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East Kingdom Curia Feedback Regarding Youth Combat

One of the core elements in Society governance is the periodic updating of each kingdom’s laws by the reigning monarchs, in consultation with the kingdom’s officers and baronage. The East Kingdom’s next Curia meeting will be held on February 1, and as several of the proposed changes would affect the Youth Combat program, I wrote in to voice my perspective.

My correspondence is attached below, along with the proposed changes to current kingdom law.

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KEM Authorization Policy Reversed

TL;DR: Contrary to a previous ruling, Kingdom Earl Marshals do not have the power to singlehandedly authorize participants in martial disciplines for which they are not qualified.

As part of the fallout from the Wistric Saga, in July 2022 the Society Seneschal ruled (or “interpreted”) that Kingdom Earl Marshals could singlehandedly issue martial authorizations, including in disciplines for which they were not warranted.

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Corporate and Society Inclusion Offices

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).

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Email Is A Social Media Platform

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.

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Update: Branches Can Create Their Own Facebook Events

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.

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SCA Social Media Can Allow Off-Topic Conversations

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.”

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Lowering the Bar for Confirmation of New Board Members

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.

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It Turns Out My Modern Name Is Also Difficult to Spell

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

An SCA Governance Org Chart

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.

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Draft Licensing Agreement for SCA Software Developers

TL;DR: If you write or manage software for the SCA, I’d love to get your feedback on this proposed license agreement intended to document the Society’s ability to continue using and maintaining the software even if you someday become unavailable.

Given the high proportion of technical professionals in the Society’s ranks, it is no surprise that the SCA has a long history of informal software development: folks developing small custom applications to facilitate some part of their office’s or local group’s operations. However, this process has by-and-large been uncoordinated, and policy for it has been slow to coalesce.

One recurrent issue in this area has been the lack of clear licensing practices. In a few cases, copyright has explicitly been transferred to the Society, but in the majority of cases the issue has not been considered, leaving the copyright in the hands of the original developer. In most cases, there is no written license agreement, which is usually fine while the original developer remains involved in local activities, but can become problematic if they move away or drop out of Society activities, as nobody knows for sure if the group has the right to to continue using the software, to make changes to it, or to share it with other branches of the SCA.

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