Minnesota Densa - E-mail to Eric Adams, MN Mensa Ombudsman

Subject:	Re: transcribed web posting
Date:	Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:30:40 -0600
From:	Al Heigl <webmaster@minnesotamensa.org>
Reply-To:	alheigl@millcityrecords.com
Organization:	Mill City Records, NARAS, Mensa, I.S.P.E., Triple-Nine, ex-MDA
To:	Minnesota Mensa Ombudsman <ericbadams@att.net>
References:	1

ericbadams@att.net wrote:
>
> Hi Al,
>
> Thanks for transcribing the handwritten / scanned note.
> It's a help in trying to understand things.

I actually started this message back on last Thursday (3/10/05) as I
noticed that it had been exactly one year since you had sent your above
e-mail to me.

And I was thinking of you because I have put up some more information in
the 'net regarding the Minnesota Mensa board that has been helpful to me
and may be helpful to you, too.

In particular, I noted that you've put in some board service, and were
at the meeting where the initial website was approved and I was
appointed Webmaster (4/28/98).

The other thing that struck my eye was the board meeting of 3/2/2004,
where it was reported:

"Al Heigl matter: Discussed status. Eric Adams has indicated he wishes
to remain impartial until he has all the information."

(I'm sure it was unintentional, but the phrasing makes me think that it
was reported that way because an Ombudsman actually wanting to remain
impartial until the facts are in was considered out of the ordinary.)

What struck me was how long ago that was. I read the minutes in every
Mensagenda, and haven't seen any followup, and you haven't gotten back
to me, either.

I'm going through a number of sources here, seeing if I can reconstruct
a time line:

Tuesday, March 2, 2004 -- you were at that board meeting wishing to
remain impartial until you have all the information.

Sunday, March 7, 2004 -- you called me at 8:16 p.m., introducing
yourself as MN Mensa's Ombudsman, saying you were in a position to help
things, and we talked for quite a while, as I recall, particularly about
the signed written agreement between Minnesota Mensa and me that
designated (redesignated) me as Webmaster for the group's website.

Thursday, March 10 -- you sent me the e-mail quoted above regarding the
transcription of that signed written agreement.

Sunday, March 28, 2004, also at 8:16 p.m. -- you called again and we had
about a half-hour conversation about the issues concerning the MN Mensa
website and my position as Webmaster.

Thursday, June 3, 2004 -- I sent you an initial reply to your original
e-mail quoted above. In this I added that I had a full set of e-mail
links up on the 'net regarding correspondence over the the 2003 AG and
all the problems that had ensued from the original problem of Jason
Schmitz's doing such a poor job on "ag2003.com". I also had some things
to add regarding the authority behind that signed written agreement.

Anyway, Eric, it's really been a long time now, and, as I said, I've no
indication that you've made any report to the board yet (did I miss it
or was it omitted from the published minutes), and you haven't gotten
back to me on it either.

So I'd like to ask how you're coming on this unhappy matter, as it
really needs to be resolved, and resolved correctly, and soon (if
possible).

There are four links there that are either of interest now or that I
feel may bear on things in the future.

1. What information I could find in Mensagenda regarding recent
elections within the last decade or so. The purpose of this is to
investigate to what extent Minnesota Mensa has the same people being
elected over and over, whether a significant number of elections have
people running unopposed, and the extent to which voter participation
(compared to membership) is generally extremely low and thus may or may
not represent the will of the membership.

2. Longevity of officers. The extent to which some of the same people
run Minnesota Mensa year after year. This bears on the degree to which
there may be cronyism involved in what's been going with the website
situation, to what extent the people voting on the motions to remove me
could be fairly be characterized as longtime friends / coworkers /
people who know each other well through a *lot* of time working together
for Minnesota Mensa.

3. Board meetings. A wide-ranging table of meetings, attendees, and
excerpts from published minutes that may have some relationship to our
on-line presence, the website(s), and particular actions that affect the
website issue and my role as Webmaster.

4. Finally, something else that struck me as odd -- board removals. It
seems to me that, given the extreme-ness of a removal action, they
should be extremely rare, yet there was one in the summer of 2003 and
another in November of last year. Both involved people who, were highly
respected names in the group, and who served, apparently well, as
officers of the group.

I, for one, would very much like to know more about why Rowan and Tighe
were removed.

