And the 42nd Interim SMC Board Member…
… is also being joined by the 43rd and 44th. I am very proud to report that Aaron Strout, Coach Deb (Deb Micek) and Chris Hambly were the top vote getters with 383 for Aaron, 340 for Deb and 179 for Chris (who barely edged out Maddie Grant who had 166).
Why did we decide to expand to 44 from 42? It is simple. No one wanted to do a run off and have to go shill for votes all weekend - and that certainly wasn’t what I intended it to be. So, this morning I asked the interim board what we should do. By a narrow margin, we determined we should simply ask the top three vote getters if they were ok with bringing them all into the interim board and they agreed. In fact, seeing Deb and Aaron joke about it in the comments is what persuaded me this morning.
Unfortunately, there were some technology troubles: the corporate proxy servers prevented some of the candidate’s supporters from voting at work (so sorry); there were intermittment failures to accept votes in the last hours and probably four or five more problems with using Democracy Poll for an attempt at democracy. More importantly, we learned an important requirement of our member community software, which we will be designing collaboratively. We really need a good community system with one member, one vote software and special discussion pages for discussing the merits of the candidates of our formal organization and for the local groups.
Still, I think the overall effort was a success in demonstrating we really are going to be an open organization that will remain unwavering in our commitment to fairness and serving the greater needs of the Social Media community / industry. There was some good discussion about whether we should sustain the process we originally outlined so as to show that we keep our word. I think it is more important to respect the people inside the process and to admit mistakes, make corrections and move on to whats important.
To that end, it was never our intention to use this election process as a link building exercise. The original 41 were selected upon three critiera - merit, willingness to contribute a few hours each month and trust. I chose people I know who really understand what is happening in social media, would commit to contributing (more then just attention) and share some of the key values we hold (despite disagreeing with some of them on other topics). Some were members, others woud have been if I asked (or could have gone through the formality of signing up for a free Open Membership).
To be clear, my intention here is to get Social Media Club organized and heading in the right direction for the benefit of the community. It is to ensure the values of openness, honesty and willingness to engage in the conversation remain at the core of what we do and what we promote. It is to get other people than myself engaged, activated and working on behalf of our common cause. It is to get Social Media Club running as a self-sustaining community organization, being lead by other self-directed people who want to do good and are willing to work with others in the community to do more good together.
So the bottom line here is that we really want this to be an organization, of, by and for the people who share an interest in social media and its “greater significance.” The election was an attempt at an open democratic process. By agreeing to expand the size and skip the run off is just one other such example of listen, consider, converse and act, then repeat.
I for one, am very glad we did this process as I got to meet a bunch of new people who are doing good work in Social Media. We also accomplished some goals, we learned a lot, we picked up some momentum and we are getting a chance to grow. We also ended up with what seems to be three really great social media professionals, which is ultimately a wealth of riches more then we could have hoped for.
We have a lot of work to do from here, which we will begin blogging about on Monday. Though several interim board members are already underway on projects.
In the mean time join me in welcoming Aaron Strout, Coach Deb and Chris Hambly. I am looking forward to working with each of you.
PS - We will be doing something more with the other 35 folks nominated as well as those who paid for CoFounder memberships. One of the first tasks of the interim board is to consider how it is being structured, the language we are using and dividing up the work on the things we want to get done.
Update: corrected spelling of Chris Hambly’s last name
AWESOME choices. Congrats to all three of you!