I’m pleased to report that the IGDA has enacted Bylaw amendments that I helped recommend as part of the task force I belonged to back in August.

Essentially the changes mean that the process of removing a Board member is clearer and easier. It requires a smaller quorum to occur (5% instead of 10%), and a Special Meeting of the members is now more clearly defined to be an asynchronous event happening over the Internet.

There’s more detail in the blog post, and of course you can always read the Bylaws.

Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games posted a look at me as an IGDA Board candidate, and also asked me some questions about my candidacy. I’m answering them here.

Why run now?

I decided to kick off my campaign for board almost a year ago, spurred by the Mike Capps debacle. Following that incident (and then the whole Tim Langdell thing) confidence in the IGDA reached an all-time low. I wanted to see better leadership on the IGDA Board, and when Coray Seifert said he was surprised I hadn’t run for Board yet things just clicked for me. Jason Della Rocca’s departure from the IGDA made it clear that the organization was hitting an inflection point, and I decided that running at this critical time in the org’s existence was the best thing I could do as a member.

Furthermore, the Boston IGDA chapter is at an excellent place right now. While running the chapter is not a simple task, we have established a workflow that lets the chapter organizers (of which Scott is one) fairly easily put together our monthly meetings and handle the website and job board. This means I’m comfortable stepping back somewhat from my local chapter duties to focus on global IGDA matters.

You say that the biggest issue facing us as developers is establishing our status as professionals, and that fixing this is a long-term thing.  What can the IGDA be doing in the short term to address things you note as symptomatic of this – like Quality of Life?

I think the IGDA is doing all that it can right now to improve QoL. Emphasis on the word “can” — the big problem is that we get a huge chunk of our revenue from studio memberships, so doing something pragmatic like instituting a program where studios are rated for QoL probably isn’t economically feasible for the organization. Even something like offering a certification program where we give a QoL Seal to companies willing to undergo a kind of inspection isn’t really feasible. This is another reason for my chapter-centric platform: strong chapters means strong outreach to individual members. I am hoping that by shoring up the chapters, we can get the IGDA to a place where we can drop our studio affiliate program and/or it wouldn’t kill the org to have a bunch of studios drop their membership if we did something they didn’t like.

If not covered by the above, what do you think the IGDA’s role in the industry-wide Quality of Life discussions should be?

I believe we should be certifying studios somehow. As mentioned above, I think voluntary inspections for companies that are confident they have good QoL would be a start. I believe such a program would be possible to do given the IGDA’s resources. We wouldn’t be pointing out the bad places to work but at least the good ones would be highlighted.

You note that you are up on the cutting edge communication technologies, and can help the IGDA with this.  What, if anything, do you see as poor about the IGDA’s communications practices right now, and how specifically would you improve them?

I wrote about this to some extent in my blog post “Transparency of the IGDA Board” back in April. Things have improved since then. There’s now an IGDA Board blog where Board members post occasional updates about what they’re doing. In particular I was impressed with Marc Deloura’s recent post about IGDA representation at a White House meeting. I didn’t know we had people there, and it was great to be informed of that in my daily RSS reading! We now have a Twitter account for the org and one for the Board as well.

While there has been improvement, we’re now facing the next step that is common to all organizations that adopt Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc: it’s easy to use them as a broadcast tool, but it can be challenging to manage the communities around them. We need to use them as tools to converse with our members. I also feel that our forum policies leave a lot to be desired (there’s been a lot of blocking/banning of posts which is generally not great practice).

Finally, there’s the issue of the website. We spent many tens of thousands of dollars over many years and what we have right now is unacceptable. I realize that a lot of those resources were spent by an almost entirely different Board and different IGDA staff, but I would like to see an IGDA website that I can link people to without also including a cringing apology. I don’t know exactly how I’d go about fixing the website. I need more insight into our relationship with our contractors, budget, and so on before I can make any concrete plans there.

Can you please talk about the big issues the IGDA itself faces as an organization right now?  What do you think is the most pressing one, and how would you work to resolve it?

