Posted by Tom Knapp at Kn@ppster. Reposted to IPR by Paulie.
The Missouri Libertarian Party held its 2009 state convention on Saturday in Jefferson City — a nicely done event with 40-50 attendees and topical breakout sessions and talks with LP leaders including Mark Rutherford of ATLAS PAC, Libertarian National Committee vice chair Michael Jingozian and Austin Peterson of LPHQ.
Since I’m new at this county chair business, I attended the breakout sessions on county committee matters conducted by state chair Glenn Nielsen. The state party has been building some fantastic infrastructure to make it easier for our county parties to maintain a seamless organizational existence: County subdomains on the lpmo.org server, a VOIP phone system that forwards calls to county party contacts so that “the number” doesn’t change just because the contact people do, etc. Cool stuff.
Then, of course, there was the business session, i.e. state committee meeting. Under Missouri law, the Missouri LP is governed by a state committee consisting of two representatives from each state senatorial district. In practice, that committee meets once a year and delegates a good deal of its authority to an executive committee the rest of the time.
On the agenda this year were a couple of amendments pertaining to “getting our papers in order” so that our bylaws match our incorporation papers. Those passed without controversy.
Two other bylaws amendments which I opposed — see here for the details — were discussed at length and with a little heat at times, and failed to secure the 2/3 vote needed for passage.
The party then elected new officers … or, rather, re-elected the sitting chair (Glenn Nielsen), vice chair (Cisse Spragins) and treasurer (Paula Benski) with no opponents seeking to unseat them. Secretary John Schultz declined to run for re-election, and Barry Albin ran unopposed to fill that seat.
We also caucused by US House District to select the new executive committee reps. I don’t have a full list of those results handy just yet. I’m now a full representative from the 1st District (I was an alternate last term), along with St. Louis County vice chair Julie Stone.
Many of the attendees chose to drive home rather than stay Saturday night, but by my count ten Libertarians hung around long enough to drop into the Knapp 2012 hospitality suite for beer, food and political chat. I had also liberally salted the event chairs with campaign literature during the day’s business.
I don’t know if I came out of the weekend’s activities with any delegate votes I didn’t have going in, but it was a good time in any case — it’s always fun to re-connect with fellow Libertarians from around the state whom I work with on a regular basis but usually only get to see once or twice a year.
Libertarian Party of Connecticut’s Annual Convention
Saturday May 30th, 2009
3pm-9pm (room & cash bar open until 10pm)
Holiday Inn
1070 Main Street
Bridgeport, CT 06604
203-334-1234
$45 ticket price (includes buffet dinner)
Confirmed Speakers:
Peter Schiff
Katherine Albrecht
We expect to sell-out capacity, so purchase tickets soon.
Tickets will soon be made available for purchase on our website – http://www.LPCT.org – watch for updates
Contact: [email protected]
Remaining LP state conventions that I know of:
April 24-25 TN
Apr 24 California
Apr 25 NY
Apr 25 Iowa
May 1-3 Ohio
May 2 Pennsylvania
May 2 Delaware
May 15 Indiana
Oct 23-25 Illinois
Any corrections/additions?
I will be in TN – if anyone has materials they would like distributed, let me know.
There’s a possibility I may go to Ohio or Pennsylvania the following week, and maybe Indiana (tho less likely). Illinois is too far out to plan for.
Surprised because based on statistics from around the web, more people still use Windows and even IE…
Out of curiosity, why would you be surprised to find that someone uses Linux? It is easy to use, fun, has loads of free software for all kinds of applications, and is actually (and provably) secure.
What amazes me is that people still use Windoze.
The LP is full of computer nerds. I’m surprised every time I find out a new member in my party is a Linux user… I’d say we’re running something like 20% or so of active LPWV members (ie, the ones I’ve actually spoken with personally) being computer geeks of some sort.
There’s a lot of software PBX solutions out there. Asterisk is the most popular. I did some work and wrote some code for another one called OpenPBX. They’re mostly all open source and free, but you need a server to host it on, and you need to buy inbound termination and DIDs. It’s not expensive if the usage is low.
Richard,
I can’t tell you anything about the tech, but it’s called a “virtual PBX” (I think that’s the acronym).
I don’t want to contribute to spam problems by publishing his email address in the clear, but drop by lpmo.org and there should be contact info for state chair Glenn Nielsen. He understands the tech details and I’m sure he’d be happy to share them with other state parties.
Well, as far as subdomains go, the DNS administrator for the ‘ny.lp.org’ zone would have to set them up. If you’re interested in doing the VOIP thing, drop me an email ([email protected]) and I’d be happy to discuss it with you. It’s fairly simple, but not free.
How do these work? “County subdomains on the lpmo.org server, a VOIP phone system that forwards calls to county party contacts so that “the number” doesn’t change just because the contact people do, etc. Cool stuff.”
LPNY http://www.ny.lp.org could use them.