[IGDA_indies] newbies, and organizational politics

[Jason Della Rocca]

Thanks for the feedback from everyone, especially the inner workings of 
non-profits from Brandon.

Jon makes a great point about better communication and involvement. This is 
an area we are working on... Especially the communication side, which 
itself will play a big part in better involving members.

In terms of Brandon's comments on gatekeepers and doing end-runs and such, 
I'll say that a lot of what the IGDA does is set up the "infrastructure" to 
allow developers to do end-runs ;) SIGs and chapters are 100% volunteer 
driven. And, aside from providing some general guidelines, the IGDA doesn't 
get involved.

We are essentially asking developers to "end-run" around us! Sadly, most 
developers don't run, wait for others to run for them, or don't know how to 
run (which is the involvement problem).

For the advocacy oriented topics like anti-censorship and quality of life, 
we take more of the gatekeeper approach. These topics are very sensitive 
and require certain levels of expertize and consensus building that we wrap 
them in committee structures with direct board involvement, etc. I think 
this is appropriate/needed when we're using the IGDA to represent the 
industry to government on an anti-censorship case. That is, we need to 
speak with one voice and not look like we're a bunch of barbarians running 
around, etc...

Regarding Ted's note on size, the IGDA is pretty tiny. We only have about 
5000 members, with ~$400k in annual revenue. We have 2.5 staff. Ironically, 
we have over 75000 folks registered with "free user" accounts who are more 
than happy to reap the benefits of our work for free...

You can check our annual report or the members link for extra details:
http://www.igda.org/about/IGDA_2003_Annual_Report.pdf
http://www.igda.org/community/members.php


Regards,
	Jason

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jason Della Rocca
Program Director
International Game Developers Association

t: +1-514-426-1162
f: +1-514-426-1201
Montreal, Canada
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.igda.org/blogs/realitypanic/

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