I think our biggest organizational issues are fixing the website and transitioning away from our dependence on studio memberships. I discuss both above. If I had to pick one as the most pressing, it would be the studio membership issue. Weaning ourselves off of that money is probably going to take several years. I’d consider myself successful if this happens by the time my term would finish (2013).

Do you think the IGDA’s dependence on studio sponsorships for money is a bad thing?  If yes, what will you do to begin changing this?  If no, why not?

Yes, and I answer the “why” and “how” questions above.

Scott Macmillan (who made that amazing statement at the 2009 IGDA annual meeting) is reviewing each of the candidate statements for the IGDA Board on his blog. The reviews are his own opinion, but I would encourage you to both read his articles and possibly contribute opinions of your own to the public discourse around the election!

You can see his main post here (will be updated with links to more reviews), and see his first three reviews of John Ardussi, Phil Bourke, and Ann Burkett. Please comment on his posts if you have any questions or want to discuss the candidates!

Again, I encourage each of you to do the same, be it on your blog/website, Facebook, the IGDA Forums or wherever else.

The IGDA just posted the information about the 2010 Board candidates. So now my candidacy statement for the IGDA Board elections is officially online. In addition to the statement, which I recently published here, there is a four-question Q&A section you might want to read.

Voting begins on 2/14 — I encourage you to read the profiles of all the candidates so you can be an informed voter. There are 24 candidates running for 5 seats. I know it’s a lot to ask to read through 24 candidate statements, but more information about candidates is what we asked for, and we’re finally getting it. Now it’s up to us to put it to good use.

(It’s official — I have been nominated and will be running for IGDA Board. Elections open soon, and that means the candidate statements go up on the IGDA website soon. Since my statement is done and submitted, I figured I would post it here. It’s based off a post I made here some months ago.)

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

Prospective members ask this 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.

As an IGDA Board member, my number one priority will be to strengthen local chapters worldwide by making them a vital part of their local game development scene.

I’ve been an organizer of the Boston IGDA Chapter since 2006, and I became its president in April 2009. I’ve worked to grow the chapter, turning it into a force in the local community. When local developers ask me to describe the benefits of IGDA membership, I can respond with a list of tangible benefits provided by our chapter:

• A place for networking, with 100-200 people at our monthly meetings, grown from 30 people in 2005
• 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.)
• Political coordination around issues of game censorship legislation, tax credits, net neutrality
• A sense of belonging to a real community of local game developers

If every IGDA chapter worldwide could provide their members with a similar list of services, individual developers would immediately see the benefits that the IGDA brings them. Furthermore, they would see opportunities to volunteer on a local level, which would lead to greater member engagement with the IGDA.

Member engagement and communication on a chapter level are the foundation of the IGDA’s ability to advocate for game developers. Imagine if all of our chapters were strong; the IGDA could respond to hot-button QoL issues as they are raised by recommending that all of its chapters participate in a theme month, where the topic of discussion would be issues surrounding QoL. We could take notes from all the meetings worldwide and compile them on the IGDA Wiki. Such notes would be of value to the IGDA’s ongoing QoL efforts, giving the IGDA a better handle on where developers stand on the issue, and the meetings themselves would almost certainly cause volunteers to step forward and join our QoL initiatives.

I believe in the future of the IGDA — I’ve been a member since 2003 and it is obvious that we are doing more as an organization today than ever before. Yet there is much room for improvement, not just on the chapter level, but on issues of transparency, budget, and election process and policy. I’ll end this statement by encouraging you as a member to research each and every candidate on this page: it’s in your hands to elect the Board you want, so don’t throw away this opportunity to make a real difference.

Volunteer contributions:

• President, IGDA Boston Chapter, AKA Boston Post Mortem (2009-present)
• Coordinator, IGDA Boston Chapter, AKA Boston Post Mortem (2006-2009)
• Technology Co-Officer, Game Education SIG (2007-present)
• Member, Special Member Meeting Task Force (August 2009)