Bob Bates just posted a message on the IGDA Forums that I think bears re-posting here. It’s the kind of communication that I like to see coming from the Board. This was posted on the epic forum thread about Capps’ comments at the studio heads panel (on which Greg Costikyan offers  some background, and his own opinions as  well), so it’s in the context of a giant QoL discussion.

Hi all,

First, the positive stuff:

** The board absolutely stands behind the conclusions of our QoL white paper. Please see our formal statement on the IGDA home page. More specifically:

_ * We believe, and it has been well documented, that extensive overtime is not only ineffective from the point of view of productivity, but moreover is destructive of employee morale.

_ * We believe that companies have an obligation to inform prospective employees of their overtime policies prior to their employment.

_ * We believe it is unethical for studios to routinely rely on extended, uncompensated overtime in order to get their products out the door. 

** We are *very* happy to see the QoL committee transform into a SIG.

** We believe that the upcoming studio and member surveys will help keep these issues on the front burner, where they should be.

Now the more personal, hard-to-deal with stuff:

* Since Jason announced his resignation in January, the demands on Board members have increased significantly. In most weeks, I have spent more time on IGDA matters than on my real job. (And just for the record, as an independent contractor who is compensated by the hour, that hurts). And to be clear, I am not the only board member working this hard – we have an unbelievably dedicated group of people who are putting in long volunteer hours on a broad range of activities that we hope will help the org members.

* As you might imagine, it’s difficult for a single board member to claim to speak for an organization of 16,000 members with widely disparate opinions. I have always felt that my job on the board was to try to get things done, rather than to “speak out.” With Jason’s departure, it has taken me a while to recognize that speaking out is part of “getting things done” and it is now one of my duties. I have to say that I’m uncomfortable with it, but I now know it’s part of the territory, and you’ll be hearing from me more often.

* When our new board was elected in March, I asked them to change the way we do business. Historically, board members have divided our attention among many of the issues that the org deals with. I believe this diffusion of effort on the part of volunteers whose time is limited has not been very effective. Starting in March, I asked each board member to pick a “major” and a “minor.” I am happy that they have done so, and you should be hearing the results of their efforts in the Board Blog that we have just started. The IGDA is a big organization, and it’s hard to keep everyone informed about what’s going on. We hope the blog will help.

Here are the board members and what they are working on.:

[list of Board members and what their projects are, I'm snipping it for length but the whole thing is here]

* I’m generally a positive guy, but I am not blind to the faults of the IGDA. I don’t believe in “circling the wagons” when problems arise, but rather in working with our volunteers to figure out how best to solve them. Often, this takes time. Sometimes, the problems simply don’t get solved. That is frustrating, but in a volunteer organization, that is the reality. How does one stay positive in the face of such failures? By working to fix them, and by realizing they don’t nullify the successes we have in other areas.

* Finally, my thanks go out to everyone who posts on our forums. I’m not always wild about the comments, but if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t complain. Many of the most vocal people are also those who work the hardest, and I think it’s great that we have so many people who have chosen to try to make industry a better place for all of us. 

I bolded the parts that I particularly like. Bob realizes that without Jason as a mouthpiece, someone has to stand up and take that role. Also, restructuring the Board members to take on particular responsibilities (he’s the chapters guy, she’s the finance gal) is a great idea.

Bob also posted a similar QoL update on the IGDA news feed.

Thanks for that, Bob!

About an hour ago, the IGDA posted its job description for a new Executive Director to relace the seat vacated by Jason Della Rocca. (I believe that it had been available via some links from a post on the IGDA Forums as early as last week, but it was just posted to the official site newsfeed this morning.) I’m happy to see it finally posted.

This portion caught my eye:

Minimum of five years executive experience leading an organization or a division of a larger entity, with responsibility for studio management including business development, financial management, administration, budgeting, and/or implementing complex programs.

I’ve been wondering for some time whether the IGDA was looking for someone inside the game industry or someone with professional association administration experience. The wording is interesting. “Studio management” would lead me to believe they’re looking for people inside the game industry, which I think is the right direction to go. On the other hand, it could be a PR problem for the IGDA to have a studio head as the new Executive Director. Before Jason signed on to be ED, he was a kind of evangelist and sales guy for Matrox, but not a studio head. I think someone like that would be a more politically neutral choice for the position, but then again, when Jason joined the IGDA it was a much smaller organization.

So the way I see it, there are three kinds of people who can be chosen for the next ED.

1. Someone from outside the industry, with association management experience. I wouldn’t be too happy if our new ED fell into this category. The ED needs to be plugged in to the game industry and understand our needs. Then again, if this candidate had a strong interest in video games I could see them learning on the job, provided they had strong guidance from the Board and others.
2. Someone from inside the industry, with large-scale management experience. This kind of candidate has the advantage of probably-relevant experience. On the other hand, it could be a PR nightmare for the IGDA, particularly if the manager came from a studio known for QoL problems.
3. Someone from inside the industry, but a rank-and-file developer. This could possibly be a low-level manager who has budgeted projects or departments, but not entire studios. Or perhaps a manager from a small studio. There might be an experience gap but I don’t think there’d be a public backlash.

