Executive Board to Expand to Eight Directors

A constitutional proposal to alter the process of electing members to the Executive Board has been passed 5 of 5. This is a build off the proposal to expand the number of Directors serving on the board that was proposed by Fettig, which was passed for consideration in the 2017 Captains’ Meeting.

1. The NCDA will move to seven voting members on the Executive Board; an additional non-voting Director of Nationals makes the Board a total of eight people.
2. Two positions, President and Treasurer, are directly elected. Qualified Candidates explicitly run for the position of President and Treasurer.
3. The remaining 5 positions are “open” positions. Candidates run for the Board as a general directorship.

More details and the full process: 

Proposal [PASSED: 5 of 5 on 2017-06-02]

Proposal on Board Election Reform:

As mandated by the Constitution, we currently we use a preferential system to elect members to individual positions on the Board. Candidates run for a specific open position.

This proposal is to alter this, and move to having candidates run for the Executive Board as a general director. Five positions of the seven voting are eligible. While candidates would outline the preferred title in their campaign documentation, specific titles would be defined later, worked out by the Board in a meeting. The election process would follow single transferable vote (STV) type of preferential election. STV is used in a number of council elections that utilize preferential voting.

In three open positions, five people might run. In a STV style preferential election, the top three preferred candidates will win a seat on the Board. Two years ago, Dylan ran for two positions, fully qualified to serve either directorship. There’s that precedent as well.

This could promote a board that is more fluid in the way it operates, allowing an elected candidate to bring his or her unique qualifications to better the League. In a 7-8 person board, we may also have a couple of titles fluid from term to term. It’s up to the current needs of the League. Titles can more easily evolve as different leaders bring their skills to the table, and a relevant title might better function the Director’s further career.

Title positions are still necessary though, there are certain League actions that need someone to default to. Otherwise we just have a list and have the President delegate explicitly if nothing is getting done.

The issue is that the qualified candidate might not always be elected. Currently, the most important voting member of the board is Treasurer. We need Mike’s valuable experience to file our growing governmental requirements and also focus on keeping us legal in future actions. If we did not have him as a voting member, we’d Have to hire him as a consultant. It costs us far less to utilize Mike as a member of the board, promoting “in house”. Mike further gives the League valuable direction through his commentary and ultimately his voting rights.

This election he’ll run unopposed, in the proposed style he would rely on the good graces on teams to elect a balanced board.

For this reason, I propose that Treasurer and President be limited positions where candidates are directly elected to those specialized positions.

Further, the Treasurer will have specific educational / experience requirements for the candidate to reflect the required expertise.

The President functions as the pubic face of the League, and general leadership of the Board and Association. While this could be another open position with the Board promoting their own “Chair”, it makes better sense for the the position to be publicly elected. It’s certainly more NCDA-like.

The Director of Expansion and Chief of Content are important positions. Their work must be done for the League to continue existing, even before considering expanding the scope of the NCDA. But there are many duties that overlap, and should we move to a larger board, we’ll need to be able to adapt quickly. We should fully utilize a shared work load of 64 hours per week (providing each Director contributes his or her 8 hr / wk average), which will allow the NCDA to continue on, but expand exponentially.

Technical details:

for three positions, the quota to win is total ballots divided by the number of open slots plus one. [e.g. 9 votes in 24 ballots = ((24/3)+1) ]. Once a candidate reaches that threshold, any remaining votes are transferred to the other candidates as defined by the preferential order on the ballots. Our software takes care of the counting.
Our current system does this already, through instead of three positions, the quota to win is a majority (divide by 2).

Teams would submit Ballots like:

Q: Rank the options in order of preference.

A:
President
1.
2.
Treasurer
1.
2.
Open Directorships (three available positions)
1.
2.
3.
4.

[PASSED: 5 of 5 on 2017-06-02]

Note: Once the period for nominations is complete, a new post will detail the campaign articles of each candidate and the full ballot instructions. Voting for the 2018 Executive Board will begin no later than 2017-06-15.