Karl BerryKarl Berry has been elected president for the term that ends with the 2007 annual meeting.
The following votes were counted:
Karl Berry, 183
Lance Carnes, 177
Both candidates made a good showing, although the total
number of voters was only a third of those eligible.
Of 1080 members as of the ballot closing date (May 17), 360 valid ballots were received. Ten ballots postmarked after the closing date, and three received with no return address, were not opened or counted. (Although there may be a concern for privacy, the return address is the only way to tell that a ballot is coming from an eligible member. The count was made by a teller with no stake in the outcome, who was supplied with a list of eligible voters; every envelope was checked against this list before the envelopes were opened, and care was taken to make sure that only the envelope with the latest postmark was processed from any one voter.)
As previously announced, the number of candidates for open board positions was fewer than positions, so these board candidates were declared duly elected for a term ending with the 2009 annual meeting: Steve Grathwohl, Jim Hefferon, Klaus Hoeppner, Ross Moore, Arthur Ogawa, Steve Peter and David Walden. Continuing board members with terms ending in 2007, are: Barbara Beeton, Kaja Christiansen, Susan DeMeritt, Cheryl Ponchin, Sam Rhoads and Philip Taylor. Gerree Pecht has also been reappointed for a term ending in 2007.
This was the first contested election since 1991. Thanks to everyone for their participation.
Barbara Beeton for the Elections Committee
The statements below were received for the TUG 2005 election, and will be printed in an upcoming issue of TUGboat.
For the record, announcements and information about previous elections is available, as well as the notice and candidate information for this election: 2005 election notice, 2003, 2001, 1999, 1997.
There are two candidates for TUG President, for a term ending in 2007: Karl Berry and Lance Carnes. Because the office of TUG President is contested, there will be an election ballot, in accordance with the TUG election procedures.
Paper ballots were mailed around April 6. The postmark deadline for votes to be sent was May 17, and the deadline for votes to be received by the election teller is May 31. We recommend mailing your ballot early, in the envelope provided.
To participate in the election, you must be a 2005 TUG member in good standing. We will continue mailing ballots to new/renewing members until shortly before the postmark deadline, but we cannot count votes with a late postmark or received late. So to avoid last-minute problems, please join or renew your membership as soon as possible. (If you're not sure if you're a TUG member for 2005, email office@tug.org.)
(Although we considered creating a method to allow electronic voting, the consensus was that time was too short to do a proper job. So voting will again be only on paper in this election. Work is proceeding so that the next election can have this possibility.)
Karl BerryTeX biography: I have served as TUG president since 2003, and was a board member for two terms prior to that. During my term as president, we've enacted some new initiatives, notably: expanded the availability of the special reduced membership rate (to past graduates and citizens of countries with modest economies); increased the memberships available to our institutional supporters; joined with Addison-Wesley in making their TeX (and other) books available at a substantial discount; and opened the online TUG store.
As president, I also serve on the conference committee, and thus was (and am) one of the organizers for all TUG-sponsored conferences, including TUG 2004 in Greece, TUG 2005 in China, and the new Practical TeX conference series, so far in San Francisco (2004) and Chapel Hill (2005).
I have also been on the TUG technical council for many years. I co-sponsored the creation of the TeX Development Fund in 2002, and act as one of the system administrators and webmasters for the TUG servers. I'm also one of the production staff for the TUGboat journal. I've administered TeX installations at many universities and companies over the years.
On the TeX development side, I'm currently co-editor of TeX Live, the largest free software TeX distribution. Previously, I maintained Unix TeX (Web2c) for several years. Along with Web2c, I developed Kpathsea, a freely redistributable library for path searching, and modified Dvips, Xdvi, and other drivers to use it; Eplain, a macro package extending plain TeX; a naming scheme for fonts; and other projects. I am also the maintainer of GNU Texinfo, the standard TeX-based documentation format for the GNU Project.
