Nominating Committee,
   Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado, Chair
   Trent Hein, XOR Network Engineering
   Steve Johnson, Transmeta Corp.
   Dennis Ritchie, Bell Laboratories
   Margo Seltzer, Harvard University