======================= Grand Council Chronicle ======================= Issue #28 -- August 16, 1995 Contents of this issue: Gareth: Various topics Modius: Relocation Proposal Kyle: Various topics Finnvarr: Reponse to Alysoun's post (Elected Seneschals) This is the Grand Council Chronicle, the proceedings of the Grand Council of the Known World, a body chartered to examine the structure of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc., and make recommendations of changes. The contents represent the opinions of the contributing authors, and do not necessarily represent the official policies of the SCA, Inc. ---------------------------------------- >From the Secretary's Desk Well, I'm off to Worldcon. Cross your fingers and hope that things work right this time. Edward will be editing the next few issues, provided the list server lets him... [Postscript, added after sending off the paper copies: REMEMBER, please, that this means that messages sent directly to me *will not appear* until after I get back. Submissions should be sent to scagc-l@lists.princeton.edu, not to me...] -- Justin ---------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 8 Aug 95 17:36:06 -0800 From: rgathercoal@foxmail.gfc.edu (Roy Gathercoal) Subject: GC response to Digest #26 Unto the Grand Council Gareth returns. This will be longish, as I have been absent for a month and there is quite a bit of ground to cover. I am very much in sympathy with the desire to find ways of freeing the board >from administration in order to provide the visionary leadership they are better equipped to provide. However, I have several major problems with Modius' recommendation to move branch review to the IAC. First, I'm not so sure that group is up and running effectively. It may be that they are just working quietly, but it might also be that they are having the same sorts of problems we are having. If they can't handle the stuff that is already on their plates (and I do not know whether this is the case) then we shouldn't be dishing more stuff to them. Second, branch review takes very little board time. It is typically almost a formality, for the Society Seneschal is responsible for making sure everything is in order. In fact, as of last July, the right to make decisions about group status below baronial level was delegated to Kingdom Seneschals. So to move this to the IAC would actually be a move toward greater centralization. Third, the IAC should not be moved into administrative work. It could function as a sort of society-wide court to handle complaints, etc., but as soon as we start pushing administrative stuff onto them (stuff which I believe should be handled by officers anyway) they start looking like another board of directors with the same problems except bigger (bigger group, not necessarily bigger problems). Fourth, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the IAC is in any serious way representative. It may have a member from each kingdom, but that means that some people in the Society are being "represented" by one person for each 2500 members, and some are being represented by one person for each 500 members. This is not equitable representation! Further, by leaving the means of selection of IAC members up to the kingdoms, we effectively have left it up to the Crowns in most kingdoms. The Crowns are not elected, nor are they representative, and in several cases they have apparently acted against the best interests of the people of the kingdom. Without effective checks on the Crowns, or without specific and certain procedures for selecting members of the IAC, we should not pretend that that body will be representative of anyone other than themselves. I would add that if the Crowns do not make the appointments for a particular kingdom, chances are good that whatever group does make the decision will be no more representative. At least the board has made conscious efforts to select people with a variety of interests and abilities. . . RE: SERWYL'S COMMENTS ON ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION I would agree with most of what Serwyl said about email. It is not an unmitigated boon to communication, any more than cramming sixty additional hard-headed people into a room will improve communication. Effective communication should not be reduced to a simplistic "more is better." Each medium has strengths and weaknesses; email is too new for us to really understand either yet. RE: CORWYN'S MANIFESTO 1. a) on outsourcing. absolutely not. To jump into outsourcing without extensive care and preparation would be irresponsible. I believe that few people even know all of the functions that the database currently serves. Outsourcing may be a wonderful thing to do, but we should take the same sort of care in making this decision as if we were to say "let's hire a management group to run the Society." Both have the potential for disaster. b) on clarifying the division between modern and medieval. an interesting idea, but in my experience in the Society it is not possible to meaningfully separate the modern and the medieval. When we remove all of the things that have significant ramifications in both arenas, we are left with a tiny pile of mostly trivia. For example, could a Crown banish someone because the banished person was "a danger to the serenity of the Realm?" What if that danger was because the person was publishing a gay rights newsletter? So is the issue of banishment medieval or modern? Or how about Crown Tournament? Is the decision to postpone Crown Tournament for the convenience of the crown (say for 3 or 6 months) a medieval or a modern matter? Or perhaps to hold Crown Tournament "just across" the border of the kingdom? How about a barony's decision to serve at a fund-raiser for a political action committee? Or the Crown who states that "no woman will fight in my Crown Tournament? Are these medieval or modern issues? I do not think such a line can be fruitfully drawn. 