We *could* have just picked a name out of a hat.
But that would have been boring.
So this was our procedure.
The eligibility rules were changed to include *all* River Valley Orchidworks OrchidTalk members, regardless of the date they joined. The only stipulation was that members who wanted to be eligible had to post at least five messages during the current month.
Each member was assigned a number, starting at 1, and ending with the number of members who met the above criteria.
Then, we fired up the pseudo-random number generator inside our handy-dandy HP 48GX Programmable Calculator, and we set the boundary numbers from 1 to the number of eligible members. The date September 30, 2004 and current time was used as a seed value.
We pressed "Enter," waited a second, and we had this month's winning number! The calculator's output was matched with the corresponding member, and that member won the award!