SAGE Board Election Changes by Barbara Dijker At the SAGE board meeting during SANS, the SAGE board of directors decided to make significant changes to how the SAGE board is elected. Currently, SAGE directors are elected for staggered two year terms in annual elections. During each annual election, half the board is up for re-election: 4 in odd numbered years and 3 in even numbered years. All SAGE directors are elected "at-large" rather than to a specific office. Officers are appointed by the newly seated board after each annual election. Originally this approach seemed like a great idea. The staggered terms were to ensure continuity - preventing the entire board from turning over in any one election. In reality, this model has resulted in problems for SAGE. First and foremost, the staggering to ensure continuity also ensured instability at the same time. While each board member serves two years, an entire board has only one year to work as a team. Any group that works intimately together goes through natural stages of team building: building trust, learning and adapting to styles of communication, and building working relationships. Annual changes to the SAGE board members in a very practical sense undermine the board's ability to work effectively as a team. As a result, the SAGE board spend's too much time each year in "start-up" mode. This of course results in a less effective board. In addition to the above problems created by turnover, there are other problems with the staggered term model. The 1996 election cost $5,000 to conduct. While there may be less expensive means of conducting authenticated elections, annual elections will always be twice as expensive as elections every other year. Turnover in the SAGE board relative to turnover in the USENIX board also presented a problem for communication and direction. And finally, annual elections split the open seats available in any given election. That means members who wanted to become involved and run for the board needed to run at least twice consecutively to have a shot at all possible open the seats. That discourages member participation. So the SAGE board decided to switch to a synchronized term model. All directors will be elected every other year. Directors will still be elected "at large" and officers appointed by the seated board. Officers will be appointed on an annual basis. This is to allow the board to accommodate director's changing work loads. While SAGE never officially set term limits before, some were under the impression that terms limits of 2 consecutive terms were in force. Term limits had been discussed by previous SAGE boards, but never formally set one way or the other. A limit of 3 consecutive terms has now been set. In the past, SAGE board elections were conducted shortly after the LISA conference at the end of the year. Terms were more or less synchronized with the calendar year. That works fine when LISA is in Oct or Nov except for the holiday madness issues. But LISA has been shifted to later in the year. Conducting an election and a conference in the middle of the holidays isn't practical. So the SAGE board has fixed elections relative to the calendar, rather than relative to LISA, to January. The big question is how will we synchronize the terms to implement a transition? The SAGE board considered three basic approaches: having the next election be for half-terms synchronizing in 1998, aborting just elected terms by half synchronizing in 1997, or extending terms about to expire by a year synchronizing in 1998. Clearly having an election for transition "half-terms" this year is the most "correct" way to synchronize terms. However, doing so ends up spending lots of money and candidate time and energy for little gain - not to mention member voting time. Such an election would also result in a lower than normal turnout. After a lengthy debate, the SAGE board opted to extend by one year the 4 terms scheduled to expire in 1997. The SAGE directors whose terms were thus extended are (alphabetically): Barb Dijker, Paul Evans, Tim Gassaway, and Helen Harrison. Because of the one month shift in the time of the elections, synchronization will occur in elections held in Jan 1999. One could argue that extending director terms without a vote of the membership is rather presumptuous. Think of this as making up for lost productive time. The current SAGE board is on a roll. We hope the members will agree that extending these director terms is in the best interest of the membership and facilitates these changes in the most practical way. Since SAGE is a "special technical group" within USENIX, there is no legal requirement to conduct a vote of the SAGE membership for such a change. The number of directors was also discussed but left unchanged. Five seems to few and nine too many to be effective. A summary of election change implementation: Dec 1997 election skipped, 4 director terms extended by one year Jan 1999 first synchronized election elect all 7 directors two year terms three consecutive term limits