One thing of great interest that I learned while representing myself
(successfully) in my custody dispute a few years ago was that in many
cases, apparently criminal or civil) one or both attorneys may submit to
the judge what's known as "Proposed Findings of Fact, Conclusions of
Law, and Order". Each side may present to the judge what they believe
should be his ruling. If he goes along with either one, then most of
the work has been done for him, and he can just sign it. Or at least he
can use much of what's been submitted as a starting point for a ruling
that isn't quite what's been proposed.

So I would like to do the same here, as it's been a long time since you
started on this and granted that it's somewhat convoluted and involved
(all those e-mails!), still, we could use your decision/opinion so that
we can proceed from there.

After a lot of time for my own studying and contemplation of the
material I have posted on the 'net to aid in understanding the issues, I
think there are really just two basic issues after a summary of what led
up to them:

To summarize the beginning, I had said that I wasn't interested in
working on website pages for the upcoming 2003 AG, so Judy Hogan chose
Jason Schmitz to work on that project. He did not approach it from the
standpoint of providing pages to be put at the (original) website, which
would have been mnmensa.org/ag2003/. Instead, he set up a separate
website at ag2003.com, the TLD of which is contrary to Mensa policy, and
the domain name of which was ill-chosen as it suggested agriculture.

He also did his work in secret, with the ag2003.com website protected by
username/password. At no time was I (as Minnesota Mensa Webmaster)
given access to his work-in-progress, and I was never contacted by
anyone asking for my advice or any other input into this project.

When ag2003.com finally went live, I browsed there and was utterly
appalled. There was no privacy policy, to ratings code to show that the
site was family-friendly, the pages weren't cross-browser compliant (I
couldn't see any page main content in my Netscape 4.79), there were bad
links, missing links, and a host of misspelled words, included "musuem",
which I believe was misspelled three times on one page, including in a
link.

What I did that was probably *not* upsetting was to take all of Jason's
pages, clean them up so they wouldn't be an embarrassment to us, and put
them in the mnmensa.org/ag2003/ folder that I had originally created for
that purpose.

What *was* upsetting, at least initially, was that I got in touch with
the website people at American Mensa, telling them that the ag2003.com
was not worthy of being linked to, and that their link(s) should be to
mnmensa.org/ag2003/ instead, where the pages were presentable. I heard
back that Judy Hogan had given them the ag2003.com link, and I replied
-- rather testily, I'm afraid -- that I was the Webmaster and that I
knew which link was the proper one.

Which started all the hoo-hah, and I found myself sending out e-mails to
board members explaining in excruciating detail what was inept about
Jason's efforts. A good example of this is at
http://www.millcityrecords.com/mndensa/emails/ag-email26.htm. That
"summary" e-mail was sent on July 27, 2002, subsequent to Judy Hogan's
initial motion to remove me as Webmaster on July 17, 2002 (the minutes
of which were never published).

As I indicated early in this message, many on the board at that time
were long-time friends and MN Mensa co-workers. On the other hand, I
had joined around 1991, and early on had attended one First Friday, but
I live 35 miles away, and don't like to drink and drive, especially that
distance, so my physical presence at local group events has since been
limited to driving to a couple of board meetings pertinent to the
website.

So, let's consider an elected officer. If Dede Tredinnick had raised
all the issues about how incompetent the ag2003.com website was, and how
it wasn't of sufficient quality to link to, would Judy have introduced a
motion to remove DeDe as LocSec? I say no way; you know these people,
what do you say?

Let's consider an appointed board member. If Bill Conlan had raised all
the issues about how incompetent the ag2003.com website was, and how it
wasn't of sufficient quality to link to, would Judy have introduced a
motion to remove Bill as Editor? I say no way; you know these people,
what do you say?

(Let's look at Bill with a closer analogy. If Judy had asked a relative
newcomer member to prepare a brochure for the 2003 AG, and Bill had
looked at it after it was done, and found that the graphics were
horrible, and the text full of typos and misspellings, and had wrong
information and missing information, and then would have nothing to do
with it and refused to assist in its printing or distribution or even
allude to it in Mensagenda, would Judy have introduced a motion to
remove him as Editor? I sure don't think so.)

Finally, let's consider an appointed volunteer not on the board. If Ray
Voet had raised all the issues about how incompetent the ag2003.com
website was, and how it wasn't of sufficient quality to link to, would
Judy have introduced a motion to remove Ray as Historian? I say no way;
you know these people, what do you say?

