Chair's Board report for the 3rd quarter of 2025

[Donald Dale Milne]

Chair's Board report for the 3rd quarter of 2025:
    There was no new discussion of long-range goals for the GCD.

    There were no significant new contacts regarding commercial use of our data this quarter.

    I have recently reviewed our ongoing efforts for our main project of cataloging comics data and found that we have about 323 indexers who had changes approved during the quarter.  This is about two dozen less than the previous quarter.

    I have also received the following reports and am forwarding them to the Board.

Policy Coordinators' report:
    The results of a June vote on indicia scans was received. We decided to allow scans with more information, excepting art.

    A vote was held on adding issue titles to The Cursed Library series, which passed.

    There were several discussions held:

• Capitalization on editor role description, in particular the use of acronyms. Opinions were divided and there was no conclusion.
• Discussion about story arcs led to implementation of that field, which had been delayed for years pending clear direction.
• There is an unfinished discussion about story arcs and miniseries.
• An old discussion about adding a field for print run had some following, but mostly the point remains rejected.
• There is an unfinished discussion about using "narrative levels" as universes. It was mostly rejected.
• A discussion about allowing the use of universes for Archie has stalled.
• There is a proposal pending about reorganizing some newspaper strips compilation books into psuedo-series, as they were not published as a named series.

Reservations Coordinators' report:
    The Coordinators acted upon at least one request to increase members reservation limits this quarter.

PR Committee / Social Media Coordinator's report:
    As noted last quarter, the PR Team is effectively defunct.

Feature Committee:
    The committee submitted its final report, which generated little Board discussion.  A motion to adopt is pending.

Documentation Coordinators' report:
    There is currently a small backlog of changes for Policy Votes.  We have also made minor changes for clarity and link improvements.

Mailing List Administrators' report:
    Two new members were placed on moderation the day after joining several lists, for forwarding spam e-mails.  After continued activity, both were banned.

Treasurer's report:
    No report received.  In fact, I have not heard from our Treasurer during this past quarter at all, despite sending him some e-mails.

Secretary's report:   
    Several discussions stalled with the Board:

• Official GCD t-shirts and/or other merchandise:  There were no objections to offering an official T-shirt.  The board offered no opinion on the logistics.  One volunteer offered to serve on a committee.
• Indexer Registrations: A massive quantity of a single indexer's registrations made it onto a mailing list, leading to a short discussion of whether a 2-step process might be helpful to avoid this form of spam from happening. No recommendation at this time.
• Virtual Convention: We were invited to participate in a virtual convention.  The board briefly discussed this, but the offer didn't offer enough specifics to determine if it had any promotional advantage to us.
• Second party indexing:  Whether to allow indexing on behalf of other indexers and how to credit IMPs for that. No recommendation at this time.
• Receiving physical copies of comics:  Whether to allow publishers to submit physical copies of comics for indexing and how to deal with it.  No recommendation at this time.
• Implementation of the Feature Committee recommendations: this discussion remains ongoing.
  

Editors' group report:

        The Editors did not add any new Editors during the last quarter.

Tech and SysAdmin Coordinators:
        Jochen has recently been working on updating several functions for our website.

- Don Milne