2. Accountability is an important thing, and is largely missing all around. Currently the board lacks appropriate accountability. The membership also lack accountability. It is far too easy for the board to make a far-reaching decision without proper consultation, and it is too easy for a member to sound off in an irresponsible manner with little care or regard for those who get blasted. I hope this will be a question that will become mostly irrelevant when the role of the Board is straightened out. I believe the main reason for the board's secrecy is the number of administrative decisions that it is making. These should be made by administrators. There are lots of channels for input to the board, but it seems that too many people consider posting to some listserv or grousing around a campfire to be an effective means of communicating a concern to the board. I think the board ought to listen more, but I also think that people ought to be more willing to meaningfully engage in reasonable conversation. I have seen many examples of communication to the board that looked more like personal attacks than like honest attempts to resolve issues. To be fair, I have also seen letters from board members that seemed cold and uncaring. Board meetings are not the places for members of the populace to begin their interactions with the Board. Board meetings are not the places for people with well rehearsed axes to grind on and on. If there is going to be honest participation from the 25,000 members or so (and the additional who-knows-how-many others) then we must develop some format that allows universal access, equal opportunities for participation and requires accountability of each participant to the group. Perhaps we ought to be talking about starting local discussion groups at the branch level. These then would feed into discussions at the kingdom level, and then something intelligible could be directed to the board. This seems like a lot of work, and will take a bunch of organizing, but it might be worth it. It is clear, however, that there is no way in which more than 20,000 people can speak individually to any small group of people. Even if each member sent one substantial message in their entire SCA life, the results would be paralysis. Yet to simply set up a system in which a self-selecting vocal minority "speaks" for the entire populous doesn't seem helpful. Any system we establish to promote feedback to the board ought to be held to this test: Can every member access this system with about the same ease as any other member, and can we ascertain how widespread is the support for any statement? If the answer is no to either question, the feedback method holds as much potential for misinformation as for information. More information is not necessarily better information. 3. The definition of membership is clearly an important issue. I tend to be conservative on this issue, fully believing that anyone too poor to pay the modest membership fees (at least before the latest increase--I'm less strident now) should be saving their money for food and shelter and not spending it on garb, armor and events. I do not think the society should be an enclave for the wealthy. I oppose running up the cost of events in order for groups to make big bucks. But I also don't believe that it is possible to be active in the SCA without spending a lot more money than the membership. We should not be talking about welfare recipients, here. I believe that if we are to have an organization, all of the people who participate should bear the costs. There might be special categories for students and unemployed people, for example, but the idea that one can continue to take advantage of the groups' resources without helping to pay doesn't make sense. If we are not going to be organized, then we will all fly apart into a thousand different micro-groups, each with a "better" idea of how things ought to be done. But hey, we don't need the SCA to do that, we can do that already. I cannot see any middle ground here, how we can incur expenses of organizing, but not expect those who utilize these resources to pay for them. I am glad to see the question phrased in terms of whether there should be two memberships. I think it is important that we avoid turning the Society into a moving demo, where most of the people do not join anything, but rather only pay an admission to get in to events. We should not have two classes of citizens, either people are members, or they are guests. Now, the tough part is to see where the common ground lies. 4. I am a bit confused by this question, and by #5. It seems as if the entire corporate structure has suddenly been folded into the board of directors. I see the board as a group of trustees, who are charged with overseeing a very large and complex system of groups. I think there should be more accountability between the board and the membership, but in order for that to happen there must be a clear and unequivocal manner in which the membership can speak. But we should be talking about the society and the corporation as an entity separable from the board. The board is one component, but only a relatively small component. I do not think the idea of a federation is workable, at least in the way it is outlined here. First, the kingdoms are artificial constructs of the larger organization. Currently they are supposed to be acting as regional offices--the Crowns are regional chairpersons, the officers are regional deputies of the Corporate-level officers. The kingdoms have no more right to exist than does the corporation. If you want a federation, then you should start at the local group level. Why compel a local group to belong to a particular kingdom? One reason, of course, is that this is part of the game as we have built it. There are good reasons there should not be one kingdom for each state, province, territory or county. And who elects kingdom officers? Which kingdom has an elected Crown? Multiplying the bureaucracy by a dozen or so then scattering them across the planet in itself won't make anyone more accountable. Kingdoms and their Crowns are fully capable of being even less accountable to its members than are the corporation and its board. