Creative Administration

Accessing SCA Member Information

For reasons discussed here previously, I was curious as to how complex it might be to programmatically access member data from the SCA’s new member portal.

It turns out the switch from MembersOnly to NeonOne has made this dramatically easier, and we can access member data in just a few lines of Python without scripting Chrome or hand-crafting any RPC calls.

From the Archives: Annexation of the Southern Marches

When the Middle Kingdom was created in 1969, the borders between kingdoms were not precisely drawn, but it appears that all of the seaboard states continued to be part of the East.

The borders of the East remained this way through 1972, by which time branches had been founded in Florida and Georgia.

From the Archives: Women as Fighters, Knights, and Kings

For those with an interest in SCA history, it can be intriguing to follow a thread of discussion as Society policy is defined and changed over time. Below is one such example, showing a sequence of entries from the minutes of the Board of Directors discussing women in armored combat over the years 1975–1977.

Release Form Improvements

When the new Release Forms Handbook was published earlier this year, it included updated versions of the release forms themselves.

Although I had a chance to provide feedback on the contents of the handbook, the new forms unfortunately weren’t shared with me prior to publication, so I wasn’t able to proofread them or provide suggestions for their appearance.

Complaints as a Service

Thank you to Thomas Blackmoore, Society IT Manager, for the mention in last month’s report to the Board.

Commendations: Matthew Cavalletto (Mathghamhain Ua Ruadhain) – for invaluable assistance in finding issues that need to be resolved
President’s Report for April Board Meeting

It’s good to know that the ceaseless stream of emails I send to Society officers are productive, even if they may at times be somewhat annoying.

Creating Facebook Events

The Social Media Handbook issued in October 2021 introduced a new requirement:

IV.C.3.d. On Facebook, Events are to be created through Official Kingdom Pages rather than Groups.
SCA Social Media Handbook, page 9

This creates a significant challenge, because local branches can create hundreds of Facebook events every year, and requiring all of those requests to pass through this bottleneck would create a serious burden on the Kingdom Social Media Officer who operates the Official Kingdom Facebook Page, and would likely lead to delays and coordination challenges.

Appearance on “This Just In…”

Last night I spent an hour in a livestreamed conversation about many of the topics previously discussed on this site.

For your convenience if you’d like to skip to a particular topic, here’s an outline of what we talked about:
2:35 Introduction to My Perspective
6:50 Collecting an Archive of Board Minutes
10:57 Cataloging a Decade of R&Ds and TRPs
21:25 The “125 / 0.5%” Drama
29:13 The Sanction of Brian De Moray
38:28 The List Archives Breach
47:12 How Can We Improve Things?

A Decade of Sanctions

There has been a recent spate of interest in the number of Society-level sanctions issued by the SCA in recent years. This information is publicly available, as it is contained in the meeting minutes of the Board of Directors, but it isn’t organized in a consistent fashion, so counting the records is perforce a manual process.

To facilitate this type of analysis, I am making available a list of sanctions-related actions extracted from the quarterly Board minutes for the decade from 2013 to 2022. These records are found in a Google Sheets document linked to below, along with a statistical breakdown of action types by calendar year.

Archived Board Minutes

For various reasons (ahem), a number of folks have recently been interested in reviewing the minutes of previous Board meetings, but unfortunately the recent replacement of the Society’s “member portal” means that those archives are currently unavailable.

As it turns out, I have been collecting Board minutes for some time and figured I’d share my collection for those who are interested.

2012–2022 (18MB Zip)
2002–2010 (8MB Zip)
1972-1989 (35MB Zip)

Letter: Reconsideration of Sanction of Brian De Moray

I have sent the following letter regarding the sanction of Brian De Moray to the Society Seneschal, the Board Comments address, and the Ombudsman for IT, with copies to the Society IT Manager, Society Webminister, East Kingdom Webminister, and Brian De Moray himself. As always, I included my modern name and member number. Receipt was acknowledged less than two minutes later; I suspect they’re having a busy weekend over there. I will update if further action is taken.

To the Society’s Seneschal and Board of Directors, greetings from the East.

I write to you today to ask you to reconsider the January 2020 sanction of Brian De Moray, as the information available in the public record suggests that this decision may have been made in error.