This year’s election is complete, and CBS Sports and XML Team Solutions will now gain representation on the Fantasy Sports Trade Association’s board of directors.

CBS’ Danielle MacLean and XML’s Alan Karben joined incumbents Brett Baker (Fantasy Coverage), Jeff Thomas (World Fantasy Games) and Whitney Walters (The Huddle) as the five members voted to a new three-year term on the board.

“I think I may be the first person to run for a slot on the FSTA board on a geek platform,” Karben says. “I hope to help FSTA members discover ways to cooperate technically that make everyone’s work a bit easier. In a manner that doesn’t affect competitive advantage.”

Karben says he sees potential for greater enhancements to fantasy game features, especially by the smaller outfits, if companies can work together on some of the more mundane tasks involved in hosting the contests.

“Most of the innovations in our industry have come from companies that don’t have the luxury of large engineering staffs,” he says. “If you clear the product development process of some of the drudgery that most every firms faces — exchanging data with partners, wrestling with terminology and identification codes — then you free them up to spend more energy building the features that bring new players in and keep them coming back.”

MacLean, meanwhile, hails from the most mainstream of companies now represented on the FSTA’s board. She could tap into CBS’ larger audience to gleen the kind of information that could help member companies better understand their consumers.

“As a board member, I intend to help facilitate insights as it pertains to research and marketplace analysis,” she says. “I am excited to help the organization grow and to aid in positioning the industry to media, partners and advertisers.”

The CBS connection could also help to open doors to bigger-budget sponsors for fantasy providers.

Finally, quite frankly, it can’t hurt to add a woman to the mix, especially in an industry that seems to be playing to a growing female audience.

Should any of the five not be able to fulfill their duties, Mock Draft Central’s Geoff Stein was chosen as the first alternate.

The chosen five will join the board in the new term that begins April 1. As we reported earlier, the group will then be charged with selecting a new president. FSB.com will have more on that process when the time comes.

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association is holding an election for five three-year roles on its board of directors. The voting is open only to member companies, with each company only allowed a single ballot.

Members who have yet to make their selections can download the official ballot here and find the available candidate bios on the FSTA’s website. The list of options includes 17 members of the fantasy sports community, four of whom already reside on the board.

In alphabetical order, those up for election are …

Brett Baker, Fantasy Coverage (incumbent)

Craig Davis, Fantasy Planet

Bill Green, Fantasy Dispute (incumbent)

John Hartman, Pay The Fan

Scott Iverson, FLW Outdoors

Alan Karben, XML Team Solutions

Michael Mandt, Fantasy Sports Girl

Danielle MacLean, CBS Sports

Lawr Michaels, Creative Sports

Greg Robitaille, Fantasy Football Draft

Regi Simon, World of Entrepreneurship Inc.

Geoff Stein, Mock Draft Central

Scott Swanay, Swanay Sports Consulting/Fantasy Sherpa

Jeff Thomas, World Fantasy Games (current president)

Whitney Walters, The Huddle (incumbent)

Clint Webb, SportsDirect

David Wu, RotoHog

Who: Brett Baker
What: President and co-founder, FantasyCoverage.com; member of FSTA board of directors

“I’ve concluded that I’m not all that interesting.”

That self assessment came from Brett Baker after reviewing his biographical information in the answers to my questions for this profile. Well, if a guy who has been a chemical engineer, spent eight months of a year working in China, the Philippines and Venezuela, worked in the burgeoning field of wind-energy harvesting and launched a fantasy-sports startup isn’t interesting, I don’t know what that says for most of the rest of us.

The chemical engineering came with a company called APV, which works in industrial manufacturing and engineering, where Baker landed after graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in process engineering. As an engineer and then project manager with APV, Baker helped design and implement beverage plants for drinks that included Sunny Delight and Gatorade. It was this job that took him to China for five months in his final year with the company, as well as the Philippines for two months and Venezuela for one more.

Upon leaving APV in 1997, Baker says he followed his boss to NEG Micon, which manufactures wind turbines — “like the huge ones you see in Palm Springs.” (I have to say that the closest I’ve come to seeing Palm Springs is watching the early scenes of “Rainman,” but at least the turbines are visible there.)

“I quickly found that the wind energy industry is very similar to the fantasy sports industry in that most people in it are very passionate about their work,” Baker says. “If you were traveling and eating dinner with people after already having worked with them for 12 hours, they still only wanted to talk about windmills. After two years and countless failed attempts to change conversations to sports, I figured I was in the wrong line of business.”

So after a couple of years there, Baker joined Apropos Technology as a senior director of professional services. His group designed and built software for customers, and Baker spent his time managing revenue and interfacing with the sales and engineering groups, experience that would help him once he entered the next phase.

In 2005, Baker and an associate launched Receller Inc., which acts as an intermediary for people who want to sell items on eBay. It was also that year that they got FantasyCoverage.com off the ground, while Receller was somewhat idle, waiting on movement by a large customer.

“We originally intended to license software for wagering on fantasy sports performances,” Baker says. “My background was consulting and we saw that there was a need for specialized software development services within the industry, so we shifted our focus to that. It started to take on a life of its own fairly soon afterwards and I began to spend most if not all of my time on that side of the fence.”

Among the companies that Fantasy Coverage has worked with already since its public launch in 2006 are ESPN, Fanball and Ditka Fantasy Sports. Whereas he didn’t find the same passion as those around him in the wind-energy industry, Baker doesn’t find the same problem working in fantasy.

Baker says he has played fantasy football in a league with friends from college since 1993 and also counts fantasy baseball and basketball among his annual pursuits. Forays into NASCAR, golf and “some of the more obscure sports” haven’t taken hold, but the eight or so leagues among the three sports he does keep up with — along with raising three kids — is enough to keep him busy.

Last year, his fantasy involvement included Fantasy Coverage joining the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, when they realized the winter conference in Chicago would be local for the company based in La Grange, Ill.

“We didn’t know what to expect, but it seemed like a no-brainer,” Baker says of joining.

Now, he sits on the board of directors and played an integral role in the planning for the most recent summer conference back in Chicago. Of course, maybe someday he’ll actually do something interesting.