Board Meeting Summary

by Gale Berkowitz
Deputy Executive Director

and Ellie Young
Executive Director

The following is a summary of some of the actions taken by the USENIX Board of Directors from November 1999 through February 2000.

SAGE Certification
A proposal from the SAGE Executive Committee for $135,000 to fund the first phase of the SAGE Certification Program was approved. See "Certification 2000" on page 75 of this issue for more information on this.

Public Relations
It was agreed to allocate $60,000 for public relations for USENIX and SAGE for one year.

USENIX 25th Anniversary
A proposal to allocate up to $107,000 to commemorate and celebrate the 25th Anniversary of USENIX was approved. A compendium of the best papers from the USENIX proceedings and a special giveaway will be produced and given to members. At the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, the following activities will be added: a display of USENIX and computing-related memorabilia, accompanied by a trivia contest and game show, and enhanced reception(s).

Tutorial Instructors Remuneration
A proposal to offer a $10 per attendee bonus to instructors when attendance in a class exceeds 100 was approved.

Conferences
Dan Geer was charged with trying to find a champion/program chair for an embedded systems conference.

A proposal from Dejan Milojicic for USENIX to sponsor, along with IEEE TCOS and ACM SIGOPS, an annual workshop on experiences in building and using industrial systems software and application environments was approved. The first workshop will be co-located at OSDI, and the next at SOSP.

It was agreed that USENIX will be a co-sponsor for the WCSMA and Mobicom conferences.

Electronic Frontier Foundation
The $100,000 contribution to EFF approved by the Board at its previous meeting will be used to support legal efforts in the DVD DeCSS cases (which put at risk free expression and fair use of information) and the Bernstein encryption software case.

Next Meeting
The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, June 20, at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in San Diego, California.