Mathghamhain – Creative Administration

A Better Solution for Local Branch Electronic Newsletters

In the SCA, “electronic newsletters” generally take the form of infrequently-published PDFs that have a unique content and format and production infrastructure and distribution calendar, making them very different communications channels than branch websites and outwards-facing social media channels — but it doesn’t need to be like this.

One possible step along the path suggested in yesterday’s post would be for the web ministry to provide publishing solutions for electronic newsletters that could be used by the two hundred baronies which are required to produce them, as well as the smaller number of shires and cantons that produce them by choice.

(I exclude the kingdom newsletters as they have special requirements, although perhaps at some point in a paperless far future they could benefit from a similar type of publishing platform.)

Electronic Newsletters from a Web CMS

Many local branches use a content management system to publish their website, using various hosted services or open-source platforms such as WordPress.

Any interested web ministry could run some software that published selections from their baronies’ CMS in an electronic newsletter in compliance with the requirements of the Chronicler’s Policy — published on a regular basis (II.A.), in a static format that can be archived (II.B.1., III.C.3.B.), and distributed via email (II.D.) — and with the required inclusions of event announcements (II.K.2.), and a statement of ownership (III.C.1,).

(My reading of the Chronicler’s policy is is that the email could be delivered as HTML, but it’s also straightforward to convert from HTML to PDF and then email in that format, if some people really prefer that.)

The web ministries are well suited to operate this as a service for their participating baronies in the form of a server-side process that runs once a month to request some nicely formatted content from the website and send it to a mailing list — there are open source solutions and free WordPress plugins that can do this.

This could be implemented by individual web ministers for their local group, or in kingdoms where the kingdom web ministry manages CMS hosting centrally, they could include this in their services.

Benefits

This type of solution would let the web ministry focus on tools and platforms and tech ops, while the chroniclers focus on content — without siloing information.

For any baronial chronicler that wanted to opt in, they could produce their newsletter by just posting great content to the CMS, without having to worry about the mechanics of the electronic publishing infrastructure. (A tag or category could be used to specify which posts went just to the mailing list, or just to the public-facing website, or to both.)

This gets us a step towards a multi-channel world in which pieces of content — event announcements, pictures and news from recent events, messages from officers, meeting notes, officer lists, and so on — are mostly managed in one place, with multiple officers in the group all feeding material in to one system from which it flows out to multiple channels — including the branch website, discussion mailing list, newsletter mailing list, Facebook groups and events, Discord channels, Instagram feeds.

In baronies whose chronicler had lots of energy for content generation, the items they were producing would contribute fresh material for branch’s website. In other baronies, a chronicler with less energy for producing content could fill their newsletter by just picking and choosing material to include from the items that other officers had recently published to the website. And in little shires with an active web minister but no chronicler, the shire could offer email newsletters without appointing a separate officer for that role.

(Chroniclers who wanted to continue to use desktop publishing software to lay out PDFs every month would be welcome to do so, but I would expect that over the course of the next few years, as local office-holders came and went, a majority of baronies would opt in to this kind of system.)

Getting Started

This approach doesn’t appear to require a redefinition of any office’s areas of responsibility or any special approval from the Board: the web ministry already has the authority to host and manage various web services, and individual chroniclers/branches already have the authority to choose which publishing tools their newsletters will use.

A couple of branches have already been experimenting with CMS-to-newsletter pipelines; I am hoping that a couple more industrious web ministers (at the kingdom or baronial levels) will take the initiative to set more of these up and demonstrate that it can be done at a wider scale.

If your branch is taking steps in this direction, I’d love to hear from you!

One Path Towards Modernizing the Society’s Communications Offices

Every few months, I run into another discussion about modernizing the SCA’s communications offices. There is widespread agreement on many of the problems — information about events and activities routinely appears only in one channel or another, with key details of an upcoming championship to be found only on a Facebook group, and a fighter practice being announced only on a closed Discord server, and discussion of a feast menu happening on a mailing list which only a fraction of the populace receives, and court reports being included in a PDF “newsletter” which almost nobody reads.