Like I say, you know these people. If you yourself had done what I had
done, would Judy have introduced a motion to remove you as Ombudsman?

So I complained in the first place about cronyism and a "kill the
messenger" reaction on Judy's part, all of which was supported by her
close friends on the board. That was denied, of course.

Just recently, I was checking out some of the Mensa leadership
publications available on the AML website. You're probably familiar
with these; you likely have them.

Right now I'm looking at LocalSecretaryHandbook.pdf, page 2-17 (page 30
in the pdf). This is in the section on American Mensa By-Laws.

"(3) Every member shall have the same rights and privileges accorded
every other member, without qualifications or limitation."

Thus, it's right in the AML by-laws that I should have the same right
and privilege to hold the Webmaster position as DeDe, Bill, Ray, and
you, to hold those particular positions that they and you hold, without
punishment by removal for criticizing Jason's efforts and declining to
link to it, if any of the others would have been safe and secure in
their positions for doing essentially the same thing.

It's been obvious to me that Judy Hogan took personal offense that by
criticizing Jason, I was criticizing her as overseer of his task (and I
suppose I was, though that wasn't my intent), and when she introduced
that first motion to remove me as Webmaster, she was taking it out on me
in a way that she wouldn't have done with her friends.

Issue #2:

During the time when I was raising a fuss over that unfair and shabby
treatment, Dede Tredinnick sent out an e-mail to everybody on the board,
designating the 1st Vice Secretary, Paul Jensen, as "hereby authorized
to conduct the affairs of Minnesota Mensa."

Under that authority, Paul came down to Northfield on August 10, 2002,
and we discussed the situation at length. We then negotiated a written
agreement designed to reinstate me as Webmaster for the group website
(mnmensa.org at that time). Paul signed that agreement on behalf of
Minnesota Mensa and I signed it as Webmaster.

That signed written agreement contained no language about whether the
rest of the board approved of it or not. Paul had been "authorized to
conduct the affairs of Minnesota Mensa." (He hardly needed
authorization to bring up something before the board, as 1st ViceSec, he
could do that any time.)

Further, Item 5 of that agreement imposed an obligation on the board.
It required the board to appoint Jason as AG webmaster (one of my
concessions) "running parallel with Al as Mnmensa webmaster."

Again, this was not something for the board to pass judgment on and
approve or not approve; it was something they were obliged to do.

(It's worth noting that Items 1 through 4 were all carried out, even
including Judy's written apology to me.)

As we know, certain members of the board did not act accordingly on Item
5, and that's where the current hassle stands.

I have kept my parts of the written agreement I signed. I intend to
continue to do so.

The board has not honored the agreement made between Minnesota Mensa and
me. To keep my part of the bargain, I moved the website to
minnesotamensa.org (which was the original choice, but back then there
was some sort of length limit).

As for Item 6, Paul and I deliberately numbered the Items to form a
sequential path; as each Item was fulfilled, the next one would be due
for action. Accordingly, since all of Item 5 has yet to be fulfilled,
Item 6 is still on hold pending completion of Item 5. It's my intention
to combine the minnesotamensa.org site with whatever can be salvaged
from mnmensa.org and make one unified site that could be reached from
either domain name.

As of this writing, you can still browse to
http://www.mnmensa.org/archives/puzzles/ -- please note the quality
(meaning the lack thereof). It may "look" attractive, but it doesn't
work.

This is a page archiving puzzles that have appeared in Mensagenda and
reprinted on the website.

1. Note that it is incomplete and out of date. Nothing before 2002 or
since October 2004.

3. Note especially the entries for May, June, July, August, and November
2003, where there links to the answers but NO LINKS TO THEIR PUZZLES!

4. Note that the links to those answers without puzzles are all bad.
And, while the archive page shows "March Links" at the upper left, the
custom File Not Found page says "September Links".

(I strongly recommend that you do something to preserve this evidence,
since the WWW is very transient, and it's likely that someone will may
dispatched to fix this page or remove it. Use File | Save to save a
copy, or print it out, or at least take a screen shot of it.)

This page was created by what I still consider an inept, incompetent,
webmaster wannabe, Jason Schmitz, as part of his "redesign" of
mnmensa.org after he utterly destroyed every single page in the original
site. As far as I know, this page has been in this deplorable condition
for over two years.

