[UK-TUG] Supporting Statement for Motions 6 and 7

[Joseph Wright]

Supporting state for Motions 6 and 7 from David Carlisle

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Statement in support of motions 6 and 7


** Summary**

Please vote for Jay Hammond for Chair, and for motions 6 and 7 on the
AGM, to allow UKTUG to be formally wound up and see this as a positive
step to support TeX activity in the UK.  Freeing up finances and the
valuable time of TeX-knowledgeable volunteers to be usefully used to
support TeX activities, not locked in procedural debates in committee
for another decade.

**Longer justification for the current motions**

UKTUG should be wound up and motion 6 is by the constitution the only
way that is possible (a vote of the members agreeing to that). Voting
for a delay just just delays the inevitable and requires the committee
to spend months discussing what should be done instead.

In my email sent to the public list set up for discussing the issue in
advance of motions being sent out, archived at

https://tug.org/pipermail/uktug-committee-public/2019/000010.html

I set out the main reasons, which I quote here for convenience:

> I believe UKTUG should be wound up, and urge the committee to bring
> forward a motion to the AGM to allow members to vote for dissolving
> the group in accordance with its constitution.
>
> UKTUG holds a not inconsiderable sum of money and has held it for many
> years but appears structurally incapable of using it for the benefit
> of the TeX community: engine developments, font developments, travel
> support etc, have all gone unfunded.
>
> More seriously it is totally disconnected from almost all TeX users.
> TeX users have for decades gone to the internet (originally
> comp.text.tex, these days more likely tex.stackexchange.com) for any
> technical queries which leaves a national user group struggling to
> find itself a purpose and struggling to get more than a hundred
> members which is an insignificant fraction of the actual TeX
> community.

There, I described UKTUG as "structurally incapable" of coming to decisions
of what to do with its finances. Jay Hammond (who has more current
experience, as he is on the current committee) describes the committee
discussions in his Candidate statement

https://tug.org/pipermail/uktug-announce/attachments/20191104/e990d056/attachment-0001.pdf

as "toxic".

Note in that early mail I was suggesting that the committee bring
forward a proposal for a future vote, but it was clear that they would
not even be able to agree to agreeing to having a future vote in time
for the motion deadline.

In an internet era when users get the software and any technical help
required directly from the internet, UKTUG serves no useful purpose,
as is seen by the fact that it has less than 100 members out of
the entire UK TeX population.

Voting against motion 6 just forces a delay, you should vote for
motion 6 "That UKTUG should be dissolved" unless _you_ are prepared to
spend hours in the committee arguing about procedural rules. Most
likely you find UKTUG more or less irrelevant to your TeX activities,
but please do not abstain as that just forces someone else to volunteer
to put in the time to manage these finances.

Note that dissolving UKTUG does not in any way mean changing support
for UK TeX activities.  UKTUG historically supported users by helping
to set up the original archive network, CTAN, and the fact that that
is now totally run from Germany is one reason I suggest giving some
of the remaining funds to the German TeX users group. The other
activity for which UKTUG is best known is the "UKTUG FAQ" but despite
the UKTUG name, that was essentially a solo effort by Robin Fairbairns,
and when he retired Joseph Wright and I took it up, and it is now
distributed as the TeX FAQ from https://texfaq.org/  UKTUG formal
involvement was neither sought nor required. The same is true of other
activities, if some members still want DVDs volunteers could volunteer to
write the texlive iso image to a disk, or to give away unused TUG DVDs
without requiring the overhead of maintaining UKTUG as a legal entity.


David Carlisle