I’d be in favor of (2) or (3), provided it were the right person for the job. What makes a person right for the job? For starters I would love it to be someone with a lot of experience working with the IGDA already. It would need to be someone very high-energy, and almost inhumanly responsive to emails. Jason was absolutely buried in emails but he always got back to me within 24 hours, usually within one or two hours. And it would need to be someone friendly. We can’t have a super abrasive person as our ED, for many reasons.

It’s going to be a tough search. I hope we get a good selection of candidates.

“How will the IGDA tangibly benefit me as a developer?”

Prospective members ask IGDA volunteers that question time and time again. Often, we struggle to answer. Sometimes we mention one of our excellent Special Interest Groups to convince a developer to join. Or we use IGDA events like the Leadership Forum and the Global Game Jam to show what the IGDA does for its community. Unfortunately, sometimes these groups and events alone fail to persuade potential IGDA members, and we lose the opportunity to expand our organization.

I am a chapter coordinator for Boston Post Mortem (the IGDA Boston chapter), so when local developers ask me to describe the benefits of IGDA membership, I can respond with a list of tangible benefits provided by our local chapter. The Boston Post Mortem gives its members:

• A place for networking (~180 people at our monthly meetings, most of whom are professional developers)
• A monthly speaker on game development topics
• A news feed for relevant local events
• An active job board
• Community coordination around large-scale events (discounts to local conferences, placing our members on panel discussions, etc.)
• Mobilization against, for example, game censorship legislation on the city/state level, and mobilization to pass legislation that would benefit our industry
• A sense of belonging to a real community of local game developers

I contend that if every local IGDA chapter worldwide could provide their members with a similar list of services, individual developers would immediately see how the IGDA benefits its members and join the organization.

The presence of active, thriving IGDA chapters all over the world would provide a way for developers to become more engaged in the IGDA’s activities. Developers involved with dynamic local chapters will have more incentive to participate in SIGs, committees, and other IGDA events. Active local chapters also allow the IGDA to communicate with its members more effectively. An email from a trusted local chapter coordinator about a new SIG or IGDA issue has a personal touch a newsletter from the IGDA Board lacks.

In addition, the increased member engagement and improved communication of an active chapter increases the IGDA’s ability to act as an advocate for game developers. The IGDA did a commendable job of resolving the EA Mythic credits controversy last year, but imagine a hypothetical situation where we had a network of strong chapters in place during that controversy. The IGDA could have recommended that all of its chapters participate in a theme month, where the topic of discussion at that month’s meeting would be issues surrounding credits in the game industry. We could have taken notes from all the meetings worldwide and compiled them on the IGDA Wiki. Such notes would have been invaluable to the IGDA Credit Standards Committee, and the meetings themselves would almost certainly have caused volunteers to step forward and join that committee. Perhaps this effort would have drawn attention to and catalyzed action around crediting issues in local communities.

If elected to the IGDA Board, I will make the growth of local IGDA chapters worldwide my primary issue. I will serve as a mentor for local chapter coordinators around the world. I will use my experience expanding and running the Boston chapter to help chapter coordinators meet their specific needs. I will work with chapter coordinators to develop a written guide to starting and maintaining an IGDA chapter. And I will use my position on the Board to ensure that relevant IGDA activities are communicated to local chapter coordinators, who can then relay that information to their membership as they see fit.

In light of the issues I highlighted in my previous post, namely that not even the Board of Directors knows what’s going on with the search for the IGDA Executive Director, I have decided to put together a petition open to all IGDA members to ask the Board to tell the membership who is on the search task force and to open up what is currently a closed committee.

Even if the Board does not act on this petition, it is important for them to know that a sizable chunk of the membership cares about who the next Executive Director is and it is a disservice to the community to be so secretive about the search.

UPDATE: Bob Bates, Chair of the Board, has responded in the comments below, naming the members of the task force and promising to post that information on the IGDA website. This is good. You should read his whole comment below. So that’s part 1 addressed (or just about to be). As for part 2, on openness of the search, Bob states he has no problem with it, but understand that he does not speak for the board so this petition is still relevant and important. We need to send a message, loud and clear, that we require transparency in IGDA affairs. And thanks, Bob!

The Petition

One issue that has reared its head something like eight times today on various forums and email threads is the lack of communication within the IGDA — specifically a lack of transparency on the part of the IGDA Board. In this post I’m going to discuss communication about the Board’s activities — the communication we have right now, why that communication is problematic, my proposed solutions for our transparency issues, and what I will do as a Board member regardless of whether my solutions are enacted. 

