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): Terence Chan Clifton Gurlen Nigel Vander Houwen Jim Hudspeth Cory Johnson Kenneth Koster Bart Kus Randy Neals Kenny Richards Robert Salsgiver Mark Sheppard Mike Shirley Lynn Speed Ryan Turner David Yost I’d also like to thank the following folks for their contributions, but have not yet met the minimum requirements to be an official “Supporting Member” according to our constitution: Bob Edmiston Carl Leon I’d like to thank all of the above folks for supporting HamWAN and our ability to purchase gear to expand the network and provide services to users. We’ve been very fortunate in our ability to keep overhead low, so we can put as much as possible into things that directly improve the network. We’ve seen a lot of great progress over the past year, not to mention a number of new users on the network, including a lot of interest from the local ACS folks. Here’s a small sampling of some of the things accomplished over the past year. The new cell site at Beacon was brought online, and has enabled a number of users to connect. Our “Open Peering Policy” project saw new users, as well as a feature improvement to allow dynamic IPs The new site at Baw Faw was brought online. The Haystack site saw significant restructuring of the power system to avoid the outages we had last winter. It’s been working great this winter! Baldi has been improved with a large battery bank to keep it running during outages. Our sister networks all over have seen great progress, Spokane, Tampa Bay, Interior BC and more. Capitol Park saw the addition of a bit of battery backup capacity, and some better optimized antenna aim on one of the backhaul links. We’ve also seen some damage over the winter, that we’re working to repair. Gold has been intermittent due to what we suspect is a faulty PDU. We have a new PDU, and some batteries to give the site some backup power ready. I expect the trip up will be happening soon. Sector 3 on Haystack which covers a lot of the populated areas died this winter. We’ve got a replacement on standby for when the snow clears enough for us to get up there to replace it. Our sponsorship with a local datacenter provider at Tukwila ended this year. It was a nice setup where we could announce to the internet at large, and had RF links that provided extra redundancy to Baldi and East Tiger. We thank them for their donated services over the last three years, and we’ll be working to find replacements soon to add back that redundancy. 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. 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, Ryan Turner, 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, acquiring new sites, installing and maintaining them, as well as some software projects, as well as acting as an administrator for the Puget Sound network day to day. Thank you Bart! Ryan Turner - Ryan heads our sister network in Memphis. Thank you Ryan! 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. 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