Back in 2020–21, when I first got involved in trying to clarify the SCA’s release forms policies, my goal was for there to be an up-to-date reference that webministers, chroniclers, and social media officers could all share, which would incorporate the original policy written in 2009, and the various FAQs written in 2010, the policy interpretations that various Society officers had issued since then, into a single document.
In 2021–22 I put together a draft of that handbook — by and large a restatement of existing policy, with no significant changes — and handed it off to Society officers who then made some additional changes and published the result in early 2023. .
In the following months, as the new handbook was circulated, I talked to people serving in a bunch of different roles across the SCA to get their reactions, and wrote up a series of suggestions on how to improve the handbook based on that feedback:
- Clarify that individual members of the populace do not need to fill out release forms when publishing their own material to social media or to other platforms like wikis. (March 2023)
- Clarify that local officers can grant permission to redistribute material published by their office. (March 2023)
- Correct typographic errors and confusing elements in the official release forms. (May 2023)
- Clarify where content previously posted online by members of the populace can be re-shared by an officer without requiring a release form. (June 2024)
- A revised Technology Contributor Agreement that addresses some concerns that volunteers developing software for the SCA. (November 2023)
However, the response from the Society Publications Manager — the officer that owns the Release Forms Handbook — has been to ignore me. The Society’s org chart shows that the Publications Manager supervises the Society Chronicler and the editors of the various Society-level publications, but they aren’t responsible for web publishing or social media, so the concerns of those offices are (understandably) less salient for them.
In 2024, I tried to find examples of people for whom the existing release forms were working well — who were able to publish a large number of photos, art, and text written by the membership each month, without experiencing a lot of friction around release forms — but I wasn’t able to find anyone for whom this was true… and when I wrote to various Society officers asking if they knew of any such success stories, they weren’t able to identify any either.
The Society Social Media Officer is able to publish a large amount of user-generated content without experiencing issues with the release forms… because they’ve decided that they don’t have to use the release forms. However, as far as I can tell, they never informed local social media officers of this policy interpretation, and dealing with release forms continues to be cited as a barrier by officers as a barrier to getting fresh material onto local websites and social media.
I think it’s time to have a round of discussion about updating the release forms policy to better serve the organization, but doing so is an uphill battle.
The release forms policy was written fifteen years ago by a cautious lawyer without a lot of Internet experience. The 2022 Release Forms Handbook restated that policy but did not update it to reflect the modern media landscape. The people who the current policy inconveniences have no power to change it, and the people who have power to change it aren’t themselves constrained by it.
Having a restrictive policy limits the organization’s legal liability, and if turns out that adhering to the policy causes so much friction that officers routinely ignore the policy, well… the Society’s leadership can just ignore that and hope that nothing ever goes wrong.