Rob McKenzie – Candidate for Board of Directors 2025

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 Elections at the 2025 Annual Meeting.

Nomination Statement

Greetings,

You likely know me, I’m Rob McKenzie, one of the founding directors of Judge Foundry.

In the last year, we have been doing a lot of station-keeping.  We ran yearly maintenance, did store orders, and other “keeping the lights on” types of things primarily.  Due to a number of factors, there was not a lot of program growth, and I can own up to the factors I had control of in that space.

I had outside-of-judging things pulling on my time between increased workload in my normal job and some mental health struggles that decreased the amount of focus I could bring to Judge Foundry.  This is not an excuse, it’s a set of facts, and should absolutely determine if you think I am a good fit for the role based on the results and likelihood of the factors continuing.

I also had some personality conflicts with some other members of Judge Foundry, and it made me less inclined to do any volunteer work outside of what I considered necessary.  I do not wish to single anyone out.  Everyone owns their own actions, and I’m owning that I did less work and focused on Judge Foundry less, and am accounting for my actions and what caused me to choose to take those actions.

I’m running again this year to provide institutional continuity and to manage some of the ongoing projects within Judge Foundry.

I do the streaming for the board meetings, I produce and ship products, I reach out to potential partners like Loading Ready Run, and I do some amount of administrative work behind the scenes such as email administration and acting as one of our key people on our Amazon hosting for WordPress.

Some of this would not go away if I am not elected – I am the head of the Products Project independent of being on the board, and if the board wanted me to produce the board meetings, I’m happy to do so.  If not elected, I’d try to hand off as many of the digital administration tasks as possible to new board members unless they create a project for digital assets and devolve the responsibility.

The next year is going to be interesting.

I think our key short term goals have to be shoring up some of the things we are missing – we do not yet have a defined process for judges to reach Level 4 and Level 5.  This has to be resolved somehow.

We also need to work on our acquisition pipeline.  People continue to bring up the old Rules Advisor position, with a public facing exam, and something like that which gives value to our otherwise uncertified members might be a good tool.  I’m willing to push for something like this and help, but would not be doing this myself.

We also need to get the long promised event administration/scorekeeping certification up and running.  This has been picked up and put down by multiple people, it’s pretty challenging and has some roadblocks.  Scorekeeping especially is tough, as there are now many possible tournament softwares that can be used and the process likely would require general “how to run an event” knowledge rather than specific software interface mastery.  I can provide support on this for someone else, but with other commitments cannot do this myself.

The real thing I’d be focused on is judge conduct.  I’ve been open that the lack of a judge code is functionally on me – I have taken point on it twice, and failed to produce a public document twice.  This is a very good reason to not vote for me!  I do have the desire to see this done, but between the aforementioned issues that decreased my program work, this has repeatedly been a very low motivation task.  It needs to be a priority, and I’ve not made it so, and that will change if I’m elected again.

If the lack of progress on key program components is a dealbreaker, please do rank me down.  If you would like continuity and someone that does background work and has a general historical view of the judge program and some amount of Wizards of the Coast contracting experience, please rate me to stay on the board.

Q1: Judge Program Direction

Question: It appears that one of this board’s main responsibilities will be to either navigate our relationship with Wizards of the Coast’s new Judge Program Manager, or manage a transition from Judge Foundry back to Wizards of the Coast. How would you navigate this situation?

This is a difficult question, because it involves one very large unknown that determines nearly everything.  Who will be hired into the Judge Program Manager role?

The person hired into that role is going to have (either functionally or openly) a large amount of control in how Wizards of the Coast interacts with the community judge organizations like Judge Foundry and the International Judge Program that have sprung up in the last two years.

I have substantial experience contract with Wizards of the Coast due to my history as a Regional Coordinator and prior experience as an ORC providing support on Magic Online and the now defunct Wizards of the Coast forums.

My objective would be to get to the “happy path” – get the person hired to partner with the community judge organization in some way, be it contracting us, bridging in our teams, or whatever would best serve the judge community based on the legal constraints that put bounds on the situation.

This is hugely situationally dependent, and all I can point to is my set of contacts with Wizards of the Coast and my history of attempting to make the program work on a high level as a guide to what could happen here.

Q2: Non-Profit Administration

Question: What skills, experience, or plans would you bring to this role in non-profit administration?

I’ve been doing administration work for Judge Foundry for two years.

I’m quite close with the team that runs Magikids, and have gotten good advice from them repeatedly since before we founded our organization.

I also have other resources that can provide guidance – I’m not a nonprofit accounting expert, but my wife is, and I have consulted with her about our general accounting strategy in the past.  I want to be clear here that I’m not saying we should hire her or take her advice in an official capacity, but she has directed me to resources and information that have been useful, and has enough experience to point me to what general actions we should take or types of things we should do.

Q3: Member Benefits and Resources

Question: How do you think Judge Foundry should best use its limited resources to benefit the members?

I think we should figure out our conference spend better.  Should this be defraying presenter costs?  Providing more exciting conference kits with exclusive items (playmats, sleeves, etc)?  This is space we very much need to be spending resources on.

It’s also possible we need to do some kind of general member benefit yearly.  I’ve proposed variants of this to the board in the past, but (correctly) it was not considered to be a good spend while we were not sure about our financial stability.

We also should likely look at partnering further with Face to Face and StarCityGames for more work pushing local stores to use Judge Foundry judges at Regional Championship Qualifiers.  There are some interesting potential things that can be done here, like getting judges or stores to report the usage of judges at their events to get some kind of beneficial item or promotional hanger or callout somewhere.  This is nebulous, but I think the pilot program where we packed judge reward items into RCQ kits in Canada was generally well received and we could be doing more in that space.

We also need to push more content creation through Community Grants or direct contracting.  Right now we have the excellent JudgeCast videos and the Loading Ready Run videos, but there is potential space for many basic videos or other pieces of content that could exist that we could be providing resources for.