1. Call to Order
Chair, Mike Moore, called the meeting to order at: 9:32 pm EDT
2. Roll:
Present: Afton Benson, Matan Presberg, Aslynne Howes, Chris Garcia, Amy Wieliczka, Eric Shibuya, Mike Moore, Scott Steiskal (joined at 9:41 pm EDT)
Absent:
Recorder: Matan Presberg
3. Approval of Agenda
Motion: Aslynne
Second by: Eric
Discussion:
Explanation of voting for new board member:
-either ask for abstain or oppose (for relatively uncontroversial motion), silence = pass
-anyone can ask for vote by role, or initiated by chair
-abstaining strongly encouraged for any vote w/conflict of interest (financial or otherwise)
-giving Chris access to IJA Folder on Drive, which will give him edit access to this document and all future agendas
-Chris now has edit access (Chris wrote this, hi!)
Vote: passes unanimously
4. Approval of Minutes:
Business Board Meeting (LINK) (June)
Motion: Amy
Second: Aslynne
[Scott Stieskal joins at 9:41pm EDT]
Discussion: Note: does not include the one on June 30th
Vote:
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain :
Result : passes unanimously
5. Motions for Consideration
A. Motion to approve Mike Moore as Chair for 2020-2021.
Motion: Matan
Second: Scott
Discussion:
-asked if anyone else interested in being chair – no one interested (anyone who’s been a board member for a year is eligible to be chair)
Vote:
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain : Mike Moore
Result : passes unanimously minus Mike
A.2 Motion to nominate Scott Steiskal as the Operations officer
Author : Mike
Motion : Mike
Second : Matan
Discussion :
Scott: my interests in what I want to do on board align with operations officer and am excited to take it on.
Mike: XD
Chris: what are the responsibilities of the Operations officer?
Mike: linked previous discussion to the motion. Operations officer takes over ‘default’ position for odd jobs, this used to be the chair position.
Vote :
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain : Scott Steiskal
Result : passes unanimously minus Scott
B: To approve purchasing Director and Officer and General Liability insurance from Chubb instead of renewing with previous vendors Hartford & PIAI.
Author : Afton Benson
Motion : Eric
Second : Amy
Discussion :
Afton: explanation of history of our vendors as well as what Director and Officer Liability insurance is
Afton: some concern that switching would incur extra fees, but Chubb does not charge those fees
Afton: identical amount of coverage and what they cover is identical
Scott: is deductible on the officer, or on the IJA as an organization?
Afton: on IJA on almost all situations
Eric: is the new company fairly reputable?
Afton: trusts Associated and our rep Christa, so we trust the referral
Afton: will follow up on coverage for non-USA members
Aslynne: if policy changes in order to include non-USA members, will we have to do anything?
Afton: if fees change, will have board vote (if this company would, old company would too)
Chris: if we switch from the old one, do we have extra work to get records over to the new one?
Afton: not that I know of, but will ask, have not done it with other organization Afton works with
Vote :
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain :
Result : passes unanimously
C. Motion for a pro tem extension on the IJA Officer positions.
Motion: Eric
Second:Aslynne
Discussion:
Do we know anyone who’s interested in becoming a new officer? Anyone who wishes to retire?
Mike: officer positions are on 1 year rolling approval
Matan: did any of the applicants from board job search take the officer positions we suggested?
Eric: yes
Matan: are they included in this motion? Do we have to appoint them?
Mike: will make a motion after this to appoint them
Afton: at one point Martin Frost was looking to not be communications director
Afton: Jim Maxwell happy to be affiliates director, but that role doesn’t really exist right now
Afton: Marilyn might have been looking to step back from her role as membership director?
Afton: probably a good time to start passing along that information (communications director), was a scary situation with Martin’s health about 2 years ago
General consensus that we should renew everyone – amiable takeovers possible. We can always appoint a new officer to a role.
Aslynne: potentially interested in membership director but not if Marilyn still wants the position.
Amy: will reach out to Martin to figure out what communications role entails.
Aslynne: planning on helping Galen with YJA things, not necessarily an officer role.
Vote:
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain :
Result : passes unanimously
- Nominate Albert Lucas as Competitions Consultant and Yves Bolognini as European Representative
Author: Mike Moore
Motion: Aslynne
Second: Scott
Discussion:
Matan: do we have roles laid out? Or just titles
European liaison: After additional deliberation, the Board would like you to consider taking the position of European Liaison in order to use your specific talents (and location) to assist the IJA. You would serve as contact for the Board and help develop ideas and projects to encourage greater European membership and representation. We hope you will accept the position of European Liaison.
Competitions Consultant: The Competitions Consultant communicates with the various competition directors to improve or maintain quality of those competitions.
Vote:
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain :
Result : passes unanimously
E. Motion to renew Afton as Treasurer
Author: Mike Moore
Motion: Aslynne
Second: Amy
Discussion:
All: XD
Vote:
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain :
Result : passes unanimously
F. Motion to approve last month’s vision meeting minutes (June 2)
Author: Mike Moore
Motion: Aslynne
Second: Eric
Discussion:
Vision: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17SJ0E8ztgBrYuJAy3xASTc9U958plNJYDWQQFOkbRxk/edit
Votes:
In favour:
Oppose :
Abstain :
Result : passes unanimously
6. Discussion
2020 Festival Discussion (all)
Mike: wow! That went so well. Exceeded everyone’s expectations (organizers, attendees, everyones)
Afton: Direct people who need to be paid to Afton or Amy. Payment ~5-7 business days
Amy: Sent out emails to people who have yet to fill out the form
Matan: final fundraising numbers/reports?
Notes from Mike Moore/some FB posts/video chats
Streaming reflection (probably not important now, but maybe for closer to another event)
Matan: impact that the IJA has is large. People were very excited to help, because it’s the I J A. This was a key driver to the success of the event. Can maybe lean on this more.
