Richard Bishop, Director, Nominations Chair, UK User Group Leader

I’d like to take a moment to thank those of you who took the time to vote in our recent election. As most of you know, Vivit has a Board of Directors that consists of nine directors who manage our staff of four and provide leadership and direction to our Local User Group and Special Interest Group leaders throughout the world. Each year, Vivit holds staggered elections to elect three of the nine board members.

I would like to reassure our members that Vivit makes every attempt possible to be a non-intrusive organization and keep the number of emails that we send to a minimum. We are conscious that in our attempts to drive up voter numbers, at this time of year we send a large number of emails to members regarding the elections. This year we managed to reduce some of these emails by not emailing those who are ineligible to vote (i.e. HP employees) and not sending "please vote” emails from our automated mailing system to people who had already voted. Local User Group and Special Interest Group leaders also sent their own emails that may have contributed to "email overload”. 

I’m pleased to say that this year, we have managed to conclude our election process more quickly and with more members voting than ever before. Despite this success, we are working to streamline the voting process for future years and reduce the number of unwanted election emails. We need to ensure that our desire for a streamlined voting process doesn’t reduce the board’s electoral accountability. We’d appreciate feedback from members on how we can do this and I’d be happy to hear from members who’d like to contribute to this discussion.

I’d like to thank the other board candidates who although they were not elected to the board this year, they were exceedingly strong candidates who volunteer their time as Local User Group or Special Interest Group leaders. We feel proud to have them as leaders within our organization and hope that they’ll consider standing for election in future years.

I’d also like to take a moment to thank Jim Murphy who is departing the Vivit board this year. Jim decided against standing for re-election due to work commitments and he’ll be a loss to our team. We wish Jim well and hope that he’ll stay in touch.