The fact that these communications channels are siloed into separate offices is frequently identified as a problem — with Chroniclers producing newsletters, Web Ministers maintaining Society-run websites, and Social Media Officers administering Society-organized online discussion channels, perhaps it is no surprise that communications end up fragmented as well… And it’s natural to suspect that if we merged those offices into a single team, that would allow our communications to be more coherent across that entire spectrum.

In Search of Release Form Success Stories

For the last year, I’ve been trying to find examples of offices which had demonstrated success in using the SCA’s release forms to collect consent from people for their likeness or creative works to be used in Society publications.

I was hoping that if we could identify a handful of folks who were doing this effectively, we could document the processes they used and share them with others.

Instead, I’ve found that nearly all offices fall into one of two groups:

Updates to the Society Org Chart

At the April meeting of the Board of Directors, following a good deal of members feedback, a proposal was ratified to promote the office of the Chatelaine from a deputy to a full Society officer, and to add a new Society officer for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB).

As part of this update, the previous Corporate office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging office was named the Office of Inclusive Programs.

I assume the Society’s Governing Documents will be updated soon to reflect these changes.

I’ve updated my org chart to reflect these developments, as well as two corrections to the version I assembled in December:

In Support of the Omnibus Peerage

I was tardy in writing to the Board in support of the proposed Omnibus Peerage, but did manage to get my letter in just under the wire.

The process of implementing this change has taken much longer than it should; the proposal has repeatedly been workshopped, brought forward for consideration and then sent back for refinement, over and over again for years.

I hope that this time it’s finally going to get across the finish line.

Local Branches Shouldn’t Be Required to Publish Newsletters

There have been ongoing discussions for many years about how local branches can best manage communications with their populace in light of the changing media landscape.

Decades ago, the Society established a policy that each local barony and province should publish a newsletter to get information out to the membership and the public, but given the increasing importance of websites and social media, a growing number of branches find that those newsletters no longer play a meaningful role in their communications portfolio.

Who Has Rights To Heraldic Illustrations Submitted to the College of Arms?

There’s often a bit of confusion about the rights to the pictures people submit to the SCA’s College of Arms when registering their personal devices and badges.

Does the SCA “own” or “have rights to” those heraldic images?

An Early Edition of the Society’s Governing Documents

The Society for Creative Anachronism is governed by a collection of documents known as the Organizational Handbook, which includes both the bylaws of the modern-day not-for-profit corporation (SCA, Inc.) and the policies that govern the “in-game” historical re-creation activities and the volunteer bureaucracy that supports it (“Corpora”).

These documents emerged incrementally over the first decade of the Society, as the initial leadership established a structure for the organization. Bylaws were established in 1969 and supplemented over the following years by a body of decisions made by the Board referred to as Corpora. By 1979 the framework had taken on a recognizable form organized along similar lines to the rules we use today.

Explicit Consent May Be Required to Publish Society Names in Europe

When I wrote a rough draft of the SCA Release Forms Handbook back in 2021, I incorporated a distinction reflecting practice here in the East Kingdom: participants’ modern names are considered personal information and must not be published by the Society without their explicit consent — the same rules that apply to their home address and other real-world contact details — but their Society names are considered “in-game” attributes and their publication doesn’t require any paperwork.

Following the release of the Handbook in 2023, folks from Drachenwald mentioned that their interpretation was different; under the European GDPR, Society names could be seen as “information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person,” and thus protected as personal data, which should not be published without consent.

Society Membership Trends

During a recent discussion of levels of Society participation, I was asked about long-term trends in overall membership numbers.

As it happens, I had previously extracted some of the relevant figures from other sources — some of which showed up in a post about kingdom-level breakdowns — but hadn’t gotten around to publishing the older numbers here, because the data is incomplete and would benefit from additional review and cleanup.

That said, even if the specific numbers are taken with a grain of salt, the overall pattern shown here is likely of interest to others, so I might as well share this as a work-in-progress.