September 2023 – Creative Administration

From the Archives: The “SCA Gazette” Proposal of 2015–2017

In April 2015, the Society’s Publications Office undertook a survey, variously referred to as the “Evolution of SCA Communications” or “Newsletter & Communications Survey,” which asked participants about the channels they used to obtain information about SCA activities.

Survey announcement sent to kingdom chroniclers

At the next quarterly meeting of the Board of Directors, the Publications Office submitted a flurry of proposed policies and actions based on the survey results.

New York City’s Knife Law and Historical Reenactment

In a couple of recent discussions as part of our local NYC chapter of the SCA, folks have expressed concern about running afoul of the city’s notoriously-strict knife law.

Obviously that law was written to deal with people being menaced or attacked on the street, rather than to crack down on our local fencing practice, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether a well-intentioned historical re-creationist might get caught in the same net.

Society Documents May Be Shared

The SCA has a legitimate interest in avoiding confusion around its policies that could be caused by the widespread publication of incomplete or out-of-date documents. To further this goal, it instructs officers in kingdoms and local branches to link to the canonical documents on SCA.org rather than hosting copies on their own websites — this way, there’s no chance that someone might be misled by reading an old copy of Corpora or an office handbook that has been since been superseded.

But I wanted to make sure that this policy would not be construed in such a way as to prevent amateur historians of the Society from sharing and discussing old versions of these documents, so I penned an inquiry to the Society’s leadership.

Reassuringly, I’ve received an answer from the Society President stating that these are “public documents” and may be shared as long as steps are taken to minimize the chances of confusion.

Correspondence on this topic is appended below.

From: Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin To: Society Seneschal Cc: Society In-House Counsel, Society President Date: 18 August 2023

Greetings from the East,

I have a policy-related question that I hope you can help with: would any harm be caused by sharing an archive of previous editions of the Society’s governing documents?

I ask because the following sentence appears on the front page of the Organizational Handbook: “The contents of this document will be posted at http://www.sca.org and further reproduction on other Internet sites is expressly forbidden.”

I assume the prohibition stems from a concern that having multiple copies of the governing documents floating around on various websites could cause confusion if someone were to refer to an out-of-date edition that had been posted to some third-party location.

However, given the interest in possible revisions to Corpora and the Bylaws, I think there is a real value to our membership in making earlier versions of the governing documents available for easy reference so that people can see what has changed over time.

Therefore, I have collected a batch of sixteen historical versions of the organizational handbook from the last two decades, and would like to post them for public review. Before doing so, I plan to watermark each page by overlaying a message that clearly indicates that this is a non-canonical document for historical reference only, and directing people to visit SCA.org to obtain the current governing documents.

Can you see any way in which this would harm the interests of the Society?

Thank you for your consideration,

— Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin

From: Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin To: Society Seneschal Cc: Society In-House Counsel, Society President, Board Ombudsman for Corporate Office Date: 23 September 2023

Hello,

I’m checking in because a month has passed without a reply to this question.

Would any harm be done if I posted an archive of old versions of the Society’s governing documents, clearly labeled to show they were out of date and for historical reference only?

Thank you,

— Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin

From: Society President To: Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin Cc: Society Seneschal, Society In-House Counsel, Board Ombudsman for Corporate Office Date: 25 September 2023

Hello Matthew,

We very much appreciate your interest in this area and concur with your basic analysis. We feel that the risk of confusion from having the old versions published may possibly outweigh the value of being able to look at the evolution. There is a concern that someone may look at an outdated version of one of our documents and rely on a section that has since been amended. But all of these versions are public documents and as such are in the public domain.

It is appreciated that if you do put these up that all of the past versions are clearly marked as such and that wherever the placement is done that area be clearly designated as not an official site of SCA, Inc.

Your watermark plan should help prevent any confusion.

In service,

John

Three Black Directors Resigned from the SCA’s Board In Six Months

During a period of half a year, three members of the Society’s Board of Directors resigned in succession. Resignations from the Board are not unknown, but they are uncommon; I believe the last one before these three was around a decade ago.

