Tadd's NEDA Page

In January 2000 the North East Digital Association passed a critical juncture.  They'd had their first year without 3 board meetings and without newsletters documenting the club administration happenings.  This, according to the club constitution, meant that the club was dissolved.  

So.. NEDA is history. 

Since the club owns no hardware (except for a NEON sign, some software for MSWindows3.1, and a 1991 laser printer) the disposition of the packet radio network is not an issue.  For the last several years the club's influence was limited to standards and documentation so the club's shut-down will not have any immediate consequences.

Well.. enough of that.  Here's the latest news:

Note.. this is now out of date.  I hope to update it eventually.

NEDA = North East Digital Association.  The "north east" means those places north and east of St. Louis.

I'm was an officer, appointee, and founder of NEDA.  Follow this link for my history with packet.  The page you are currently looking at is about current events.

NEDA has it's own web page which is the official NEDA page.  This page is mine and it has very little that is official about it.  There are times, however, that I wish to promote something that has to do with packet, or NEDA, and the web is often a good place to do it.  So...  keeping in mind that this stuff is not necessarily approved by NEDA.

Many of the documents on this page are rendered into Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.   You'll need a reader or plug-in to display them. 

NEDA Documents

NEDA has published around 30 issues of it's magazines and books.  I'm going to try to convert them all to PDF form as I get permission from NEDA's board of directors to do so.  I'll put links the current ones on this page and old documents will go into the document archive. 

NEDA Forms and Current Docs

Here is the NEDA membership form

Board Meeting May 02, 1999

We had a meeting at the Mercedes Benz Technical Center in Montvale New Jersey.   The meeting was very productive.  We talked quite a lot about FlexNet and NEDA node compliance.  There was general agreement that FlexNet fit the parameters that those attending thought NEDA should request.  The better result of the meeting was a decent list of issues that should be addressed by a network software in order for it to be NEDA compliant.  The list will be published in the upcoming NEDA Quarterly (#5.2).

Quarterly #5.1 Shipped - April 23, 1999

I started shipping out NEDA Quarterly #5.1 today.  This issue of the Quarterly is 64 pages long.  Here is the table of contents:

Report #5.3 Shipped - February, 6, 1999

I shipped out NEDA Report #5.3.  This issue of the Report is 36 pages long.   It contains these articles:

Happenings, January 31, 1999

We had a board meeting.  Before the meeting started we figured out the election problem.  We needed three nominees to keep out of trouble.  WA2WNI, WB2QBQ and N2MKH.  So, our board of directors is now WA2WNI, N2MKH, WB2QBQ, K1CSB, K1MEA and KA2DEW.

The board meeting, held in Northampton Mass, was relatively brief, lasting less than an hour and a half.  During the meeting, N2MKH noted that N2UBH, John, in Syracuse had volunteered to do the graphical part of the map creation.  Now we need to get people set up to accumulate the log data to build the maps. 

We formed a committee headed by K2BJG and N2IRZ to research what it will take the club, the users, the server ops, and everybody else, to migrate from TheNET to FlexNET. 

We agreed to change the magazine's name from NEDA Report, back to NEDA Quarterly.

I showed off the current NEDA Report, set to go into the mail on Feb 3rd.

The meeting was tape recorded and yours truly is going to transcribe it for the minutes in the Quarterly, due out in March. (note, it was mailed in April)

Happenings, November 7, 1998

A review of the NEDA Constitution revealed that the balloting procedure is thus:

At or after the last board meeting of the year an appointed member who is not on the ballot for next year determines what members have attended two of the year's board meetings.  Those members, who are not serving already for the following year, are automatically nominated.  The ballot is sent out within 2 weeks of the meeting.   After the ballots are returned, the votes are tabulated and those chosen by the electorate are contacted in order of most votes received.  Those who do not want to serve are deleted until 3 nominated members agree to serve for the following 2 years.   If the club runs out of nominees before three board members are found, the volunteers and the current board may, with consultation with the founders of NEDA, seek volunteers from the body of all previously serving board members.  If six board members are still not found, then the club is dissolved and any remaining funds are donated to charity. 

The appointee this year was Mike Staines, WA1PTC.  The understanding at the board meeting was that only those who were asked and volunteered were to be placed on the ballot.  At the board meeting none of those asked volunteered (see below.)  In addition, one of the 3 potential nominees who was not at the Hanover meeting said no.   One said yes but one was not available to be contacted. 

After consideration of the Constitution and the will of those in control, it was decided that ballots would not be sent at all, especially considering the result of the balloting was known in advance.

Well.. It looks like those in charge at the next board meeting will have to give consideration to our future as a club.  At this time I know that we have at least the 3 board members already voted in (from last year's election), plus 1 who would have been elected and accepted the position, plus we have at least one, if not several, candidates from the pool of previous board members. 

The question to be answered is:  Are we more honorable to follow the letter of the Constitution (It's too late now), or to serve the membership as well as we can?  We are currently in the position of having a very productive year in 1999.  We'll almost certainly have lots of candidates for next year's election. 

Board Meeting - October 24, 1998

We had a meeting in Hanover, New Hampshire. 

The board had some discussion about the club Constitution and we discussed the annual elections.  Jim, Ray and I (tadd) were elected for 1998 and 1999 so we're not involved.  Cal, Burt, and Mike are all up for re-election.  All three asked not to be on the ballot.  There are five other members who are eligible.  These are Bob, WB2QBQ, Dana, WA2WNI, John, N2MKH, John, N2UBH, and Joel, N1JEO.  Bob said he didn't want to be on the ballot,  Dana said he'd rather not.  John, John and Joel  were not available for comment.  The Constitution says that if we can't elect 3 new board members we can get replacements from the pool of previous board members or founders of the club. 

The members who resigned positions or asked to be removed  from the ballot were, in my opinion, doing so because they weren't getting encouraging feedback to boost enthusiasm.  It is also my opinion that enthusiasm is the rarest of resources in a project that involves hundreds of people.  Feedback to build enthusiasm is something that needs to be built into any club foundation in order to ensure it's survival.   Observation of successful clubs shows this.  NEDA's board hasn't seen a lot of encouraging feedback for several reasons, not the least of which is that many of the people who have been members of NEDA have tossed off packet radio in favor of the Internet.

In any case, all have served for many years on NEDA's board and one can't fault them for not volunteering after all of this time. 

Cal and Burt are resigning all of their positions.  Cal is resigning from permanent Chairman of the Board and membership director.  Cal was previously the editor as well but that position was handed over to me (Tadd) in May 1998.  Burt is resigning his appointments of chairman of the technical committee and mapmaker.  The Chairmanship of the Board was left unfilled while Bob Seastream, WB2DWD, volunteered to take over the membership director position (we knew all this coming into this meeting.)   Don Rotolo, N2IRZ, took the technical committee chairmanship, and I (tadd) took the mapmaker position. 

We also talked about the budget.  We currently have about $2000 (about the same as the entire year in 1992) but we're spending it rather quickly on newsletters and whatnot.   If we look at our costs compared to 1992 we can see that we actually have enough money to operate for a year.  We have half as many members as we had in 1992 however so we might need to consider looking at what services the membership was getting in 1992 against what we're doing now. 

My personal feelings are that once we refocus the club on the needs of the existing packeteers, having lost many of the computer geeks to the Internet, we'll find that we've got a decent collection of radio enthusiasts to work with.  I think that if we make the newsletter the way it was when our membership was still growing that we'll get some of the membership back. 

We'll just have to see what the position and actions of the next board show eh?

Report #5.2 - August 17, 1998

Board Meeting, Syracuse NY, May 3, 1998

Previous Meetings