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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Neon CRM Vulnerability Allows Modification of Member Numbers

TL;DR: Earlier this summer the SCA configured their Neon CRM membership portal to show registered users their member number. I discovered a vulnerability in Neon One’s software that allowed technically-savvy users to use that capability to change their member number to any value they desired.

After this was reported, the link to the vulnerable screen was removed, but the screen still exists and the vulnerability in the underlying Neon CRM software appears to remain unpatched.

In February the SCA completed the migration of its membership data from an aging legacy system (“Members Only”) to a new platform hosted by Neon One. Their Neon CRM service now appears to function as the system of record for the Society’s member records, including modern names, addresses, and payment information, as well as SCA-specific data such as Society name, kingdom, and member number.

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When Was the Society President Hired?

The senior-most officer in the Society for Creative Anachronism is the President, to whom nearly all other officers report. (The only exceptions are the Society’s Executive Assistant, and for some reason, the Manager of Information Technology.) As described the last time the position was opened for new candidates, the President is the Society’s executive representative to the outside world, and coordinates much of the Society’s internal operations.

The position of President was held by Isabeau della Farfalla from around April 2013 until around April 2016, when she was replaced by John the Bearkiller. Although there isn’t much documentation on how these appointments work, my understanding is that this was expected to be a three-year term (as it had been in the past), accompanied by a small stipend.

It appears that at some point in 2019 this arrangement was revised, and the position was reclassified as a salaried employee with no scheduled expiration date. I haven’t been able to find any discussion of this change in the Board Minutes or other public records of the Society’s governance.

This topic was brought up during the Board’s “Meet and Greet” session at Pennsic, and director Bricca di Ghelere indicated that she would provide an update on matters of internal staffing during the next quarterly Board meeting.

Is Data Disclosed by the SCA’s Digital Membership Card Vendor?

On June 23, the SCA announced the upcoming availability of “digital membership cards,” an electronic representation of the SCA’s traditional paper membership cards, delivered in formats compatible with smartphone apps such as Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.

On June 26, SCA members received email messages sent on behalf of the SCA, containing instructions on how to download their personal digital membership card. The email was sent by Cuseum.com, a vendor providing this service on behalf of Neon CRM, the service that the SCA uses for its membership data.

In the last day or so, a number of SCA members have expressed concern that the Cuseum.com privacy policy allows them to sell (“share”) user data, and thus information about SCA members might be being given to advertisers.

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SCA To End Emailing of Credit Card Numbers

The SCA will soon stop asking local event organizers to pay for venue insurance certificates by sending their personal credit card number to the corporate office via email, as it had been doing for the last two decades.

Instead, event organizers will be asked to process those credit card payments on the new membership portal operated by NeonOne, as hinted when the new higher costs for certificates were announced in April.

This change will be well received by Internet security enthusiasts among the membership, who have complained for many years about the practice of sending credit card numbers by email.

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Lawsuit Watch: Parker v. the SCA

A recent mention in social media led me to discover a currently-active lawsuit against the SCA currently being litigated out in An Tir: Parker v. Society for Creative Anachronism Inc.

As I understand it, the case was brought by Ha’kon Thorgeirsson and Alizand Thorgeirsson, a couple with long history in the Society, who became embroiled in a seemingly-endless web of disputes with other local participants, which seem to have included a mix of disagreements about how to run local Society affairs, random interpersonal drama, and the kinds of things that Americans refer to as “culture war” issues — the lead plaintiff’s social media posts include allegations of Democrats rigging the 2020 election, and claims that anti-Covid measures are motivated by a sinister desire for pervasive social control, while some of their antagonists complained about comments that were perceived as racist.

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Are Releases Needed to Re-share Social Media?

Someone asked an interesting question over on the Known World Discord server this evening, and after I wrote up my answer I thought I should also post it here (lightly edited) in case it was of use to anyone else:

Is sharing posts from individuals […] acceptable by SCA social media rules for official accounts, or is a written release required?

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