President's Letter

The various award committees in the Libertarian Futurist Society are on track to have a good slate of candidates to vote on in July. There was a minor hiccup when the chair of the Classic Fiction committee unexpectedly resigned, but Bill Stoddard has been on that committee for a long time, and has agreed to handle the duties for the year. The Special awards committee is reviewing several suggestions, and the Best Novel committee has quite a few promising candidates to consider.

Our membership is basically holding steady at just over 45 dues-paying members. About a dozen members let their membership lapse, and 14 new people joined (welcome!). We've been talking about placing some ads to encourage new memberships to ensure stability, and we will be placing some ads via Google, and others on BlogAds, as well as looking into some exchanges for ads in Prometheus with other organizations. We will be tracking which of the ads produce results in order to know which are worth the effort.

There are plenty of projects that both new members and old are welcome to help out on. We have a vacancy on the Board, a need for someone to organize our award presentations at the WorldCon, and a desire to add an assistant treasurer. In addition, content for the newsletter is always welcome. If you are interested in writing for Prometheus, please submit something to the newsletter editor (editor@lfs.org).

Board members are elected to rotating three year terms; the open seat has one year remaining. If you're interested in participating in quarterly discussions about the direction of the LFS and taking a larger role in our direction, please let me know.

If you attend science fiction conventions, or are willing to take responsibility for making arrangements with the convention staff and coordinate with other LFS members to ensure that someone will run the Prometheus Awards ceremony, please get in touch with me or Fred Moulton, the past Programming chair. Fred and I are currently making the arrangements as a team, and we'd both prefer that someone else take responsibility. Fred has been handling this for several years, and is happy to share the job for a year if someone will volunteer to take over. In addition, Fred would like to rotate out of the Treasurer position, so we're looking for a volunteer to handle that as well. We don't spend a lot of money, so the duties aren't very time-consuming. Our biggest budget items are the newsletter and the annual awards.

If you are interested in discussing libertarian science fiction (broadly construed) online, we have a yahoo group. Browse over to Yahoo! and ask to join.

In Liberty,
Chris Hibbert