Elections

Results

  • Director of Infrastructure: Leon Lewis

Election information

Each year, we hold elections for the board of directors for Altonimbus Entertainment (the organization that produces and runs the Kumoricon convention). Altonimbus Entertainment, and thereby Kumoricon, is governed by a board of directors consisting of nine members who each serve annual terms. Terms begin and end at the conclusion of voting for the annual meeting of the body which elects each board member.

We will be holding a special election to fill a mid-term vacancy in the Director of Infrastructure position.

For the special election, we will be continuing the new voting format that began with last year's annual elections:

  • Nominations, questions, comments, and responses will be held online on the public Discord leading up to the August 19, 2023, membership meeting.
  • At the August 19, 2023, membership meeting, live candidate speeches, questions, and comments will be held, including an anonymous question-and-comment session.
  • Actual voting will not occur at the membership meeting. Instead, voting will be open for 5 days, from Thursday, August 17, at 8:00pm, Pacific Time, to Tuesday, August 22, at 8:00pm, Pacific Time.
  • All members will receive emailed voting instructions closer to August 17.
  • Members do not need to attend the meeting 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.
  • Because voting is not taking place specifically at a 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 a 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.
  • We will continue our use of ElectionBuddy, a third-party platform, to vote in this election.
  • 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 are no longer mirroring the nomination list, questions, and comments on the website forums.
  • 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.

Election roles

The election is being run by the following staff:

Nomination moderator: Robert Trotter, Chair
Election moderator: Robert Trotter, Chair
Teller: Bridget Hollander, Staff and Attendee Services Coordinator
Teller: Allegra Lopez, Nonprofit Development Coordinator
Teller: Brianna Shade, Multimedia Manager
Backup teller: Panda Rushford, Assistant to the Director of Publicity

The nomination moderator will oversee nominations, and moderate the online questions and comments.

The election moderator will oversee elections at the election meeting.

The election moderator and tellers will receive and moderate anonymous questions and comments that are read at the meeting (see process below).

Nominations

Nominations are currently open for candidates for the Director of Infrastructure position.

Nominations must be seconded to be valid. A person cannot nominate or second themselves. To be listed on the candidate list below and on the ballot, a candidate must be nominated and seconded, and then accept the nomination, by the deadline. Once a candidate is nominated and seconded, they may change their acceptance status at will until the nominations deadline of Monday, August 14, 2023, 11:59pm.

Nominations and seconds can be made, and candidates may respond to nominations, in two ways:

Candidates are listed alphabetically by last name, using the preferred name as set in their official staff registration, which candidates may update at any time, or, alternately, the preferred name as requested to the nomination moderator.

Director of Infrastructure

  • Leon Lewis

Nomination records

The following is a record of the nominations, seconds, and acceptance decisions for this election:

August 8, 2023, at 9:25pm: Leon Lewis was nominated for Director of Infrastructure by Andrew Young.
August 8, 2023, at 9:26pm: Leon Lewis was seconded for Director of Infrastructure by Marie Jackson.
August 9, 2023, at 12:57pm: Leon Lewis accepted their nomination for Director of Infrastructure.

Questions and comments

The primary venue for online questions and comments will be the channels for each position on the official Kumoricon Discord public server. Please ask your question or make your comment in the appropriate channel for that position, rather than the #nominations channel.

Shortly before the meeting, we will create an exported version of the questions and answers for staff who don't have a Discord account. We will also continue to hold question-and-comment sessions at the membership meeting.

Anonymous questions and comments

After the open question-and-comment period for each candidate, we will host an additional anonymous question-and-comment period. Questions and comments may be emailed in advance, or during the meeting, to election.support@kumoricon.org.

This process is subject to the following rules:

  • The members of the moderator panel (composed of the election moderator(s) and tellers) choose anonymous questions and comments to sponsor and read at the meeting, from those submitted.
  • Anonymous questions/comments are anonymous when read at the meeting, but the moderator panel must know the identity of the person commenting. Your message must be signed with a name that clearly identifies you within the Kumoricon community.
  • As part of the moderation process, the panel may request more information from you or request a change to your question/comment, or possibly even reject your question/comment.
  • The moderator panel will reply to you stating whether your comment has been accepted.
  • Questions/comments may be shortened or summarized, and similar questions/comments from multiple people may be combined.

A more detailed explanation of the rules and process around anonymous questions and comments is available in our elections process (staff login required).