Tweaks: Now showing management positions on upcoming meeting

If you look at an upcoming meeting (here is the current list) you’ll notice that we are now indicating management’s position on each proposal. (For most meetings – in some cases our sources don’t include that information.) It was one of those small technical changes that leads to a bunch of other small improvements that I won’t get into.

Expect some more news on progress soon — we have some new data on the way, and we’re working on a new voting service and I look forward to telling you about it.

New vote disclosure from AFSCME Employee Pension Plan

Good news to follow up on our earlier announcement about new votes from Florida’s pension fund: the employee pension plan of AFSCME, the largest public employee and health care workers union in the United States, also recently started disclosing its votes on upcoming meetings, and we’re proud to publish those votes here on ProxyDemocracy.

AFSCME has been active in shareholder engagement on behalf of its members under Rich Ferlauto, director of Corporate Governance and Pension Investment (see AFSCME site’s page on pension security). Its pension plan ranks among the most activist of the institutions in our database, as can be seen on AFSCME’s profile on PD. The pension plan votes on companies in the S&P 500, which helps make their record comparable to a lot of the index funds in our database.

We’re happy to now publish upcoming votes from six sources. As the number of perspectives increases, we hope to be able to make it easier for individual investors to piggyback on these institutions and make their own voices heard.

Upcoming votes from Florida’s pension fund

I’m proud to announce that ProxyDemocracy now features upcoming votes from the Florida State Board of Administration (link to PD profile), which administers the fourth largest state pension fund. Two things make this particularly exciting news.

First, up until now everything we’ve done has involved taking existing data and organizing it, but in this case we’ve helped to create new data. The other disclosers we’ve worked with so far — CalPERS, CBIS, Domini, and Calvert — all have been disclosing their votes in advance of meetings since at least the early 2000s, and were in fact a big part of the inspiration for building PD. Florida has been active in corporate governance issues for a long time now, but until a few weeks ago they were not disclosing votes in advance of meetings. Earlier this summer they contacted us, worked with RiskMetrics to get their votes disclosed on their own website, and worked with us to make sure those votes could be published on PD. We hope others follow suit! (In fact, one more has — I’ll announce that in a few days.)

The other exciting thing is that Florida discloses a LOT of votes — on well over 3000 companies. This means that there will be more and more meetings where we will have advance votes to publish, and more where we will have perspectives from more than one voter.

Florida has also taken the initiative in disclosing its voting policy in detail on RiskMetrics’ new “Policy Exchange” (link to Florida’s policy — free registration required), which provides a very detailed explanation of their voting policies. Useful to shareholders who are considering following Florida’s lead on upcoming meetings!

New stuff in the works

It’s been quiet around here, but we’ve been busy on a bunch of new things we’ll be introducing in the next few weeks, as proxy season really gets underway.

I’ve been working with a designer to develop a new look and feel for the site. Up to this point Roop and I have been working on building data resources and front-end features and mostly putting off graphic design issues. But no longer — things should start looking quite a bit better around here soon.

Expect the mutual fund database to start growing at a more rapid pace. I’ve been revising the system for adding votes to make it more efficient and easier to error check, and I’ve been writing code to parse votes from a new group of funds (including American and Barclays).

And we’ve been working on some new collaborative features to enable users to highlight proposals they think are particularly important and share their insights with others. Expect more soon!

Alpha version of our mutual fund vote database

We’re happy to be unveiling an alpha version of our mutual fund vote database, which you can use to see how several dozen funds voted their shares in corporate meetings from 2003 to 2006. We’re already busy working on the next set of features — data from more funds, information about upcoming votes, new search options, and more user content — but we hope this rough draft conveys what we’re trying to do, and perhaps inspires some thoughts about what new features we should be working on.

What we really need at this point is feedback. What do you want to do with this data, and how can we help? Our goal is to provide the information necessary for a viable shareholder democracy, and we’d love to hear your ideas about how to make that happen.