TUG 2013 election: Results and candidates' statements

From Barbara Beeton for the TUG election committee:

Nominations for TUG President and the Board of Directors in 2013 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, Steve Peter 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: Kaja Christiansen, Steve Grathwohl, Jim Hefferon, Klaus Höppner, Arthur Reutenauer, David Walden. 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.

Terms for President and members of the Board of Directors will begin with the Annual Meeting. Congratulations to all.

Jonathan Fine has decided to step down at the end of his term. On behalf of the Board, I wish to thank him for his service, and for his continued participation until the Annual Meeting.

Announcements and information about previous elections are available, along with the notice for this election, and the roster of current and past board members: 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.


Kaja Christiansen

(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)

I live in the city of Aarhus, Denmark and work at the University of Aarhus. My job at the University involves system administration of Unix machines at the University as well as software, including the responsibility for up-to-date TeX & friends suite.

I heard about TeX for the first time in the fall of 1979. In Palo Alto at the time, I wanted to audit courses at Stanford and my top priority was lectures by Prof. Donald Knuth. That, I was told, was not possible as Prof. Knuth was on leave due to work on a text processing project… This project was TeX! Back home, it didn't take long till we had a runnable TeX system in Denmark.

Statement: I have served as a Board member since 1997, as the chair of TUG's Technical Council since 1999, co-sponsored the creation of the TeX Development Fund and served as TUG vice-president from 2003-2011. I share system administrator's responsibilities for the TUG server (which access to the Internet is currently facilitated by my University). In my rôle as a member of the board, my special interests have been projects of immediate value to the TeX community: TeX Live, TUGboat and TUG's web site. During the years 2002-2011 I have served as the president of the Danish TeX Users Group (DK-TUG).


  Steve Grathwohl

(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)

Biography: I have used TeX since 1986, first as a hobby, then “professionally” after I joined Duke University Press in 1993 on the staff of the Duke Mathematical Journal. Eventually I supervised the production of the journal (for both print and online incarnations), and I wrote and maintained the class files for typesetting. Since 2005 I have been responsible for loading content for our 50 journals and monographs onto multiple platforms as well as being TeXnical liaison for Duke to Project Euclid, a hosting service for over 50 independent mathematics journals. My current work involves a significant amount of work with XML content and metadata schemas as well as being the in-house TeX specialist.

Statement: TeX has proved to be an astoundingly robust piece of software, and the continuing development of projects like LaTeX3, LuaTeX and XeTeX helps ensure TeX's vitality into the future. I would like to see the TUG board continue to support these and others (like TeX Gyre and TeXworks) that contribute to a 21st-century TeX.


  Jim Hefferon

(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)

I have enjoyed working on the Board, trying to promote the interests of TeX and friends. In the future I would like to continue to do so, trying to balance fiscal prudence with taking the opportunities that arise.


  Klaus Höppner

(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)

Biography: I got a PhD in Physics in 1997. After several years in the Control Systems group of an accelerator center in Darmstadt, I've been working at an accelerator for cancer therapy in Heidelberg. My first contact to LaTeX was in 1991, using it frequently since then.

I was preparing the CTAN snapshot on CD, distributed to the members of many user groups, from 1999 until 2002. I was heavily involved in the organization of several DANTE conferences and EuroTeX 2005. Since 2000, I am a member of the DANTE board, some years acting as president or vice president, now as treasurer.

Statement: In the years since Karl Berry's presidency the cooperation of TUG and European user groups improved a lot. My candidacy is in the hopes of helping to continue this trend. Projects like TeX Live and CTAN owe their success to the work of active volunteers, but also to the support and cooperation of the user groups.


  Steve Peter

(Candidate for TUG president.)

Biography: I am a linguist and publisher originally from Illinois, but now living in New Jersey. I first encountered TeX as a technical writer documenting Mathematica. Now I use TeX and friends for a majority of my publishing work, and work with several publishers customizing TeX-based publishing systems. I am especially interested in multilingual typography and finding a sane way to typeset all of those crazy symbolisms linguists create. As if that weren't bad enough, I also design typefaces. (Do I know lucrative markets, or what?)

I got involved in TUG via translations for TUGboat, where I also work on the production team. I was on the TUG board of directors for several terms before becoming TUG president in 2011.

Statement: The future of TeX and TUG lies in global communication and cooperation to promote and sustain the amazing typographic quality associated with TeX and friends. Projects such as LuaTeX show that there remains a dynamic and bright future for our preferred typesetting system. I am especially interested in having TUG support projects (technical and artistic) that will serve to bolster TeX and TUG's visibility in the world at large.


  Arthur Reutenauer

(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)

Biography: I have been using TeX for the past 15 years, first as a mathematics student then as a language enthusiast. Having been president of GUTenberg, the French-speaking TeX user group, for one term, I have contributed to founding the ConTeXt Group to help with development of that part of TeX community. I am currently the maintainer of Polyglossia.

Statement: Being about as old as TeX, I have come to it in times where it was already mature but, maybe, not always up to date with the most recent developments in computer typesetting. This situation has however recently improved with the advent of XeTeX and LuaTeX amongst others, and I do believe that TeX still has a great potential to produce the best typeset documents, in which TUG can play its part.


  David Walden

(Candidate for TUG board of directors.)

Biography: I was supposed to be studying math as an undergraduate at San Francisco State College; but, from my junior year I was hacking on the school's IBM 1620 computer. While working as a computer programmer at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, I did the course work for a master's degree in computer science at MIT. Most of my career was at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was, in turn, a computer programmer, technical manager, and general manager. At BBN, I had the good fortune to be part of BBN's small ARPANET development team. Later I was involved in a variety of high tech professional services and product businesses, working in a variety of roles (technical, operations, business, and customer oriented).

Throughout my business career and now during my so-called retirement years, I have always done considerable writing and editing. This led to my involvement since the late 1990s with TeX, becoming a member of TUG, and eventually as a TUG volunteer. I have served as a member of the TUG Board since 2005 and also served in the role of Treasurer (I know bookkeeping from my business career).

I helped create The PracTeX Journal, doing its initial website development; I founded TUG's Interview Corner; I have helped behind the scenes with the TUGboat web site; and I was the “local organizer” person on the program committee for TUG's 2012 annual conference in Boston.

More personally, I use LaTeX and other tools in the “arsenal” of TeX and friends all the time, for example:

You can learn more about me at www.walden-family.com and at tug.org/interviews/walden.html.

Statement: I am interested in continuing to serve on the TUG Board:

As a TUG Board member, my frame of mind has been to get things done quickly and pragmatically with enough generality so evolution is possible.