I suppose I should have mentioned this earlier...

[sraun]

I was re-elected to the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Incorporated (AKA Minn-StF, MN-STF, or other similar abbreviations) Board of Directors at the Annual Voting Meeting on Saturday.

This is not surprising. I was on the Board last year. The chances of a sitting Board member who chooses to run for re-election not being re-elected are slim.

Dave Romm posted a picture of the new Board.

Comments

[quadong.livejournal.com]

I feel a need to share this function, which I use on the Minicon 44 site.

/* Produces a random variant on the abbreviation of
"Minnesota Science Fiction Society" */
function mnstf($forcecap = false) {
  $mn = rand();
  if($forcecap) $mn = $mn%3;
  else          $mn = $mn%5;

  $d = rand();
  $d = $d%2;

  $stf = rand();
  $stf = $stf%4;
  

  if($mn == 0)      print("MN");
  else if($mn == 1) print("Mn");
  else if($mn == 2) print("Minn");
  else if($mn == 3) print("minn");
  else if($mn == 4) print("mn");

  if($d == 0) print("-");

  if($mn >= 3) $stf = 0;

  if($stf == 0)      print("stf");
  else if($stf == 1) print("Stf");
  else if($stf == 2) print("StF");
  else if($stf == 3) print("STF");
}

[sraun]

Oh, that's neat!

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

The chances of a sitting Board member who chooses to run for re-election not being re-elected are slim.

I consider that a bug, not a feature, but I'm a trouble-maker.

What surprises me is that apparently the voting membership actually remembers who the board members are. It isn't like they (or sometimes "we") are high-profile.

[sraun]

I was always amused by Don Bailey's "Throw The Rascals Out!" campaigning.

I consider the lack of turnover to be an is - as near as I can tell, the only time you really get turnover in elected positions (anywhere/when) is when one of the following is true:
1) Term Limits are in place
2) The incumbent quits / refuses to run again
3) The incumbent does something that sufficiently annoys their electorate (or that the opposition can spin to annoy the electorate).

We don't have 1. 2 is our most common method of turnover. To the best of my recollection, 3 has happened once - during the Great Minicon / Minn-StF Handgun Carry Debate.

Given our proven incapability to keep good / usable written records, reminders to the club in the future, and things of similar ilk, the fact that we tend to have a board member who's been on forever (when I started, it was Scott Imes, now it's Dean - I think Martin Schafer[sp?] served as an overlap between the two) gives us at least some institutional memory. Which is worse - lack of board turnover, or the board getting really surprised by some legal or financial thing that none of the current board knows anything about?

[quadong.livejournal.com]

I think that total lack of institutional memory is generally worse than total lack of turnover. Of course, one of those is a (fairly) clearly defined instantaneous condition and the other needs clarification as to how long there is a lack of turnover.

But what's more interesting is not the question of two undesirable extremes, but of what balance to strike between them. With only five board members, there's not a lot of wiggle room if each person counts solely as either "turnover" or "memory". Seems like a 2:3 division one way or the other is probably the way to go, and lo, that's what we've got.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this concurrent with thinking about voting systems. I've discovered that it's very hard to construct a voting system in which the electorate can express the idea "I'd like some people from this group of candidates (but I don't care very much which ones in that group) and also some people from this other group (again not caring too much which ones), but I don't want either group to win all of the seats". With ranked voting, each voter can try interleaving the two groups in their ranking, but if other voters interleave differently (as they surely will), there's no telling if it will come out right. I suppose this is part of why some organizations have special seats set aside on their boards for young members.

[michaellee.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons why the CONvergence/Misfits board has two year overlapping terms is that it would be extremely unlikely for there to be total turnover in a year as that would require full mid-term resignations as well. There's also a fairly long transition in place in the ideal situation, where there is six months between the election and when you fully become a board member where you shadow your predecessor. [This may be a problem if it's an "unfriendly" replacement, but that's something the rest of the board is aware of.]

We didn't have any turnover for ten years on the CONvergence side, but most of us consider that to be a function of the organization starting up, and now that we're in a more steady state, we expect to see turnover on a more regular basis.

Of course, the major difference for us is that all of our positions have relatively specific job descriptions -- so each candidate is a distinct race, as opposed to the top x candidates ending up as the board. And that really impacts a lot of different things.

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

There's also option 4: An incumbent isn't reelected for reasons that are unclear.

In Minnstf, within my memory, this has happened in 2 elections. (One of them is the same election you're referring to).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Scott didn't actually express an opinion whether it was good or bad, just that it wasn't a surprise.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I know; I was just making a comment.

[jimtbari.livejournal.com]

I'm very sorry for your loCongratulations!