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the board is the major problem. It is a big component, but circumventing the board will not necessarily make things better. RE: FINNVARR'S RESPONSE TO HOSSEIN Finnvarr writes "My proposal in answer to his, is to go to a LISTSERV and require all GC members who cannot manage access to drop out." It is probably the case that we need to get tougher on GC members, but doing it on the basis of email access seems wrong-minded. After all, there are some very active emailers on the GC who have contributed virtually nothing. In six months, it seems that there are no more than a dozen or so regular contributors, and that the majority of the forty or so have done nothing more than give a short intro and (perhaps) forward someone else's contribution. So what will restricting access to computer-privileged people gain us? If members are not willing to actively engage in this forum by carefully reading and considering weighty material, why waste our time with hastily constructed one-liners and bumper-sticker philosophy? I don't think that rapidity of response is a problem--we are basically still talking about the same issues. I think depth and breadth of participation is a real problem, and one that a listserv will not fix. RE: ALBAN'S POST On GAAP, I fully agree. But I would first suggest that we get all of our groups working on some system. Financial responsibility has long been an acceptable blemish in our Society. Despite many examples of officers leaving the SCA at the same time as largish amounts of money appear to be unaccounted for, we still lack reasonable accounting standards in many (perhaps most) of our groups. Moving to kingdom level would certainly hinder this accountability. The only real pressure the kingdoms have to keep their financial house in order seems to be the corporate level officers--and that is weaker than it should be. I wouldn't doubt that it is partly due to a fear of evoking claims of repression from on high, and partly due to the fact that the corporate books appear to have historically spotty in quality. I'm not sure why Alban thinks that our current standards for impeaching and removing directors are not adequate. My understanding is that a director can be impeached by three directors, by a majority of the corporate officers, or by a petition of 10% of the membership. A board member can also be impeached by signature of a majority of Crowns or current Kingdom Seneschals. Any such impeachment must be then considered in a special meeting of the board. It could be argued that the board still has final say, but it should also be apparent that if they fail to act convincingly, they will be compelled to keep calling special meetings, as a result of additional petitions. To my knowledge this process has never been invoked. I do know of a time in which a majority of Crowns expressed a wish to remove a corporate officer, but that expression did not transfer into a petition (and many, or perhaps all of the Crowns at that meeting had failed to consult their populace). So would you propose that it be easier to impeach a director? Should we require less than 10% of the membership or fewer than half of the crowns? I can't imagine the extent of the chaos if we made it too easy to remove a director. . . The cultural imperialism stuff is probably overstated. There is no doubt that many people and institutions in the US have been insensitive to the needs of members of other countries. There is also no doubt that these members constitute a minority of SCA members. We might style ourselves an international society, but if you were to throw a dart at a world map sans North America you would be unlikely to hit a country with an active SCA group. This does not mean that these insensitivities should not be addressed, but I do not agree that it is not possible for an organization to do business in other countries without setting up totally independent groups. Wholly-owned subsidiaries, perhaps, and in a few cases a joint venture bound by contract. But these situations are relatively rare and should not become the tail that wags the dog. We are not faced with a dichotomy of either slaving under the boot of the imperial Milpitas or of living free with no constraints except those of our own making. I think that Oregon would be a fine location for corporate offices. I know that others have lobbied for Michigan and for New Mexico. (Perhaps Singapore or the Australian outback might be much less expensive than St. Louis!) Anywhere you go will offer some advantages and some disadvantages. The physical location of the offices should not be a matter for the Grand Council to decide. Besides, people's livelihoods are involved. It strikes me as insensitive to suggest that we should tell our employees "you will need to move to another state or be fired." Moving our office is not any different than closing a plant to move to a cheaper operating area. We absolutely do not need more gossip and wild ideas. The time for that is past. Either we are ready to move or not. Position papers are precisely where we ought to be focusing. We need more developed prose and not more one-liners. ON JOHN'S ELECTION PROPOSAL I think that if we are to have elected board members, we ought to have one member/one vote. Instead of having one board member representing 500 people and another 2500 people, lets have two members from the bigger kingdoms and let the smaller kingdoms share a member. Sound weird? I agree. Yet unless we have a two chamber system, I don't see how we can meet the concerns of both the large and small kingdoms. For example, what would prevent the small kingdom's representatives from making policy that would benefit the small kingdoms at the expense of the large? And what would prevent the large kingdoms from overturning those decisions in two years? And are we willing to have half the board turn over every year? I would be concerned that too much stuff could get lost between the cracks. I would imagine that we need some stability from somewhere. Perhaps the board is not the place for this stability, but whoever has it will wield a bunch of power. I don't see how seven , or even a dozen people can meaningfully represent the diversity in our entire society. In the kingdom election scenario I fear that