Why Local Chapter Growth Is My Primary Issue

“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.