ARRL's "Confidentiality vs. Transparency" Emergency: Rescue ARRL With Your Vote This Month!

Note: The emergency is over, ARRL members came through! 4 of the 5 candidates listed below were elected, removing votes from the confidientiality bloc, and the author of the most pernicious proposed rule changes. The ARRL board rescinded the censure of Richard Norton N6AA on July 19, 2019, finding that it was unfounded. Thank you!

We need your help! Please pass this message on to other Radio Amateurs, until November 2018.

You've probably heard of problems at ARRL over the past year. We are writing to inform you of a series of events at ARRL, and to ask you to vote for these director candidates to put ARRL back on track, making it a more transparent organization that represents its members properly. Please visit their web sites:

The rest of us should be talking with our friends in those divisions. ARRL represents every US ham to government and elsewhere, and is the International Secretariat of IARU, representing all hams worldwide. Thus, every ham, everywhere, has a stake in the operation of ARRL, and a right to see this calamity resolved.

In 2016, ARRL had corporate attorneys provide a director and officer code-of-conduct. This code was designed for a for-profit corporate board, and stressed confidentiality, just the wrong thing for a non-profit board that should be representing its members! The ARRL board majority, including every incumbent in this election; voted this code, officially called the ARRL Policy on Board Governance and Conduct of Members of the Board of Directors and Vice Directors, into the bylaws in January, 2017.

The code required that directors act to the membership as a unanimous bloc and prohibited dissent from board decisions in their public speech, even if they voted against those decisions. It even restricted directors from discussing the results of votes until ARRL officially announced them.

By suppressing reports of their own dissent by ARRL directors, this new policy deprived you, the membership, of control of ARRL. It made it very difficult for the membership to understand what a director stands for, and thus to have the knowledge necessary to vote for them. Even discussing your own division director's decisions with them will be difficult, if they aren't allowed to disclose their own opinions.

At the 2017 International DX Convention (Visalia) ARRL Forum, ARRL Southwestern Division Director Dick Norton N6AA got up on stage and told us about all of this. That was the first time that most hams heard about the new director and officer code.

For Dick's efforts to inform us, the members, he was publicly censured by ARRL, with the censure published on the front page of the ARRL web site and in the ARRL Letter. An open letter from NCCC to ARRL claims the reasons given for the censure were inaccurate and that there was no issue with Director Norton's conduct. Many of us feel that ARRL's censure was defamatory.

You can watch Dick's polite and eloquent discussion at the Visalia ARRL forum in 2018, a year after the event leading to his censure: Part 1, Part 2. At that meeting (and probably others), Dick stated that the ARRL board was divided between a confidentiality bloc that wished to retain the terms preventing directors from expressing public dissent, and a transparency bloc which wished to keep the membership more in the loop of ARRL decisions, allowing directors to speak freely.

In December 2017, ARRL's Executive Committee proposed a set of amendments to facilitate punishing or expelling directors and officers who "got out of line" by publicly dissenting with a board decision. There does not appear to have been any plan to inform the membership of this proposal until it had been voted upon at the January, 2018 board meeting. Fortunately, the proposed text was leaked, resulting in a great outcry by the already-inflamed membership. The changes have been withdrawn, but only for now. The board voted to create a white paper explaining the changes to the membership (which they have failed to produce), and to bring them up for a vote again at a later date.

A second proposal was made, about the same time, by Hudson Division director Lisenco: this would add four new voting members of the board who would not be directly elected by the membership, further reducing the representative democracy of ARRL. After membership outcry, this proposal was shelved.

After Dick's censure, the revelation of the confidentiality terms, and outcry over the additional rule proposals, it became clear to ARRL that the membership was upset. Disgruntled members struck straight at ARRL's pocketbook: At the Nevada ARRL convention's ARRL forum, it was reported that ARRL had lost a bequest in excess of one Million dollars in reaction to the confidentiality issue, and that many members had declined to renew. But ARRL did not handle dissent among its own membership well. In January 2018, ARRL president Rick Roderick wrote to hams accusing transparency advocates of an "organized misinformation campaign", only to be contradicted by his own board just days later, when they agreed to review the code of conduct, temporarily suspending some of its worst provisions while leaving equally bad ones in place.

At the ARRL Donor Reception during Hamvention, a private affair they hold for significant financial benefactors; Rick Roderick addressed the donors regarding the transparency issue, saying "we hear you". In discussion with Roderick and several directors in the ARRL booth, we were told that they had obtained a new code of conduct from a national organization supporting non-profit organizations. They promised to present it to the membership in August.

But the ARRL board broke that promise. August came and went, and the board has no proposed text to reform the director and officer code. They have agreed that no revision will be considered until after the October 20 executive committee meeting.

The deep split on the ARRL board became further apparent over the process leading to the election of a new CEO. The directors had been presented with only one final candidate by the selection committee, the night before the vote, and no information on other top candidates. There was a motion to delay the vote until the directors had time to research the the candidate they were presented with, and other potential candidates. This failed by just one vote, and ARRL president Rick Roderick has refused director requests to disclose the individual votes. We believe that the six directors who voted to delay the CEO vote all subsequently voted against accepting the new CEO.

Subsequently the confirmation of the new CEO was voted upon, with Mr. Carlson, Holden, Norris, Williams, Lisenco, Blocksome, Pace, Boehner, and Allen voting Aye and Mr. Abernethy, Frenaye, Tiemstra, Sarratt, Norton and Woolweaver voting Nay. The motion passed 9:6. It is believed that the aye voters are mostly of the confidentiality bloc and the nay voters mostly of the transparency bloc. But the most serious issue is that the ARRL board was split on the election of its new CEO. A position like this should be the result of a nearly-unanimous vote of the directors, or it should not be filled at all.

And that's where we are today. ARRL's board is divided into a transparency bloc and a confidentiality bloc, with the confidentiality bloc in the majority and the proposal for four officers to gain the vote potentially adding more votes to that bloc. The members are not currently represented as they should be, due to the continued application of a policy meant for a for-profit corporate board. The only whistle-blower on the board was publicly castigated for informing us. The currently-suspended rules that go against the member's interest are temporarily suspended, and could be restored. Shelved governance proposals and possible new ones adverse to the interests of the membership wait in the wings for possible action next January. Who do you want casting the votes on these proposals?

We can defuse this situation and restore proper member representation in ARRL by electing five new directors who stand for transparency, thus removing the power of the confidentiality bloc. The transparency candidates are:

ARRL members in those divisions will receive their ballots within days. Please vote, and please support the candidates above.

Signed:

Bruce Perens, K6BP: One of the founders of the Open Source movement in software, an ARRL Diamond Club Platinum member; pioneer of embedded Linux and the modern Linux distribution, initiator of the Codec2 project and evangelist for Codec2 and FreeDV, founder of No-Code International, which led the successful fight for the end of the Morse Code examination as a prerequisite for Amateur licensing. <[email protected]>

Bob Famiglio, K3RF: Past Vice Director 2015-17 - ARRL Atlantic Division

Robert A. Wilson, N6TV: ARRL Life Member

Michelle Thompson, W5NYV: ARRL Life Member. Lead engineer of the Phase 4 Ground project, creating a digital Amateur satellite communication system.

Jim Talens, N3JT: Diamond Club and Life Member of ARRL

Rick Tavan, N6XI: Maxim Society and Life Member of ARRL

Jay Maynard, K5ZC: Life Member of ARRL, Past president: National Frequency Coordinators Council; Chairman, Minnesota Repeater Council; past ARRL vice director candidate.

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