I am a co-author of TeX for the Impatient, an early comprehensive book on TeX, which is now freely available. I've also produced a number of books, articles, collections, and ephemera with and about TeX, studied typeface design, and co-written several articles on reading research and mathematical analysis of type. I first encountered and installed TeX in 1982, as a college undergraduate.
Statement of intent: I believe TUG can best serve the TeX community by working in partnership with the other TeX user groups worldwide, and sponsoring projects and conferences that will increase interest in and use of TeX. The quality of TeX's output remains unsurpassed, even now. It is our challenge to bring that quality to an even broader audience.
Lance CarnesTUG Biography:
The main reason for submitting my name as a candidate for TUG President is to put an emphasis on Users in the TeX Users Group. For the past 25 years TUG has focused mostly on TeX software developers and power-users, while often forgetting the needs of day-to-day LaTeX and TeX users. From my experiences with PracTeX conference attendees and PracTeX Journal readers, it is clear they have many needs which TUG is not currently fulfilling. I feel TUG should shift its priorities to concentrate more on user education and training, and to provide more practical information in print and on-line.
In addition, there are challenges facing TUG, and I am ready to work with the Board to address them. Three areas I feel need attention are:
I think TUG should be the leader in providing training guidelines and curricula, and in offering classes and workshops. I would propose forming an Education Committee, composed of Board members and others in the community, which will design courses and materials for LaTeX and TeX training.
Some possibilities to boost conference attendance: require all TUG-sponsored conferences to have a mix of beginning, intermediate, and high-level presentations, possibly in parallel sessions. Require conferences to include classes and workshops appropriate for beginning and intermediate users.
I look forward to working with the Board and with all TUG members to continue TUG's traditional activities while putting several of the above ideas into practice. Together we can make this an organization which responds to the wishes and needs of both TeXperts and practical LaTeX and TeX users.
There are six candidates for positions on the Board for terms ending in 2009: Steve Grathwohl, Jim Hefferon, Klaus Höppner, Arthur Ogawa, Steve Peter, and David Walden. Those whose names appear in italic are incumbent. (Continuing directors, with terms ending in 2007, are: Barbara Beeton, Kaja Christiansen, Susan DeMeritt, Ross Moore, Cheryl Ponchin, Samuel Rhoads, and Philip Taylor.)
Because there are more open positions for TUG Director than there are nominees (15 Directors are allowed under the bylaws), the seats on the Board are deemed uncontested, and the candidates are considered duly elected.
As of August this year, two directors are retiring: Mike Sofka and Gerree Pecht; we thank them very much for their service and hope and expect to continue to work with them on TeX and TUG projects.
I began using TeX in 1986 when a friend gave me his copy of the TeXbook and a pre-release version of Textures, which I tried with mixed success to run on my old Mac512K with only a single floppy drive. In a short time I had tossed off Word, WordPerfect, and other word processing systems; but it wasn't until I typeset my wife's dissertation (600pp, Middle English, Old French, multi-page tables) and began work at Duke University Press that I began using TeX in a serious, systematic way.
For the Press, in 1993, TeX was a peculiar dialect that mathematicians spoke, not really useful for production. Now, in 2005, TeX is used to produce seven of our journals, only one of them a mathematics journal. I am very pleased that I was able to demonstrate to the Press that TeX was more than capable of being a dependable production platform.
I think I bring to the TUG board the sensibilities of both an enthusiastic user of TeX and a reasonably hard-headed journals production guy who has to make decisions about what works within tight scheduling constraints.
Jim HefferonI've been involved with TeX for years, lately by maintaining the TUG branch of CTAN. I've been serving in an appointed position on the board, and I hope I can continue to help out.
Klaus HöppnerBiography: I got a PhD in Physics in 1997. After some post-doctoral fellowships I have been working working in the Control Systems group of an accelerator center in Darmstadt, Germany, since 2002. My first contact to LaTeX was in 1991, using it frequently since then.
I was preparing the CTAN snapshot on CD, distributed to the members of many user groups, from 1999 until 2002. I was heavily involved in the organization of several DANTE conferences and EuroTeX 2005. Since 2000, I am a member of the DANTE board, acting as vice president since 2002.
