Boris VeytsmanFrom Karl Berry for the TUG election committee:
Nominations for TUG President and the Board of Directors in 2019 have been received and validated. Because there is a single nomination for the office of President and because there are not more nominations for the Board of Directors than there are open seats, there is no requirement for a ballot this election.
For President, Boris Veytsman was nominated. As there were no other nominees, he is duly elected and will serve for a two-year term.
For the Board of Directors, the following individuals were nominated: Barbara Beeton, Jim Hefferon, Norbert Preining. As there were not more nominations than open positions, all the nominees are duly elected to a four-year term. Thanks to all for their willingness to serve. Election statements by all candidates are given below.
Terms for President and members of the Board of Directors will begin with the Annual Meeting. Congratulations to all.
Susan DeMeritt, Michael Doob, and Cheryl Ponchin have decided to step down at the end of this term. All have been TUG board members for many years, and their dedication and service to the community are gratefully acknowledged.
The notice for this election, the roster of current and past board members, and announcements and information about previous elections are available: 2017, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2009, 2007, 2005, 2003, 2001, 1999, 1997.
The following candidates' statements were received for the present election, and will be printed in the next regular issue of TUGboat.
Boris Veytsman(Candidate for TUG President.)
I was born in 1964 in Odessa, Ukraine and have a degree in Theoretical Physics. I am a Principal Research Scientist with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and an adjunct professor at George Mason University. I also do TeX consulting for a number of customers from publishers to universities to government agencies to non-profits. My CV is at http://borisv.lk.net/cv/cv.html.
I have been using TeX since 1994 and have been a TeX consultant since 2005. I have published a number of packages on CTAN and papers in TUGboat. I have been a Board member since 2010, Vice-President since 2016, and President since 2017. I am an Associate Editor of TUGboat and support http://tug.org/books/.
During the last two years I have been working with the Board as TUG President on keeping TUG relevant for the user community. I hope to continue this work if elected.
We performed experiments with membership options (lotteries for new members, trial membership) which helped to alleviate the steady loss of individual members over the years. I think we need to increase the effort to recruit institutional members.
I have spent some time working on the Web pages for Education and Accessibility Working groups. We have had a very interesting accessibility workshop at TUG'18 in Rio. There is a pilot project (joint with GUST) of sponsoring participation of Ukrainian students in BachoTeX planned for 2019.
We increased our outreach effort and established a presence in Facebook and Twitter (I am grateful to Norbert Preining for the curation of our FB pages).
I consider our flagship journal to be one of the main activities of TUG. We solicited interesting papers for TUGboat, and the recent issues are, in my opinion, quite good. I hope our shortening of embargo period for TUGboat will make the journal even more important and relevant.
I think we need to do more outreach to the TeXers outside TUG, including the huge audience of Overleaf users, students, institutions and many others. This is probably one of the most important tasks for the TUG officers.
I hope the community will give me the honor of serving TUG for another term.
Barbara Beeton(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)
Biography:
For TeX and the TeX Users Group:
Retiring from the American Mathematical Society in February 2019.
Statement:
Although I will be retired from the AMS I intend to continue
to be active in TUG, where I have made so many good friends.
As the oldest user group in the worldwide TeX community,
TUG provides a focus for dedicated TeX users and developers.
I believe there's still a place in the TUG ranks for one of the “old guard”, to provide institutional memory when it's appropriate, and cheer on the younger folks who are trying new things.
With support from the members of this wonderful community, I'd like to continue for four more years.
Jim Hefferon(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)
Experience: I have used TeX and LaTeX since the early 90s for a variety of projects, including technical books and articles. I helped run CTAN for a decade. I have been on the TUG Board a number of terms, including terms as Vice President, and I had the privilege of acting as President for a short time.
Goals: Bringing in new users and keeping them is a constant challenge. This includes both members of the TeX community in general and members of TUG. I am particularly interested in helping beginners, who come with challenges of their own. It is sometimes possible for a group of experienced users to forget them and I hope I can help keep them in focus.
Norbert Preining(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)
Biography: I am a mathematician and computer scientist living and working wherever I find a job. After my studies at the Vienna University of Technology, I moved to the Tuscany, Italy for a Marie Curie Fellowship. After another intermezzo in Vienna I have settled in Japan since 2009, first working at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, now for Accelia Inc., a CDN/IT company in Tokyo.
After years of being a simple user of (La)TeX, I first started contributing to TeX Live by compiling some binaries in 2001. In 2005, I started working on packaging TeX Live for Debian, which has developed into the standard TeX package for Debian and its derivatives. During the EuroBachoTeX 2007, I got (by chance) involved in the development of TeX Live itself, which is now the core of my contribution to the TeX world. Up till now I am continuing with both these efforts.
Furthermore, with my move to Japan I got interested in its typographic tradition and support in TeX. I am working with the local TeX users to improve overall Japanese support in TeX (Live). In this course we managed to bring the TUG 2013 conference for the first time to Japan.
More details concerning my involvement in TeX, and lots of anecdotes, can be found at the TUG interview corner or on my web site.
Statement: After many years in the active development and four years on the board of directors of TUG, I want to continue serving TUG and the wider TeX community.
The challenges I see for TUG remain the same over the years: increase of members and funds, and technical improvement of our software. Promoting TeX as a publishing tool, also outside the usual math/cs environment, will increase the acceptance of TeX, and by this will hopefully bring more members to TUG.