About VOICE
| VOICE Board of Directors | |
|---|---|
| President | Roderick Klein |
| Vice President | Neil Waldhauer |
| Treasurer | Keith Merrington |
| Secretary | David Azarewicz |
| Marketing | |
| Liaison Officer | Roderick Klein |
| Member | Tom Heite |
| Member | Bjorn Rietdijk |
| Member | Gerrit Schoenmaker |
| Other Positions | |
| Founding Editor | Mark Dodel |
| Webmaster | Gordon Snider |
VOICE is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of the OS/2 and eComStation operating systems, the education of their users, improving the communication between the creators of the operating systems, ISVs, developers, consultants, and consumers as well as representing the community of users to the public.
To this end, services including providing current and factual information via a news service and online magazine, conducting IRC meetings, sponsoring and funding projects and events, maintaining an index of mailing lists, and generally helping OS/2 user groups organize and promote their own activities are offered.
Some History
VOICE was founded in 1997 as a non-profit, virtual, on-line, user group by a small group of OS/2 users united with a common goal for the advancement of OS/2. Through education, promotion, and marketing they wanted to increase the public awareness/knowledge of OS/2 and see it become more widely recognized. The original objectives were to serve as a virtual, on-line user group for OS/2 users without a local user group and to any other OS/2 users interested in VOICE, to promote OS/2 to the SOHO consumer and to general computer users, to provide an effective communication channel between VOICE sponsors, user groups, ISVs, and IBM, and to to help OS/2 user groups organize and promote their activities.
Right from the start VOICE organized online meetings via IRC. This technology enabled sponsors to discuss matters in real time in spite of being located all over the world. In so-called SpeakUps, developers and vendors were able to introduce their products to the attendees, who in turn had the opportunity to get their questions answered first hand.
| Function | Date of Re-election: Aug 1 of year | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
| President | x | |||
| Vice-President | x | x | ||
| Treasurer | x | |||
| Secretary | x | x | ||
| Member (T. Heite) | x | |||
| Member (B. Rietdijk) | x | |||
| Member (G. Schoenmaker) | x | |||
VOICE and its sponsors have always been closely involved with the yearly Warpstock and—partially— Warpstock Europe conferences related to OS/2, and VOICE continues to support the events via sponsoring and provide assistance to visitors at the VOICE booth.
In May 1997, the VOICE Newsletter started as a one-page house organ but quickly evolved into one of three OS/2 online magazines. In the summer of 2000, a German issue was added. In spite of some troubled times, it endured until July, 2008.
The VOICE News mailing list for news announcements was established at the same time as the VOICE Newsletter. For some time it had limited readership because of the dominant news service WarpCast, which was operated as a mailing list by a group of independent individuals. When WarpCast closed down in 2001, VOICE filled the gap by promoting and expanding its VOICE News mailing list and incorporating the WarpCast messages into its archive. It has been working together with other OS/2-related news services and web sites for a long time to keep OS/2 and eComStation users up-to-date in our far flung community. In 2006, a news agency called ecomstationnews.com was founded with the goal to ensure that all news announcements make it to all news services. So far the VOICE News mailing list has been the primary source for this agency.
After the demise of OS/2 Connect, a regularly updated newsletter about active OS/2 user groups, VOICE created a replacement index that has been available on this site since 2006.
2006 VOICE purchased the rights and source code for the OS/2 version of PMMail, a commercial e-mail client. Development had been dormant for quite a while and since releasing it to Open Source was not a viable solution for the owner because of the Windows version, VOICE decided to try another solution to breath life into the project. A volunteer group of developers has been successful in fixing bugs and adding sought after features.
In 2014 VOICE moved to The Netherlands and was registered there as Stichting VOICE International. It changed from having 'members' to having 'sponsors'.
