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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.

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.

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.

SCA Tax Filing Summaries

The SCA and its various US subsidiaries appear in the new “Nonprofit Explorer” system from Pro Publica, which aggregates and summarizes Form 990 tax filings. (Note that there are separate corporate filings for some states but not all; there there are about a dozen state-level subsidiaries as well as two event-specific groupings.)

The returns for 2022 have not yet been included, so the major hit taken when activities were halted by Covid is highlighted, and the subsequent (partial) recovery is not yet visible.

For more, search for the SCA on projects.propublica.org/nonprofits.

Recent Board Minutes Posted

The minutes from the first two quarterly meetings of the SCA Board of Directors for 2023 have now been posted to their website in the usual location, along with the minutes from the first four conference calls of the year:
https://sca.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/sca/neonPage.jsp?pageId=10

Correspondence follows, for those curious.

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.