Board of Advisors

Thus, the Board of Advisors was created: a standing committee which would serve as a knowledge pool for the Board of Directors. Its membership comes from both inside and outside SFWA, and consists not only of working authors but also editors, academicians, and scientists. We are also fortunate to have among us many former SFWA Presidents, thereby institutionalizing an informal process which has been in place for many years now. Altogether, the combined experience of its members could probably be counted in the hundreds of years -- not bad for an organization which is only 35 years old!

Nonetheless, the Board of Advisors will not be an "active" committee; there will be no regular meetings, nor will an email listserver be established. It will not set policy or issue directives, and it's unlikely that its members will ever work in concert. All that is required from a member is the willingness to serve as a consultant to the Board of Directors (with the understanding that all such consultations remain confidential) and to be publicly listed as a member of the Board of Advisors.

Regarding various questions that have been raised concerning the origin of the Board of Advisors:

The BoA was something I hit upon during my brief tenure on the Board of Directors during the Levinson administration. I'd noticed that, very often during the online meetings of the BoD, questions were posed that the Board members couldn't answer among themselves. So the idea was to provide the President and Board of Directors with a group of individuals whom they could consult on various issues, if and when the need should arise.

Once the proposal to form the Board of Advisors was formally voted upon by the Board of Directors, each member of the BoD was invited to nominate individuals whom they thought might be worth having as Advisors. In addition to past SFWA presidents (or at least those who were still members of the organization), we invited various individuals whom we thought could provide a broad range of knowledge or expertise. So Warren Lapine, for example, was asked to join because his knowledge of small-press magazines; ditto for Bruce Coville, for his knowledge of young-adult SF publishing.

Various non-SFWA members were also asked to join the BoA in an effort to add out-of-genre expertise. Phillip J. Currie, for instance, was nominated because he's the curator of the Royal Tyrrel Museum in Alberta Canada, the world's foremost dinosaur museum, and thus knows something about science education. Much the same reasoning went for the nomination of Henry Jenkin; as Professor of English at MIT, he's also widely regarded as an academic expert on SF and fantasy.

Once the BoA was selected, an election was held among its members to pick a chairman; until that point, I myself had performed as temporary chairman. Joe Haldeman was elected by unanimous consent, at which point I stepped aside. My last act as acting chairman was to distribute a contact list of all BoA members (including mailing addresses, email, and phone numbers) to both the Board of Advisors and the Board of Directors. A couple of months later, when my term of office as Eastern Regional Director came to an end, I stopped being involved with BoD affairs.

Again, the purpose of the Board of Advisors was to serve as a brain trust for the President and the Board of Directors. Paul Levinson took advantage of it; so did Catherine, and apparently so has Robin. Other presidents chose to ignore the BoA; well, so be it. But it costs the organization nothing to keep it in place, save perhaps for a couple of inches of column-space to have its members listed in the Directory and the Bulletin. And it can be beneficial to those presidents and officers who choose to utilize it.