Note: This is a candidate page for a Judge Foundry Election. Information on this page is provided by the candidate, and does not represent the opinions or positions of the Elections Committee or of Judge Foundry. For more information about this election, see the schedule and index for the 2024 Regional Advocate Election.
- Name: Rob McKenzie
- Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
- Election: 2024 Annual Meeting
- Running For: Member of the Board of Directors
Nomination Statement
Greetings!
I’m Rob McKenzie, and I’m one of the current directors of Judge Foundry.
I’m running for the board primarily in order to ensure continuity. As one of the initial exploratory committee members that transformed into a board member, I have a good grasp on what the board has done so far.
From a positives/upsides perspective, I’ve done a number of things to help get Judge Foundry to where it is:
- Filed initial documentation to form the organization in Minnesota
- Setup and manage some of the infrastructure, including the Judge Foundry email addresses
- Opened the Judge Foundry credit and checking accounts
- Manage fulfillment for Judge Foundry merchandise
- Have done a number of certifications and have worked with TOs to get them on board with Judge Foundry certifications and processes
- Am taking point on organizing the yearly member meeting (so blame me if it has a bunch of problems)
From a downsides perspective:
- I do physical and one-shot work much better than repeated work. You aren’t getting a weekly article series from me.
- I tend to put off certain kinds of work, due to some brain problems, and they fall on the floor as a result. I did a poor job with some of the early volunteer management.
In large part, I’m a known quantity based on what I’ve already done to help Judge Foundry get setup and the work I’ve done certifying judges and with ongoing projects.
If not elected to the Board, I plan to keep on with a number of things – I’ll continue to fulfill merch as long as the Board needs me to, I’ll do other one-off projects, and I’ll do whatever mentoring and certification I can in my area.
Q1: Specializations / Focus Areas
Question: Board Members work on a wide variety of tasks and projects. What would your “specialty” or main focus area be as a Board Member?
My current speciality is the person that does physical fulfillment things – I produce and ship the store items, things like the hats for the Canadian RCQ kits, and I’ve been working on the yearly member meeting.
I also am an outreach and engagement member of the team. I am present in a lot of social spaces, respond to messages, and resolve issues for members.
I don’t anticipate that changing. I’m not going to end up writing a steady stream of articles or driving a ton of project work otherwise, it’s just not how my ability to work and get things done operates.
Q2: Certifications
Question: Many questions related to the value of Judge Foundry membership. First, regarding certifications: How would you ensure that Judge Foundry Certifications have value in the eyes of TOs and other stakeholders?
I do this on a “retail” level, engaging directly with TOs currently. I actively certify people, work with my regional TO (Nerd Rage Gaming) to push and promote people, and have collected feedback from them about what they want to see in certifications.
A large portion is getting both my headspace to match theirs and theirs to match ours, in a feedback loop.
One of the notable points is the new Level 3. NRG was uncertain about the value of it, and I’ve been working to certify L3s and show them exactly what this level can demonstrate to them for judges they have not hired before or have worked with rarely. They aren’t exactly aligned, but it has made them see value in us pushing and promoting people that were stagnating a bit, giving them a better bench for head judges and team leads and encouraging those folks to reach more, which helps their structure.
This has also been true at non-series events. I’ve pushed local TOs to care about our certifications, and have been doing local certifications as well, demonstrating our value. I can’t make big sweeping changes this way, but my hope is that if multiple people do this it will make a cascade effect and get organic growth and engagement.
Q3: Member Benefits
Question: Second, outside of certifications, how do you think Judge Foundry should best use its limited resources to benefit the members?
A certification org can give value to members in two major ways. Making those members more skilled through certifications and making those members more visibly valuable through marketing, promotions, and partnerships.
In the visibility space organizers, publishers, and players are the three groups I see us needing to reach.
For organizers, either rewards for their judges or an understanding of how certification can help their events be better. For example, the Canadian RCQ judge kids. Perhaps a strategy doc giving certification paths and how TOs can help judges build skills and what that will do to enhance their events?
For publishers, we can partner with them to promote their game in a way that brings benefits for both them and our members. The MOJO is a great example, where Daybreak got good publicity and we are giving members prizes to thank them for participating in the fun community event. More partnerships like this would be very positive.
For players, tools to give members the ability to promote themselves and be official at events help quite a bit. The Judge Foundry store gives official uniforms and things like tokens to judges to use. We also have our public-facing site that allows players to see our certification process. More public-facing docs on the site might be a good spend here.
