Annual Meeting of the Membership and Elections

Posted November 22, 2022

The annual meeting of the membership will take place on Sunday, December 11, 2022, at 12:00 noon. The meeting will be held entirely online and is open to the public. Additional participation is open to Altonimbus Members (Kumoricon staff).

The meeting will be streamed on two platforms: Kumoricon's Twitch channel, and Kumoricon's public Discord server. Both are open to the public. Viewing on Discord requires a Discord account and joining our server, and Twitch does not require an account.

This year, we are using a new election format for director elections, based on a bylaws amendment approved by our members earlier this year, and a revision to our elections process approved by the board. Here are the changes we are making:

• Voting for director elections will not occur at the annual membership meeting. Instead, voting for director elections will be open for 5 days, from Thursday, December 8, at 8:00pm, Pacific Time, to Tuesday, December 13, at 8:00pm, Pacific Time.
• All members will receive emailed voting instructions closer to December 8.
• Members do not need to attend the annual meeting of the membership to vote.
• Those who are unable to attend the meeting may watch the video replay on Twitch, and there will be time to watch it before the voting deadline.
• Although we will continue to host live candidate speeches, Q&A, and comments during the annual meeting, we will not pause between each race to vote. We expect the meeting to be much shorter as a result.
• Because voting is not part of a specific membership meeting, proxy voting is not allowed. All members have 5 days to vote and those interested in voting should directly cast their vote.
• In order to reduce the chances of needing a runoff vote, voting will be conducted using approval voting, as specified in the recent bylaws amendment. In approval voting, members vote for as many candidates as the member approves of, with the winner being the candidate who receives the most votes, as long as it is a majority of votes cast. There will also be a "no confidence" option for all races.

Things that are staying the same about director elections:

• We will continue to use ElectionBuddy, a third-party platform, to vote for directors.
• Votes on ElectionBuddy are anonymous. No Kumoricon staff, including the election tellers or moderators, can see who you voted for or whether you voted "no confidence". (We can, however, see which members submitted a ballot at all.)
• The vote counts for each candidate will be publicly published.
• We will continue to host nominations, online Q&A, comments, and endorsements on the public Discord.
• We will continue to also mirror the nomination list on the website forums and accept questions there.
• We will continue to create an archive of questions, answers, and comments on the staff website for those who do not have a Discord account.

Nominations began at the Rant and Rave meeting on the last day of the convention, and online nominations, and candidate Q&A, and endorsements, are now open on our public Discord and on the forum. The ongoing nomination list, and full details about elections, are available at those locations.

The elections will be for the following board positions, for annual terms:

• Chair/President
• Director of Infrastructure
• Director of Membership
• Director of Operations
• Director of Programming
• Director of Publicity
• Director of Relations

Processes for member participation at the annual meeting are listed on our meetings page. If you have news to report during the meeting, you can email it to good.of.the.order@kumoricon.org.