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.

This is some big news. The IGDA is in the contract negotiation state with a broker of insurance services to finally get group health insurance rates for IGDA members in the U.S. From Joshua Caulfield’s blog:

Then there will be a kick off and launch meeting, where we will walk through the core elements of implementation, communications and marketing the program.  Then we develop the materials.  Then we’ll launch.  My goal is to have this program viable in the first half of January. [...] The group we have selected after 3 months of research and review works with a wide range of A rated carriers and does not offer a single option.  Instead, they work with you, as an individual, as the HR representative for a group, as an unemployed professional looking to cover their family, as a small business owner, or whatever your situation is.  They talk with you about your needs, the options available to you, your budget, etc.  Then they will come back with some solutions for you to review.

Corvus Elrod just posted a podcast I participated in centered around the question, “What can the IGDA do for indie game developers?” We had a nice group of participants. In addition to myself and Corvus (the moderator), there was

• Scott Macmillan, indie game dev and a Boston chapter coordinator.
• Jay Barnson, indie game dev and lapsed IGDA member.
• Coray Seifert, producer at THQ/Kaos and IGDA Board member.

(Just to be clear: I did not have anything to do with the emails from “concerned_members_of_the_IGDA.” It caught me by surprise, and while I think it was a good attempt at grassroots organization, they could have been somewhat clearer that they did not represent the IGDA itself, and they should have signed names to it.)

(UPDATE: Everyone I spoke to prior to writing this who received a message had a public IGDA profile. It’s come to light that some people who definitely have private profiles also received a message from concerned_members. Seems like there might be some PHP hacking involved after all. Consulting some friends in security…)

IGDA members received an anonymous message yesterday urging them to sign the petition to call a member vote on the removal of Tim Langdell from his Board position.

Joshua Caulfield sent out an email to the IGDA membership today saying the following:

Dear Members,

Recently an email went out that appeared to have originated from IGDA. The return address of this email appeared as: “Concerned_Members_of_the_IGDA@IGDA.org.”
That email address was spoofed and the communication was not an official IGDA communication. We are currently reviewing the methods by which it was sent to see if this was sent out by people ignorant of proper use of the IGDA website or if there was malicious actions involved. We are also reviewing the method by which your email addresses were obtained and if that was done ethically or not. It is my hope that this was done by someone simply overzealous about their cause and not for destructive reasons.

Please be aware IGDA was not responsible for this email and does not have anything to do with the content or the links provided. You should read and use such links at your own risk.

We will investigate this issue and provide you with information on our findings as they are confirmed.

Thank you,

Joshua Caulfield
Executive Director
IGDA

It’s very clear from the email I received that it was not “spoofed.” The people who sent the message clearly used the IGDA’s web forms. The header of the email says it was mailed by ynilo.pair.com — well, pair.com happens to be the IGDA’s web host, so if it was sent via the IGDA’s PHP web form it would indeed be mailed by pair.com. Just to test it out, I sent the following message to a friend:

My friend forwarded me the email he received. The header and footer are identical to the email from “concerned_members”:

From: I_am_totally_anonymous <bad_address@example.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:41 AM
Subject: Message via IGDA Profile: I_am_totally_anonymous
To: (my friend)

I_am_totally_anonymous sends you the below message via your IGDA Member Profile:

This is my anonymous message to you.

-Nobody

—————————————–

You can reply to I_am_totally_anonymous at bad_address@example.com.

Note: You can change your public profile access, privacy and email settings via your MyProfile page:
http://www.igda.org/membership/myprofile.php

International Game Developers Association

So there you have it. It is clear that this was a group of people who decided to split up the Member Directory listings (which are publicly available to any paying IGDA member) and went down the list and messaged everyone using the form system. Nobody obtained email addresses through dubious means. It’s like sending a message via Facebook messaging, only in the IGDA’s Member Directory there’s no setting to say “only let my friends message me.” You’re either public or hidden, and the default is public.

These messages were not sent in an unethical or illegal way. If anything, the messages are a consequence of the rather poor state of the current IGDA website (having seen the new site, these issues will not come into play, it will be a lot more Facebook-like in terms of privacy).

I also want to say that I think it was a bad move for the “Concerned Members” to remain completely anonymous, but that’s neither here nor there. It wasn’t a hack, plain and simple.

I wasn’t aware until today that the IGDA sent out a Member Satisfaction Survey to members via email. If you’re a paying IGDA member, you should have gotten it on July 21st or some time around then. Definitely go back and check your email for the survey link. (I’d link it directly here, but I think it’s a unique URL per member and I don’t want to mess up their tracking.)

It’s vital that the IGDA hear member feedback wherever possible, and for that to happen, you as a member have to provide said feedback.

The IGDA has just announced its new Executive Director: Joshua Caulfield. He’s held the position for a few weeks prior to this announcement, and I’ve had the pleasure of talking with him about the state of the IGDA, the organization’s direction, and other topics. I’ve got to say I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen so far. In particular, I now realize that bringing on someone with professional association management experience may in fact be just what the IGDA needs.

You can go see his introductory blog post at the new IGDA Staff Blog.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while — I’ll be back very shortly with some comments on the Tim Langdell EDGE thing. (I just moved apartments and I don’t have internet at home right now, hopefully I can compose a post tonight.)

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!

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.