The reasons in each case were different, and I am not aware of any overall narrative that ties them all together, but it is notable (and unfortunate) that in a Society that is overwhelmingly white but struggling to be more inclusive, all three of the directors who resigned were Black.

Ansteorran Prince Removed After Problematic Overture

On the last weekend of August, the Crown Prince of Ansteorra (the SCA kingdom that covers Oklahoma and most of Texas) attended the coronation of the new prince and princess of the kingdom of Álendia. The Ansteorran Prince was there as an invited guest, honored as a visiting royal, and made a short speech to “extend an olive branch” to their populace.

Society royals visit other kingdoms all the time, but Álendia isn’t part of the SCA — it’s the sole kingdom of SMA, the Society of the Middle Ages, a splinter group formed in 2021 by folks who felt the SCA was “too woke.” While there are some interesting elements in their organization, the primary difference is one of modern politics: SMA is a haven for MAGA folks, including anti-maskers, Euro-centrists, and those whose racism, misogyny, homophobic, or anti-trans bias leaves them out of synch with the SCA’s efforts to be more inclusive. Notably, among its earliest members are a number of people who were sanctioned or kicked out of the SCA via an R&D (Revocation of Membership and Denial of Participation), as well as their sympathizers.

Branch Pollings Have Been Stymied by Member Data Problems

TL;DR: Democratic governance requires logistical competence, but for more than half a year garbled address data and other issues with membership records have complicated the branch pollings that are supposed to be part of routine Society operations.

As previously discussed here, the SCA recently migrated its membership database from the Members Only platform it had used since 2012 over to a service offered by Neon One.

This transition took quite a bit longer than anticipated. (It had been announced by the Society’s President at the July 2022 Board meeting, with an anticipated launch date in October. At the October 2022 Board meeting the anticipated launch date was pushed back to November; data import issues were mentioned as contributing to the delay. On January 1 it was announced that the old membership portal would be taken offline on January 3 for “several days” to launch the new system, but the site did not launch as scheduled. At the January 2023 Board meeting three weeks later, the delay was attributed to bad weather. The eventual launch of the membership portal was announced on February 8.)

Unfortunately, the data migration appears to have introduced errors in the membership records that have been difficult to correct. Some people found that their address had been reset to a location where they had lived years ago; others found that their zip or post codes were wrong; and some had their membership numbers changed. Folks with family memberships had their own set of problems; in some cases, membership numbers were swapped between two relatives, and in one case a person who requested a new membership card instead received one addressed to a recently-deceased relative.

From the Archives: A Prejudiced History of the SCA’s Board, 1969–1981

The attached document, written in 1985, reflects the impressions and opinion of Duke Siegfried von Höflichskeit, an influential co-founder of the SCA. (Although labeled as covering the period from 1969 to 1985, the narrative in this draft ends in 1981, and the author has confirmed he never completed or revised it.)

It’s archived on the West’s history site, but in an awkward format, as a scanned stack of typewritten pages; I’ve converted it to plain text below for ease of reading.

The SCA Liability Waiver Was Changed in December 2021

TL;DR: The SCA made minor changes to the standard liability waiver agreement we use at events and practices, removing a couple of clauses and tweaking the punctuation.

In the course of this update, an error was introduced in the roster form that garbled the meaning of one of the sentences, but because the populace hadn’t been notified of the change, people didn’t look closely at the new form, and the error went uncorrected for more than a year and a half.

At the end of December 2021, the SCA relocated its corporate office for the first time in decades, shifting from Milpitas CA to San Jose, about five miles south. As a result, the mailing address shown on a variety of standard forms and documents had to be updated, including some that hadn’t been changed in more than twenty years.

Apparently this update to the forms was also viewed as an opportunity to revise the wording of the SCA’s liability waiver, a standard document used at nearly every Society event and practice, in which participants agree not to sue the SCA or its officers for any harm they experience at the event. This agreement doesn’t change often; the version that had been on the website prior to that point contained metadata indicating that it was converted to PDF in 1998 by Rabah az-Zafar.