Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin's Totally Unofficial Musings on the Business Side of the SCA
The Board is soliciting feedback on a change to the governing documents that would affect DEIB efforts.
It looks like they are both creating a DEIB Society Officer (who would coordinate in-game kingdom and local DEIB offices), and separating that office from the Corporate Office of Inclusive Programs (which would be focused on corporate and Board support).
Continue reading “Corporate and Society Inclusion Offices”TL;DR: There are no clear Society-wide policies regarding mailing lists; I’ve made a recommendation that they should be covered by the Society Social Media Policies.
Electronic mail has been around for my entire lifetime (give or take a couple of weeks) and is so pervasive that it fades into the background, ceding attention to the showy titans of social media that have emerged over the last two decades. But if the historical sequence were reversed, and email was introduced today, we’d likely see it as a natural evolution of that ecosystem — another social media platform.
Or at least that’s how it seems to me, which is why in discussions of SCA policy I’ve always assumed that the Society guidelines for social media — about offensive content, or copyright, or a dozen other topics — also applied to email.
Continue reading “Email Is A Social Media Platform”TL;DR: SCA branches can create their own Facebook events using their official Facebook page identity without going through the KSMO; however, some kingdoms might impose additional requirements for kingdom-level events.
Earlier this year I posted about an annoying stricture of paragraph IV.C.3.d. of the SCA Social Media Handbook which specified that “On Facebook, Events are to be created through Official Kingdom Pages.”
The one problematic word there is “kingdom” — because it means that local branches have to coordinate all of their Facebook events with the Kingdom’s social media officer, and in the East that means that over fifty branches have to funnel their hundreds and hundreds of Facebook events through a single individual.
Continue reading “Update: Branches Can Create Their Own Facebook Events”In a recent discussion of the reasons some local branch officers persist in creating “unofficial” Facebook groups, an officer from another region of the kingdom reported that two branches had gone down that path because they had been told that “official” social media channels could not allow any off-topic conversations.
This came as a surprise, as I know online conversations often wander, and it’s totally common for a local populace discussion forum (whether on Facebook, Discord, a mailing list, a video conference, or wherever) to include a mix of group business, historical trivia, crafting discussions, in-jokes and wordplay, conversations about role-playing games, pictures of people’s pets, and a hundred other topics.
I wrote to the social media officers at the kingdom and Society level and was pleased by the prompt reply: “there’s nothing wrong with having occasional off topic conversations.”
Continue reading “SCA Social Media Can Allow Off-Topic Conversations”At the July quarterly Board meeting, a proposal was made to reduce the requirement of unanimous support for new directors to unanimous-minus-one, and the membership was asked for feedback on the idea.
This seems like a small step in the right direction — for many years that there has been a concern that the Board was too insular and insufficiently responsive to new ideas from the populace, and allowing any sitting member to unilaterally veto a candidate makes change extremely difficult.
I think more sweeping changes are needed, but we shouldn’t let a quest for revolutionary utopia throw up hurdles to incremental improvement, so I’ve written to the Board in support of the proposal.
Continue reading “Lowering the Bar for Confirmation of New Board Members”Thank you to Thomas Blackmoore for recognizing the effort I’ve put in to the still-in-progress IT Policies handbook.
Commendations: Matthew Cavaletto, Eben Kurtzman, Daniel McEwan, and Nicolas Milano for their work on the proposed IT policies and Hunter Eidson, Lewis Tanzos, and Russ Smith for their troubleshooting efforts on the server during Pennsic.
President’s Report for October 2023 Board Meeting
While working up some feedback on a draft Society policy document, I noticed a reference to the SCA’s “Corporate Officers” and was reminded of the fact that I didn’t have a clear understanding of the distinction between Corporate Officers, Society Officers, and other members of the organization’s central leadership team — categories that I would like to be able to explain to folks here in my local branch.
I posted in the SCA’s “unofficial” Facebook group and soon had useful pointers from Cormac Mór and John the Bearkiller.
As I should have guessed, the answers can be found in a careful reading of the Society’s Governing Documents. The SCA, Inc corporate officers are listed in the Corporate Bylaws paragraph VII.A.1, while the Society officers are listed in Corpora section VI.
Continue reading “An SCA Governance Org Chart”