February 18, 2014 Dear friends of WYOU, We are faced with a good problem. We have a lot of excellent people on the ballot for Board members and we can only vote for five of them, which means that some of these fine people who should be serving on WYOU's Board will not. Because of the situation at the time of WYOU's celebration party at the end of January (no new registrations and the prospect of a three person board), some of us went into overdrive and started talking with and recruiting individuals with amazing qualifications to apply to the board. We were looking for diversity in skills, community connections and, of course, commitment to free speech as well as media connections. Reading the replies of people on the ballot I think we did a great job and I'm convinced that we will have the group of leaders needed to take off from the strong base created by the partnership of WYOU and the Madison Public Library. Now I'd like to stress that although we need a very good board of directors, we also need people with appropriate skills to fill the vacant space left by the absence of staff. We need leaders to develop the different initiatives that some mention in their replies - live shows, streaming, more diversity, more community involvement and connections, developing the new partnership with the library, raising funds, making the changes needed in WYOU functioning and governance due to our new situation, making programming more relevant to the greater community and archiving, to name a few. All of these things as well as your other ideas will need strong volunteers to be achieved, and you don't need to be a board member to lead a working group in building what you feel is important for the station. So I'm hoping that even if not elected, the remainder of the group will find a way to help in creating a community television station for the future generations. And this also includes any other WYOU members who want to take part in any way to make the station creative and vital. Thank you for responding to the call! See you soon, Luciano Producer and WYOU Board of Directors member until February 25, 2014