On March 15, 2021, I will resign from the board of directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. I plan to continue serving as chair of the Twine committee (and to continue my association with IFTF in general), and in fact a large part of the reasons behind my resignation relate to that duty.

I chose this date because it’s exactly five years after I began in the position—and five years, more or less, after IFTF itself began. But I am choosing to do it now because this past year, I found that I had overcommitted myself. It is a lot of work to serve on the board of directors of a nonprofit. It’s also a lot of work to chair a committee. And, honestly, I don’t think I was able to do both effectively at the same time. I found myself choosing to prioritize one over the other over the course of 2020, which meant I neglected the other role. I would like to say that I balanced things so that one role never became too neglected, but I don’t know that that was always true.

Deciding between the two roles was not hard. Twine is my priority, in an IFTF context and outside it. But more than that, I am confident that IFTF is on solid footing. I wouldn’t be resigning if I didn’t believe so. And I am very excited to see where the efforts to expand the board lead this year. It is time for more voices, and more varied voices.

[We are deeply grateful to Chris for his help over the past five years, and we are excited to see Twine continuing to move forward under his guidance. We’ll have more news in the coming months about bringing new people onto the Board and into all of IFTF’s projects. Signed, the rest of the Board.]