IFTF co-founder Carolyn VanEseltine last week stepped down from our board of directors at the end of her one-year tenure. (While we went public late last year, IFTF legally incorporated in March.) Carolyn has played as much of a formative role with IFTF as any of the rest of us, and we’re sad to see her leave the board — but pleased and proud at her continuing work in interactive fiction and elsewhere. Happily, she accepted an invitation from the remaining board members to remain connected to IFTF affairs through our advisory committee.

A board with only four directors sits a bit shy of the ideal, and we’ve been engaging our advisors and others towards inviting IFTF’s first non-founder director. I’m looking forward to it, honestly! Like many non-profit organizations, our founding board comprised a group of friends with a shared passion, chosen at least as much due to mutual proximity as any other strategy. We now have a chance to invite people on who add complementary skills, experience, and perspectives that the board otherwise lacks, broadening our ability to fulfill IFTF’s mission.

We’ve also published a new page for IFTF’s IFComp committee. This committee, in essence, makes public the informal mailing list I created when I became IFComp’s organizer in 2014.

For the sake of timeliness, the board created the committee last summer, in time for IFComp 2016 — and it spent the rest of the year with only one member, that being yours truly. At the start of this year, I worked with IFComp’s informal advisory group to transform it into a more formal governing body, operating under a written charter with a published roster.

Practically speaking, the organization of IFComp doesn’t change: there remains one organizer, and this person will also act as the chair of IFTF’s IFComp committee, year-by-year. The other committee members play an advisory role to the organizer. As the new page notes, IFComp’s full list of volunteers and participants rolls out far longer than this list of names; one can find a more complete roster by browsing the names attached to any particular year’s competition files on the IFComp website or in the competition archives.

Finally, the board extends a welcome to IFTF’s new communications manager, David Streever. He’ll be working with IFTF secretary Flourish Klink to better organize our social-media presence, email communications, and so on.

David is a very prolific writer in both hobbyist and commercial spheres, from his 150+ IFDB reviews through his paperback travel guides for cyclists. Clearly David cannot stop writing and I feel very fortunate that he has volunteered to extend some of that energy in IFTF’s direction!