Aslynne: Race and Feminism panels had great ideas that we can implement
Scott:
- People are willing to contribute. Delegating IS possible. Agreed to moderate 14 hours of workshops, which felt unnecessary after the fact. Maybe establish an email list of potential volunteers?
- Would like to continue to have workshops online during the festival. Will lean into the reach we have online.
- Lots of potential to livestream a lot of events.
Amy: could bring in international panelists to the in person festival
Aslynne: could have IRC Show at the in person festival by collecting the videos
Eric: Raffle went really well. Picked up after it went live, lots of vendors contributed after it went live. Should do an online raffle again (and happy to help with it).
Scott: surprised by profit from t-shirts/merch, made almost $600. Very easy to add new products, very little overhead.
Amy: easily hit 1000 people watching for every stream, some up to 2000. Our reach was surprising. Lots of chats along the lines of ‘this is my first IJA event, so glad this was happening online.
Aslynne: what was the conversations around putting venmo links for feminist panel? Worried about the implication that we were not compensating them.
Matan: Was asked right before the panel, didn’t feel like questioning it and just went forward with it.
Amy: There was prior communication, but we went back and forth on it and it fell through the cracks.
Afton: non-profit best practice to have contracts ahead of time for everything. If someone makes over $600, need to find them to get W-9 (can be difficult). Better for all parties, clear terms for us and them.
Amy: another key takeaway. Planned it too late, very strapped on time to handle finance like we wanted to.
Eric: problem with Feminist Panel -> not a lot of experience with IJA (catch 22, not enough women = not enough women on board). On an IJA panel, not a knowledge about the IJA specifically.
Aslynne: similar issue to Eric, also didn’t love someone being unprofessional and sitting and eating cereal.
Matan: reiterate planning more ahead of time for marketing.
[Eric leaves the call ~10:58]
Afton: noting that IRCs got an oversized amount of marketing compared to other events.
[Amy leaves the call 11:01, rejoins at 11:02]
[Mike talks about some of the below]
Aslynne: maybe get more reports from international people?
Chris: should we have a survey form?
Afton: yes, would like to have a more clear direction for survey to be more concise
Matan: suggests two identical surveys, one for membership and one for posting to Social Media
Scott: one last takeaway, as listened to Race Panel and some of the suggested systemic changes, heard some things that would require total overhaul on being more financially accessible
Aslynne: interested in helping make that happen
Mike: any geographically bound festival will inherently be inaccessible to most of the population we’re trying to serve. Would love to see an electronically available festival in addition to geographically bound one.
Scott: what happens if we pick a totally different kind of location? (casino, university, whatever)
Mike: universities tend to be surprisingly not cost saving (have had IJA’s there in the past)
Scott: hotels tend to be the most expensive
Chris: people want to see more accessibility online, what needs to be setup in order to incorporate online events into in person festivals?
Aslynne: Youtube -> will it auto close caption?
Matan: yes, not sure how reliable
Afton: also ASL interpretation is a good accessibility thing, now know some ASL interpreter jugglers.
Chris: one suggestion for transcription, google sheets can do live translation on a sheet
Optimization
- Layer of redundancy for workshops – what if the mod doesn’t show? (Make the workshop instructor a mod as well)
- If we can make time zones clearer SOMEHOW, that’d be great
- More jam sessions! Maybe some general, some specific.
- Maybe smaller (fewer people) or longer panels. For tougher topics, I’d be down for 2-3 hour ones. Leaning more toward seminal videos than livestream excitement
- Lean into performers’/participants’ locales for news coverage
- Championships right with announcement of results would make more sense to people who hadn’t watched them (Eric: I think we should also consider showing all the contestants, or the top 2 or 3 in any case–which would have been all this year–I think a lot of folks missed Zalia’s second place Juniors routine).
If we do “this” again, some big ideas:
- Perhaps an off-season e-festival yearly (Feb?)
- Spread out the content creation – NA/SA, Europe, Japan? Maybe 4 time zones, making it 24 hours/day? Even just having two would be amazing, the flare of the club battle was so interesting and hype. (We’d have to make sure people with bad internet connections have ways around it – pre-uploading videos, etc) .
- Having more bilingual workshops, or multiple offerings in different times. I had some people in Europe (Israel and places I couldn’t place), Japan, etc in my morning workshops. And frankly, my best everything always happens before 10:00 am, so I’m happy to do morning things!
(Eric: I will note that if we do “this” again we should recalibrate our expectations. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. We got a lot of interaction during the week because the world’s essentially stopped. Whatever moving forward, whenever that is, we have to remember that lots of people will eventually be back at work. If we can expand to different timezones for content, I like a week long, off-season virtual fest. Otherwise, I think we consider a long weekend).
7. Varia:
-
Mike Moore: Spoke with parliamentarian for a bit before/after the meeting. A few notes:
- We should probably change our quorum bylaws to reflect the number of people we actually expect at the meeting. There doesn’t seem to be a reason to do a song and dance
- The parliamentarian said our project was so low-maintenance that she’d look over a draft of these (and other changes) for free if we wanted!
- At end of business, a motion to adjourn is not necessary (only if there is outstanding
- Don’t need to take role of board at AGM (Board has equal rights to other members during AGMs)
- Don’t need to ask for abstentions for unanimous consent (saving us those precious, precious recurring syllables)
- We should probably change our quorum bylaws to reflect the number of people we actually expect at the meeting. There doesn’t seem to be a reason to do a song and dance
8. Confirm Next Meeting
Not deciding at this meeting – sending out whenisgood
Next meetings will take place on…
for the next vision meeting
for the next business meeting
9. Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 11:26 pm EDT.