The itSMF voting saga: who is Julie Linden?

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2007-11-05 10:00
Share this post with

The Charlotte conference of itSMF USA this year was something of a non-event for me after Julie Linden's threats of a crowd of people revealing all regarding an election rort involving "100 votes" came to nothing.

Turns out only a handful of false votes have ever been verified (though it seems no-one has just asked the whole voter base to confirm their vote: it is only five or six hundred voters in total).

None of this excuses the naive governance that left the membership database so exposed to abuse.

But it does mean someone among the accusers lied and not just to protect identity. Julie lied about how many votes he/she* had proof of. Julie lied about what was going to happen at Charlotte. I also think Julie lied about how he/she came into possession of the information.

So where does this leave us? A Board member fabricating votes to swing the result? Or an elaborate scam to discredit the itSMF? Instead of Occam's Razor, we could apply Skep's Razor:

When unable to choose between two competing hypotheses, consider that they might both be true.

Perhaps rorting did go on. And perhaps someone wanted to optimise their own position while whistleblowing so they fabricated the whole Linden game to exploit what they knew.

Who can say? We may never know. But I can say this: I think I know who you are "Julie". I hope one day to get the last piece of the jigsaw to be able to say so with confidence. You screwed me about and I don't take kindly to that.

*Call me an old-fashioned misogynist if you will, but several times in email correspondence and in comments on this blog it seemed to me that Julie Linden talks like a man.


Published in The Skeptical Informer, November 2007, Volume 1, No. 10


Syndicate content