Statement: In the years since Karl Berry's presidency the cooperation of TUG and European user groups improved a lot. My candidacy is in the hopes of helping to continue this trend. Projects like TeXLive and CTAN owe their success to the work of active volunteers, but also to the support and cooperation of the user groups.
I appreciate the start of the PracTeX journal, the first online journal about TeX. I wish it could become a part of a future pool for TeX articles where authors can give their permission for translations and publishing these in the journals of other user groups.
Arthur OgawaThe most important issue facing TUG today is its declining membership. I am running for membership on the TUG Board of Directors because I take this issue seriously.
I have served on the TUG Board from 1997 to the present and have served in the past as Secretary and Vice President, involving myself in the business of TUG as a member of its Executive Committee. During this time, I have watched as TUG's membership first staged a modest recovery from the lows of 1997 and then leveled off. The current trend is a slight yearly decline. Attendance at TUG conferences has also declined during this time. TUG's continued existence was greatly imperiled by the meager membership numbers of the late 1990s, and the current situation does not bode well.
While I do not feel that I possess the only answer to the problem, my committment is to address the matter and to find a solution, by working with the TUG Board, its Executive Director, and TUG's membership.
At the present time, TUG is a vigorous and vital organization. Its day-to-day operations are competently served by our office, staff and volunteers, and its Board of Directors and President work together effectively. I am convinced that TUG provides its members with valuable services and products, and that TUG supports important software efforts that most certainly benefit TeX users, whether or not members of TUG or any other user group.
Now it is time for TUG to ensure that its efforts to support and benefit TeX users will continue. How this is to be done is not clear at present, but I firmly believe that the TeX Users Group, which has been helping TeX users for over 25 years, can continue to do so. TeX is a free, popular, and robust software, and it continues to benefit people all over the world. It is our opportunity as TUG members to help with its further development, its dissemination, and its use by the many people who have embraced it.
I hope that you agree with me on the importance of TUG in this effort.
Steve PeterBiography: I am a linguist and publisher originally from Illinois, but now living in New Jersey. I first encountered TeX as a technical writer documenting Mathematica. Now I use TeX and friends (these days, lots of ConTeXt) for a majority of my publishing work, and occasionally consult on it. I am especially interested in multilingual typography and finding a sane way to typeset all of those crazy symbolisms linguists create. As if that weren't bad enough, I've recently begun studying typeface design.
I got involved in TUG via translations for TUGboat, where I also work on the production team. This past year, I was on the organizing committee for PracTeX San Francisco, co-edited the TUG 2004 conference pre-proceedings, and was appointed to the TUG Board (thanks, Karl!). Working with and for the community has been so rewarding that I've decided to run for a regular term on the board.
Statement: The future of TeX and TUG lies in communication and working together to promote and sustain the amazing typographic quality associated with TeX and friends. I am especially interested in having TUG support various projects (technical and artistic) that will serve to bolster TeX and TUG's visibility in the world at large.
David WaldenBiography: I was supposed to be studying math as an undergraduate at San Francisco State College; but, from my junior year I was hacking on the school's IBM 1620 computer. While working as a computer programmer at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, I did the course work for a master's degree in computer science at MIT. Most of my career was at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was, in turn, a computer programmer, technical manager, and general manager. At BBN, I had the good fortune to be part of BBN's small ARPANET development team. Later I was involved in a variety of high tech professional services and product businesses, working in a variety of roles (technical, operations, business, and customer oriented). For more about me, see www.walden-family.com/dave.
Statement: Throughout my business career and now during my so-called retirement years, I have always done considerable writing and editing. This led to my involvement since the late 1990s with TeX and as a member of TUG and now as a TUG volunteer (The PracTeX Journal editorial board, TUG Interview Corner, etc.). I am interested in serving on the TUG Board for three reasons:
As a TUG Board member, my frame of mind would be to get things done quickly and pragmatically with enough generality so evolution is possible.