There is a lot of space in making judges more visible and more connected to the community that we can spend our resources on.
Q4: Legal Commitments
Question: Judge Foundry as an organization and Member Directors individually are bound by several Non-Disclosure Agreements, prohibiting disclosure of information gained as part of their duties as a Member Director, including in some cases disclosure of the existence of an NDA with a particular organization. Violating these agreements may have consequences for the individual and for the organization. As a Director, will you abide by any agreements that Judge Foundry has signed, and will you personally sign NDAs with other organizations as needed in order to pursue and maintain partnerships with other organizations?
Yes. I have abided by them so far, and I have been the organizational person to sign organization NDAs for Judge Foundry up to this point. I will continue to abide by them and will sign other ones as necessary for working with industry partners.
Q5: RCQ Judge Demand
Question: In the post Covid era of Magic, the amount of qualified L2 judges seems to have declined, but demand for judges at competitive REL events has grown with the advent of RCQs. Is there a solution you would pursue to prepare enough judges for Comp REL demand?
The real way to do this is push more level 2 judges into level 3 so they can certify and train more level 2 judges.
We have overall fewer level 3 judges than I expected at this point (only 25), which suggests we are running into an issue creating level 3 judges somewhere.
Currently, I’ve been working with a number of candidates, and I’ve interviewed six level 3 candidates, two of which have passed their exam. I think we need a more dedicated path for level 3s, with a bit more of an onramp for existing level 2s, because our failure rate on the exam is higher than I’d like. Either a built out study course or some tinkering with the exam would make this better, and I’ve been working on both and will continue to do so.
This is something that needs a lot of people working towards this goal, starting with level 4+ judges trying to certify more level 3s, but it is doable as long as we have the people willing to put in a bit of work to build out their regional communities.
Q6: Judge Work Opportunities
Question: What efforts, if any, would you support in order to increase work opportunities for judges?
Large scale organizers will hire as many judges as they need, and I don’t think Judge Foundry can really change that.
The space we can operate to get more judges places to judge is on a local level, demonstrating the value of certifications to local organizers.
Right now we have the Canadian RCQ kit that encourages RCQs to hire certified judges, and I want to do more in that space, some kind of outreach and growth among local TOs encouraging them to assist certified judges.
I’d like to get a similar kit into the hands of US stores (which has some cost and scaling problems we are working on), and would like to build out other outreach opportunities with our RAs to work with local organizers.
The organization only works if we have a wide base of engaged people, both on a judge and a store level.
Q7: Judge Foundry Areas for Improvement
Question: Pick one area you strongly feel Judge Foundry needs to improve and tell us your idea for doing so. Is it feasible? Is it achievable? How will you make it happen?
Judge Foundry needs some more folks involved with outward-facing communication – the board can’t handle all the inbound contacts, and there are a lot of web pages that need rework on JudgeApps.
Notably, the Judge Blogs pages need a lot of cruft cleared out, but that’s not purely a Judge Foundry task to do.
The board worked to get a Member Services role setup, but it did not end up working out, and I’d like to retry that initiative. What we need is someone willing to step up and do some amount of member contact work, and be a reliable point of contact, and willing to assign problems out to members of the Judge Foundry team.
This is very doable if we find the right person, and I’d like to get that search underway again.
This is the same for someone doing page cleanup and management for the resources pages – we probably can work with other orgs to find more than just US/Canadian folks to get some of the resources pages rebuilt. Again, this is doable with the right people, we just need to find those people.
Closing Statement
From a board and organization standpoint, I’m a ground-up kind of person. I’ve spent a lot of time working in my local area and region, knowing the judges and the organizers here well, and building out a community.
This is how I’ve operated up to this point, and it’s difficult to change anything after years of doing work the same way. Connections, community, and personal interaction are the way I get things done.
This is what you will be getting if you re-elect me to the board. Someone who tries to engage personally, work with individual people, and make those individuals better.
I’m not the most effective coordinator of larger groups, and I work to find workable in-the-moment solutions to issues, and I’m willing to round up to success – very few situations or interactions are total failures, and success and failure are usually rounded up or down. I’m willing to do “good enough” work for things.
If you decide you would like that “good enough” work, I’m in for another board term. If not, please know I’m not going to step away from the org, and I’ll continue to work with Judge Foundry to get things done, and I’ll be excited to see what the future board does.