For those with an interest in SCA history, it can be intriguing to follow a thread of discussion as Society policy is defined and changed over time. Below is one such example, showing a sequence of entries from the minutes of the Board of Directors discussing women in armored combat over the years 1975–1977.
Continue reading “From the Archives: Women as Fighters, Knights, and Sovereigns”Author: Mathghamhain
Spot-Checking the 2022 Org Chart
The Year End Report that was recently published included an updated org chart for the Society which is slightly different from the one published in 2019.
A couple of the changes took me by surprise, and might be the result of typographical error — I’ve written asking for clarification and will update when I learn more.
Continue reading “Spot-Checking the 2022 Org Chart”Release Form Improvements
When the new Release Forms Handbook was published earlier this year, it included updated versions of the release forms themselves.
Although I had a chance to provide feedback on the contents of the handbook, the new forms unfortunately weren’t shared with me prior to publication, so I wasn’t able to proofread them or provide suggestions for their appearance.
Continue reading “Release Form Improvements”Complaints as a Service
Thank you to Thomas Blackmoore, Society IT Manager, for the mention in last month’s report to the Board.
Commendations: Matthew Cavalletto (Mathghamhain Ua Ruadhain) – for invaluable assistance in finding issues that need to be resolved
President’s Report for April 2023 Board Meeting
It’s good to know that the ceaseless stream of emails I send to Society officers are productive, even if they may at times be somewhat annoying.
Creating Facebook Events
The Social Media Handbook issued in October 2021 introduced a new requirement:
IV.C.3.d. On Facebook, Events are to be created through Official Kingdom Pages rather than Groups.
SCA Social Media Handbook, page 9
This creates a significant challenge, because local branches can create hundreds of Facebook events every year, and requiring all of those requests to pass through this bottleneck would create a serious burden on the Kingdom Social Media Officer who operates the Official Kingdom Facebook Page, and would likely lead to delays and coordination challenges.
Continue reading “Creating Facebook Events”Appearance on “This Just In…”
Last night I spent an hour in a livestreamed conversation about many of the topics previously discussed on this site.
For your convenience if you’d like to skip to a particular topic, here’s an outline of what we talked about:
2:35 Introduction to My Perspective
6:50 Collecting an Archive of Board Minutes
10:57 Cataloging a Decade of R&Ds and TRPs
21:25 The “125 / 0.5%” Drama
29:13 The Sanction of Brian De Moray
38:28 The List Archives Breach
47:12 How Can We Improve Things?
A Decade of Sanctions
There has been a recent spate of interest in the number of Society-level sanctions issued by the SCA in recent years. This information is publicly available, as it is contained in the meeting minutes of the Board of Directors, but it isn’t organized in a consistent fashion, so counting the records is perforce a manual process.
To facilitate this type of analysis, I am making available a list of sanctions-related actions extracted from the quarterly Board minutes for the decade from 2013 to 2022. These records are found in a Google Sheets document linked to below, along with a statistical breakdown of action types by calendar year.
Continue reading “A Decade of Sanctions”Archived Board Minutes
For various reasons (ahem), a number of folks have recently been interested in reviewing the minutes of previous Board meetings, but unfortunately the recent replacement of the Society’s “member portal” means that those archives are currently unavailable.
As it turns out, I have been collecting Board minutes for some time and figured I’d share my collection for those who are interested.
Continue reading “Archived Board Minutes”Letter: Reconsideration of Sanction of Brian De Moray
I have sent the following letter regarding the sanction of Brian De Moray to the Society Seneschal, the Board Comments address, and the Ombudsman for IT, with copies to the Society IT Manager, Society Webminister, East Kingdom Webminister, and Brian De Moray himself. As always, I included my modern name and member number. Receipt was acknowledged less than two minutes later; I suspect they’re having a busy weekend over there. I will update if further action is taken.
To the Society’s Seneschal and Board of Directors, greetings from the East.
I write to you today to ask you to reconsider the January 2020 sanction of Brian De Moray, as the information available in the public record suggests that this decision may have been made in error.
Continue reading “Letter: Reconsideration of Sanction of Brian De Moray”The Sanction of Brian De Moray
TL;DR: Brian De Moray is a Master of Defense and of the Pelican in Atlantia, who was sanctioned by the Society in January 2020 for an innocuous 113-word Facebook post commenting on software development work he was doing as a volunteer for the kingdom.
As far as I can tell from the information available to me, this sanction appears to have been an error, made in haste by a Board that misinterpreted some technical jargon they didn’t understand, and should be reversed.
I first became aware of this case when it was mentioned in the context of the Wistric Saga, being discussed by Aeron Harper in the second part of his “Tale of Six Sanctions” essay. Aeron’s article was focused on the procedures and policies of the sanctions process, and understandably glossed over some of the technical details, but as a software developer, my curiosity was piqued.
At the time, I was disappointed to learn that Brian was reluctant to discuss the details for fear of additional sanction, but ten days later he published additional information, including technical details of his work, after the Chairman of the Board of Directors assured him that he would not be sanctioned a second time for the same offense.
Continue reading “The Sanction of Brian De Moray”