Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin's Totally Unofficial Musings on the Business Side of the SCA
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.
Continue reading “Accessing SCA Member Information”When the Middle Kingdom was created in 1969, the borders between kingdoms do not seem to have been precisely drawn, but it appears that all of the seaboard states continued to be part of the East.
I’m not sure exactly what folks at the time had in mind, but I think it was something like this:
The borders of the East remained this way through 1972, by which time branches had been founded in Florida and Georgia.
Continue reading “From the Archives: Annexation of the Southern Marches”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.
Continue reading “From the Archives: Women as Fighters, Knights, and Sovereigns”The Year End Report that was recently published included an updated org chart for the Society which is slightly different from the one published in 2019.
A couple of the changes took me by surprise, and might be the result of typographical error — I’ve written asking for clarification and will update when I learn more.
Continue reading “Spot-Checking the 2022 Org Chart”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.
Continue reading “Release Form Improvements”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 2023 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.
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.
Continue reading “Creating Facebook Events”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?