[alicebot-archcomm] alicebot.org server status

[Noel Bush]

Rich seems to have forgotten that the Board passed a resolution that
cancelled the meeting he imagines will occur tomorrow.  He has also,
perhaps, forgotten that even if a meeting were to occur, the bylaws of
the Foundation provide for any members not physically present to be
able to participate by some virtual means.  Any member not able to
participate is able to designate a proxy.  Were the now-cancelled
meeting to actually occur, anyone could be sure that the remaining
Board members would not acede dumbly to Rich's plans.  Any "business"
that Rich conducts sitting alone by himself is absolutely outside the
bounds of the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation, regardless of whether Rich has
squirreled away the papers in his armpit and crows that "nobody can make
me".

It seems that Rich is satisfied that he's bullied the Board into
shutting up or quitting.  None of us have the manic energy to fight
any more.  But it isn't dominion over Richard Wallace's fantasy world
that anybody concerned here wants.  And if Richard Wallace wants to
plant his ass atop his ruins of an "organization" and refuse to budge,
ethics or no ethics, law or no law, then by gum he'll win.  I don't
know what in the world this has to do with making bots, but I guess I
should have understood long ago that that wasn't the point, for Rich,
of this particular enterprise.  Silly me, silly us, to believe such
things.

Rich wrote to the Board (these archives are available if anyone wants
to see) that he planned, at the August 16 "meeting", to remove me and
Nika from the Board.  At various times, he also stated that we weren't
on the Board in the first place, or that we had forfeited our
membership because of non-participation, etc.  Various realities moved
in and out.  Whatever.  Undoubtedly Rich will go on to abuse a few
more waves of unwitting supporters, but does any of this have anything
to do with any of the reasons that most of us are involved in this
project?

None of us have received any accounting for the missing money.  We've
all had mailboxes and ears full of acid abuse.  Those of us who've
contributed most have been attacked the most viciously, with unabating
energy.  I know I don't have to repeat this: it's all plain to see and
unerasable.

I suppose that in response to this I can expect one or more of:

(a) a sarcastic message lamely mocking the Board's resolution (e.g.,
"Are you conducting official Board business or not?")
(b) a rapid-fire burst of emails to one or more mailing lists, one or
more inboxes, spouting contradiction, abuse and venom
(c) more phony legal threats from the "Doctor" (funny how the
threats have been so much more aggressive than the behavior they claim
to be responding to)
(d) another character smear
(e) a distorted revisionist accounting
(f) a pseudo-scientific "personality analysis"

...who knows what else.  Given that I've listed most of the kinds of
attacks that Rich has launched in the past, I'm sure he's creative
enough to find a seventh alternative.

I just have to wonder, again, what any of this has to do with a
perfectly decent open source community project.

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Dr. Richard S. Wallace" <drwallace@alicebot.org>
Reply-To: alicebot-archcomm@alice.sunlitsurf.com
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 13:39:52 -0700

>> > And another person - preferrable from your face-to-face community -
>> > should handle all that linux stuff, thus being a kind of servermaster
>
>It is a remarkable blessing in my life that, during the past year, "two
>worlds have merged."  I used to have the problem for many years that, I
>lived one life inside my computer with all my ALICE friends, who were
>numerous but scattered around the world, and another life here in Silicon
>Valley, where there was a kind of parallel universe of history that didn't
>seem to involve ALICE and AIML at all.
>
>This past year however I can barely walk out the door without someone
>mentioning ALICE, bots, chatbots, program D, program E, and the rest of our
>alphabet soup.  Now that the Internet Bubble has burst, Bot Fever has
>gripped Silicon Valley at last.   Actual profitable companies here in the
>Bay Area are touting AIML wares, asking me to lunch, and inviting me to
>speak at conferences.  Even my friends from the parallel world are starting
>to wonder what is up with this bot stuff, and how can they get a piece of
>the action.
>
>Thanks to this blessed merging of two worlds, I now have the luxury for the
>first time of recruiting Foundation volunteers from the local scene.   It
>was amazing to have people come together from all over the world to
>volunteer to work on ALICE and AIML.  But let's face it, we all know by now
>that relationships cannot be built on e-mail alone.  There are too many
>pitfalls and too many chances for misunderstandings.  We human robots still
>need that face-to-face contact for some reason, even if we can't exactly say
>why yet.
>
>A Board that can actually meet and look each other in the eye is vastly
>preferable to one limited to email, IM chat and expensive long distance
>phone calls.   Thank goodness AIML is now big enough that we've finally been
>discovered by Silicon Valley.
>
>Rich
>
>
>
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