(There's lots more where this came from. I have multiple copies over
time of this website. Currently there are 41 broken internal links.
That's not counting a lot of typos, misspellings, etc.)

Note here that all months in which the puzzle was put on the website are
covered. Each answer page is linked to directly from its puzzle. All the
links are good.

Conclusion? I have to think that anybody who would look at both pages
and then advocate that mnmensa.org should represent Minnesota Mensa is
no friend of Mensa, and a person who doesn't care if Mensa's image and
reputation suffer.

I have tried my best to maintain a quality website for Minnesota Mensa
even throughout all this dispute.

The salesman needs to ask for the sale to close. I need to ask you to
finish up your investigation of these issues and issue a decision/report
so that things can move on from there.

1. Al Heigl was, and continues to be, a good Webmaster for Minnesota
Mensa. The website minnesotamensa.org is a good and positive
representation of Minnesota Mensa. While Al is publicly documenting
these disputes, he keeps his documentation off of minnesotamensa.org and
confines it to his own personal website.

2. The work on ag2003.com was substandard, to say the least, and, as
Webmaster for the group, Al was justified in refusing to link to it from
mnmensa.org, trying to keep AML from linking to it, and taking all of
the content from it, cleaning it up, and putting it at
mnmensa.org/ag2003/.

Judy Hogan took personally Al's criticism of Jason Schmidt's work, felt
it reflected poorly on her, and retaliated by introducing the original
motion to remove Al as Webmaster. Others on the board went along with
her mainly because they were her friends.

Removing Al, when others more within the circle of friends would not
have been removed for saying and/or doing the same or similar things,
violated the Mensa by-law that all members should be treated equally.

Therefore, the initial motion, and all subsequent motions, because they
violate a Mensa by-law, should be repealed and/or nullified.

3. Groups and organizations are obligated to honor signed written
agreements to which they are a party. Al and Minnesota Mensa are
parties to a signed written agreement negotiated by 1st ViceSec Paul
Jensen under the authorization he was given by LocSec DeDe Tredinnick.

This signed written agreement provides, in part, that Al be "Mnmensa
webmaster" and the board has so far failed to honor that provision or to
cooperate in implementing it.

Minnesota Mensa should honor the agreement, begin treating Al as
Webmaster again, and see that he has sufficient access to the domain
name mnmensa.org so that he can do his job.

Let me add a number 4 -- Since Al has admittedly been a big pain while
fighting for his rights to be treated fairly and have signed written
agreements honored, he should be required to do something in return.

Al should agree to (a) do his best to combine both websites into one
unified site with an updated design, and (b) to prepare a comprehensive
"Webmaster's Handbook" in coordination with interested board members and
AML. The purpose of the handbook will be to lay out the rights, duties,
privileges, and responsibilities of the Webmaster and any other member
of Minnesota Mensa who has anything to do with the presentation of the
group and its activities on the Internet.

That's about all I have to say on this topic at this time, Eric.

I do hope that you will finish up your investigation as soon as possible
and convenient for you.

In doing some recent research, I discovered in the "First Twenty-Five
Years" booklet that you go back fairly far -- you yourself were LocSec
from November 1983 to February 1988, which is quite a lengthy term of
service, not to mention your earlier months as 1st and 2nd ViceSec. I'm
impressed.

While I realize that you, too, know all the board members currently
involved in this dispute, and really still don't know much about me, I
continue to trust in your objectivity as Ombudsman. Learning of your
service of LocSec, I'm even more trusting, as you were there overseeing
things well before many of the recent board members even arrived.

So you may be dealing with friends and co-workers on one side, and a
relative stranger on the other, but you have that incredible perspective
going back almost 22 years, and I consider that very important, and a
big advantage in your efforts as Ombudsman.

I would be grateful if you'd let me know where you are in your
deliberations and what sort of time line you see for finishing up.

(Should you be considering disagreeing with any of the four points I've
suggested your report contain, I would be interested in your reasoning
for that.)

And, of course, feel free to contact me if you have a need for any other
information that I might be able to provide.

Alan Heigl
Mill City Records
P.O. Box 177
Northfield Minnesota 55057-0177
507-663-6090
(Professional Proofreading,
Web Site Work using FrontPage 2003)
http://www.millcityrecords.com/webwork/