a certain group of visible peers will dominate the board, replacing the studied diversity that is there now. I do not think our society would be strengthened by a board of the seven best known people in the Known World. We should be striving to select a board that has some diversity of experience, abilities and interests. I would be dismayed, for example, if there were no non-fighters on the board, or no people attuned to the arts and sciences, or for that matter, if there were no Royal Peers. I believe there is strength in diversity, for the tasks which the board ought to doing. Gareth ---------------------------------------- From: modius@dobharchu.org (Erik Langhans) Date: 09 Aug 95 12:48:58 -0600 Subject: gcc proposal Greetings to the Grand Council from Modius. I would like to submit the following proposal for your consideration and vote: "The Grand Council proposes that the Board of Directors examine the option of relocating its corporate headquarters to a state/city which has lower rental & overhead costs and one which as a more central US geographic location. By relocating the corporate offices to a region with lower overhead and rental costs, tremendous saving should be experienced." FROM: MODIUS@DOBHARCHU.ORG ---------------------------------------- >From KINCORA1@aol.com Wed Aug 9 23:58:14 1995 Subject: gc comments I would like to apologize for my absense lately, life is always hectic due to the fact that my home is in one city and job in another. Ad to this, Rhiannon and I's long time friend and room mate, Master Johanes the Black, was in the final stages of his battle with AIDS. Some quick comments: I don't know the first thing about accounting (beyond my check book) but if the SCA isn't using standard accounting practices we need to find out why, and if there isn't a good reason, strongly (formally) recommend that they start. As a side note, an inaccurate financial report set off the pay to play mess last year. Sizable one time expences were listed as recurring, hence, impending financial disaster. I like Modius' proposal to turn over group status changes to the IKAC or a simalar body. The same body could also handle the leg work on bannishments etc... A seperate body could be for financial oversight. >From my discussion with a former board member I gather that their tendancy to micro management is more tradition than policy (Finnvarr, is this correct?). Lady x writes a letter to the board that her local seneschal is an ass, she expects and generally has gotten a responce, even if it says, go to the kingdom. There has been a lot of discussion on what the BoD should and should not be involved in. I propose that we distill the discussion into a set of "not limited to guide lines" and make a proposal to the board. This could be the first of any number of small steps toward the board becoming more of an umbrella organization rather than one of total management. An international commitee is definitely something we need. No coment on the Swedish issue, but I can see why it happened. Alysoun mentioned the seneschals, why not have them consult with a kingdom level advisory group (members of the peerage??) and then elect the board members. Kingdoms would each have a voice in the process. Member(s) could be unelected when neccesary, I would make it harder to remove a member to avoid knee jerk reactions, but the size of the board wouldn't change and real screw ups could be removed. Just a thought, comments ?? Lastly, has anyone taken action on my request to look at changing our non-profit status and or moving the corporate headquarters. A lot of the discussion lately is very similar to my comments using the Sports Car Club as a possible organizational model. Kyle, ---------------------------------------- Sender: Steve Muhlberger Subject: Response to Alysoun's post Greetings to the Grand Council and the Membership Committee from Finnvarr. Alysoun's post in the last GCC made a few things fall into place in my head. A. is looking for an organized body with expertise to take on more of the administrative burden of the organization and act as both a resource for and a check upon the Board. I believe that some type of representation is needed to connect the ordinary member and the local group to the Corporation(s). I also think that at least the bigger Kingdoms need representation of some sort, too. What if the members in local groups elected their local sensechal? And what if local seneschals elected higher level (Principality and Regional) seneschals? And what if the Regional and Principality Seneschals elected the Kingdom Seneschal? Seneschals in this situation would have both a greater mandate and greater accountability to the ordinary member. At the same time, seneschals could be the link between the ordinary members and the (non-game) officers of various mundane corporations. Who better than Kingdom Seneschals to know which of their number would be the best Society Seneschal? (And can one imagine being Society Seneschal without recent experience of being a Kingdom Seneschal?) Now I am not an uncritical sensechal-lover, so I would place a limit on them by keeping the Board of Directors of any Corporation out of their grasp. The Board would be self-selecting as now, and in fact there would be a limit to the number of ex-Kingdom or Society Seneschals who could be on the Board. After all, administrative skill is not the only useful talent for Board members, especially if the Board is going to be restored to its proper role as an oversight rather than an administrative body. Defining our goals and directions requires poets and artists (and fighters!) as well as accountants and managers. And if there was a separate body for things like appeals from the members against banishments or administrative enactments (necessary in my view if there is more than one corporation, as there already is) -- then this body, too, should not be elected by the seneschals. This all rests on an assumption that only those who are paid members, who put their names on the dotted line, have a vote on the local level. There is is, lords and ladies, fire away! Finnvarr ----------------------------------------