Meet your new IGDA Board members

The IGDA elections are complete.  Though we did not meet quorum we had more than 10% voter turnout and an exciting election with a significant expansion on the amount of information available on candidates.

We are very happy to announce that Wendy Despain, David Edery, Darius Kazemi and Jane Pinckard have been appointed to the IGDA Board of Directors and that Coray Seifert has been appointed to an additional term on the Board. These 5 people were the top vote getters in our largest ever slate of candidates. Each will bring a different perspective and direction to our board, and they all look forward to serving our membership as we continue our mission to advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers.

A formal announcement of the new board members, along with the officers for the coming term will be made once officers have been selected in the next couple weeks, but we wanted to let everyone know who was chosen to the board as soon as possible.

The entire board looks forward to speaking with many of you at GDC next week, and continuing to work on your behalf in the coming year.

Sincerely,

Your IGDA Board of Directors

IGDA Bylaws updated

At today’s Board of Directors meeting we made several amendments to the IGDA’s Bylaws. These revisions were mostly centered around the processes surrounding special meetings and should clarify the requirements for members to call a special meeting, and how that special meeting will be held should one be called. Our overall goal for this was to make sure that while there is still a heavy burden on the membership to call a special meeting, it is still possible for our members to enact change with the current makeup of our organization.

You can see the amended Bylaws here: http://www.igda.org/sites/default/files/IGDA_Bylaws.pdf

The changes made are summarized as follows:

• Article III. Section 4 – Reduced the % of membership requirements to call a Special Meeting down from 10% to 5%
• Article III. Section 4 – Added language clarifying the process of a special meeting to include 4 parts: Notice, Discussion, Meeting and vote
• Article III. Section 5 – Reduced the quorum required for membership action to 20% for the removal of a member of the Board of Directors and 1/3rd of the membership for all other membership actions
• Article IV. Section 8 – Clarified language around removal of a member from the Board of Directors

In any organization like the IGDA it is critical that the members have the ability to make changes through special meetings. While this process should not be easy, it should be possible. The original intent of the Bylaws embraced this, but the current realities of our organization set the bar too high to realistically ever allow a membership enacted change. Our amendments today keep a high bar in place but set it at a level that is possible for our membership to meet. While we hope that this process will never need to be used, we are glad that we have been able to make these changes and are thus able to give this power back to our membership.

IGDA Partnership with GDC Europe

Gordon Bellamy here. We are proud to share that we are continuing and improving our long standing partnership with Think Services for the upcoming GDC Europe event in Cologne Germany , August 17th – 19th, 2009.

GDC Europe provides a great opportunity for our SIGs and Chapters to convene, learn and share game knowledge and experiences this summer.

Thanks to the collaboration and guidance from our chapter leaders and SIG leaders across the globe, we will have an on-site IGDA meeting room for the entire event, whose schedule for Chapter and SIG get togethers will be scheduled and listed in the GDC Europe program.

There is a 10% Discount for all IGDA Members… so be sure to send people to

http://www.igda.org/join because this discount ALONE more than covers their annual membership.

Details to follow from the SIG and Chapter leaders.

http://www.igda.org/chapters/

http://www.igda.org/SIGs/

to learn more about your respective Chapters and SIGs of interest and what their GDC Europe specific plans may be in the weeks ahead.

And IGDA is also of course a key contributor to the show’s content. We will highlight key talks by IGDA members in the weeks ahead as well.

IGDA Members receive a 10% discount off of Main Conference and All Access Passes when they register with code: GDCEIGDA

Register before the end of early registration (7/29) and save even more.

any questions/suggestions are encouraged and appreciated. . . gordon@igda.org