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Forum Report: Electronic Participation in Shareholder Meetings

Plans for Completing Definition of Standards

The following two special project “workshops” are being initiated to develop reports for consideration by all Forum participants:

A.   Defining standards – As agreed at the Forum’s July 13 open meeting, we will be developing a proposed final list of questions to be considered by investors in their individual determinations of fairness. Current discussions are addressing suggestions to refine previously proposed questions and to add new ones, as well as a suggestion to simplify the presentation by refining the issues into only three essential questions that effectively cover all the issues.

The schedule for this project requires presenting a proposed list of questions to all Forum participants for comment by mid-August, so that the Program Panel can review a final version to be presented for broad marketplace review by early September.

B.   Identifying practices – Responding to the interests of both investors and corporate managers, this project is being organized to review practices such as the examples presented for comment last week that can be used for the information exchanges associated with shareholder meetings. For some proposed practices, we may need to consider technological or administrative feasibility as well as user judgments about value or fairness.

This project is expected to continue through the month of September, with an early focus on processes that can actually be used by the Forum itself or by its participants in real marketplace tests of the proposed standards for fairly conducted communications.

Anyone interested in helping to guide either of these projects is encouraged to participate. Forum “workshops” are very informal, and offering your views involves no commitment other than to respect the privacy rights of other participants according to the same “Conditions” that apply to all Forum activities.

GL – July 30, 2010

 

Gary Lutin

Chairman, The Shareholder Forum

c/o Lutin & Company

575 Madison Avenue, 10th Floor

New York, New York 10022

Tel: 212-605-0335

Email: gl@shareholderforum.com

 

 

 

This Forum program is open, free of charge, to anyone concerned with investor interests in the development of standards for conducting shareholder meetings with electronic participation. As stated in the posted Conditions of Participation, the Forum's purpose is to provide decision-makers with access to information and a free exchange of views on the issues presented in the program's Forum Summary. Each participant is expected to make independent use of information obtained through the Forum, subject to the privacy rights of other participants.  It is a Forum rule that participants will not be identified or quoted without their explicit permission.

The organization of this Forum program was encouraged by Walden Asset Management, and is proceeding with the invited leadership support of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. and Intel Corporation to address issues relevant to broad public interests in marketplace practices, rather than investor decisions relating to only a single company. The Forum may therefore invite program support of several companies that can provide both expertise and examples of leadership relating to the issues being addressed.

Inquiries about this Forum program and requests to be included in its distribution list may be addressed to e-mtg@shareholderforum.com.

The information provided to Forum participants is intended for their private reference, and permission has not been granted for the republishing of any copyrighted material. The material presented on this web site is the responsibility of Gary Lutin, as chairman of the Shareholder Forum.

Shareholder Forum™ is a trademark owned by The Shareholder Forum, Inc., for the programs conducted since 1999 to support investor access to decision-making information. It should be noted that we have no responsibility for the services that Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., introduced for review in the Forum's 2010 "E-Meetings" program and has since been offering with the “Shareholder Forum” name, and we have asked Broadridge to use a different name that does not suggest our support or endorsement.