The Communcation We Have

The Board publishes its meeting minutes online, which is a nice start, but if you actually read those meeting minutes they look like this:

Agenda
1) Approval of Minutes
2) Proposed Bylaws Changes for the IGDA Foundation
3) Executive Director Transition
4) 2009 Budget
5) Adjourn

Motion Summary
Motion to approve minutes of November 15, 2008 (Unanimously Approved)
Motion to approve IGDA Foundation Bylaws Changes. (Unanimously Approved)
Motion to adjourn meeting at 1:02 p.m. (Unanimously Approved)

That is literally the entire meat of the Jan 22 2009 Board meeting minutes, aside from a list of who attended the meeting. There is not a whole lot to go on there. We know that they were going to talk about some stuff, and it looks like they hit (1) and (2) seeing as related motions were approved. Did they get to (3) and (4)? Who knows? We don’t even know what the bylaw changes for (2) were.

I’m not saying that Coray, the IGDA Secretary, is doing a bad job. He’s doing his job — this is more or less what meeting minutes are supposed to look like for any organization. Meeting minutes are not, however, a tool of transparency or of communication. (Though searching Google for “meeting minutes,” the second hit shows a much more verbose example than what we see above.)

We need more than meeting minutes if we are going to be engaged members of the IGDA.

What else does the IGDA provide its members in terms of what the Board is doing? We have the Annual Report, which is nice but awfully thin on information. Take a look at last year’s report: it’s great that the Board publishes simplified financials for the IGDA. We’re able to look and see that even though the IGDA’s income grew in 2008, its expenses grew even faster and as a result we are $91,000 in the hole for 2009. On the other hand, it looks like our administrative costs have actually gone down. It’s a matter of something called “Member Programs & Meetings” increasing by about $300,000 since last year. What is this? We don’t know. Is this because the Leadership Forum cost more this year? Is it due to costs associated with developing the new igda.org website? It’s hard to say. The note from the Chair at the beginning of the report doesn’t even mention the $91,000 deficit — to read that note you’d think everything was just fine.

Finally, we have the monthly newsletter. This is great, but is only effective as an email blast — the newsletter format is really only good as a once-a-month email thing. It does not fit into most people’s standard routine of catching up on news. Having a plain-text format where you have to copy/paste all the links into a web browser to go visit them is not exactly a great way of highlighting things going on in the IGDA. You can’t even take metrics to see which initiatives people are clicking on to check out. And, more to the point, the IGDA newsletter functions mostly as a way of highlighting initiatives that are happening throughout the IGDA — which is fantastic, but is not really a vehicle for transparency for the way the Board functions.

Why This is a Serious Problem

I will use an example to illustrate why this lack of transparency is a problem.

The search for the new Executive Director is possibly the single most important task the IGDA faces for 2009. Yet the search task force for the executive director is shrouded in mystery. Its only mention *anywhere* on the main IGDA website, and this includes the monthly newsletter and the Board meeting minutes, is the press release that went out in early February. This press release mentioned, briefly, that “[t]he IGDA Board will appoint a task force to coordinate the search for a new executive director.”

That’s all I heard until the Annual Meeting last week at GDC, where it was mentioned that Tobi Saulnier is heading up the task force with a number of other IGDA members, and the task force has recently completed writing a job description to be posted “in the near future.” What’s the job description? Where is it being posted? How did one get a position on that committee? Why didn’t we hear about it for six weeks? Are they giving consideration for the job to IGDA members first, or do they have a policy of looking for professional association managers from any industry?

We don’t know the answer to any of these questions. More disturbingly, it looks like the Board itself doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions.

This is the most important task for the IGDA in 2009 and not even the Board of Directors knows exactly what’s going on.

This is a problem. (EDIT: I have created a petition to ask for greater transparency in the matter of the search for the Executive Director. I encourage you to sign it if you are an IGDA member.)

My Proposals

I propose that the full accounting of the IGDA finances be disclosed to the organization’s membership to the extent that such disclosure is legal.

I propose that the Board of Directors appoint a Board member or an IGDA member to a role dedicated to communicating the Board’s activities to the membership. This will benefit everyone — as activity on the forums has shown, communicating what the board is working on quells the claims that the Board is sitting around and doing nothing and enables IGDA volunteers to come forward and help with initiatives they are interested in.

I propose that the above communications should be in blog format, with a functioning RSS feed, as that best fits the way that most game developers daily read their news.

What I Will Do If Elected to the Board

Regardless of whether my proposals are accepted, as an individual on the IGDA Board I will be certain to use this blog at dariusforigda.org as a place for members to come and see not only what I’m working on as a Board member, but also my updates on what other Board members are doing. So even if there is no systemic transparency, I will use my position as a Board member to shed light as best I can on what is happening on the Board of Directors.