Well, it’s certainly been a while since my last post. Last time I wrote it was about the completion of one my pet projects, the XvTED Academy. Since then, the academy has moved rather slowly with only three people having signed up for it. Not exactly what I was hoping for it, but it will be.
As of late, (and with the exception of the past few days) I’ve actually been rather pathetic when it comes to time spent doing things for the RS. For half of the month of December and pretty well the majority of January I have done very little other than play a lot of RuneScape or spend time holidaying at home. It’s been fun, but certainly counter productive.
In the past few days I’ve actually been able to kick myself up into gear on working on getting the next missions for RS 203 out. 203b is done for the majority, but it needs live testing and the niceties like a briefing and in-game messages finished up. 203r is still just a vague idea in my mind, and I’ll need to do some reading up on the outline to get my ideas sorted out and put into bytes. Hopefully I can come up with a decently challenging mission this time around, as a number of the past missions have been less than ideal, in my opinion. Kicks is working on 202a, although that has been a rather bumpy ride with semi-threats of quitting, disappearing, and not really knowing how much of the mission is done or actually capable of doing, going by some of his comments on the TacOps mail system. However, I don’t doubt that we’ll have a decent mission by the end of things.
With the recent appointing of Sconn as FC, there’s been some things which I’ve liked and others which I’ve questioned. The first thing that I really like is the creation of a formal email for all Executive peoples to keep in touch and bounce ideas off each other. I’m hoping that something like this will help with finding able bodies to work on projects or possibly to just hand off projects to areas more suited for them. Probably the best aspect of it though would be those projects which require effort in various offices will be better co-ordinated.
With the advent of the Execs group email, it’s opened up a nicer venue for me to bring forth a few random ideas of my own, the first of which will be an idea to try and get people together with respect to non-Star Wars gaming. The topic has been floating around in the RS but no concrete ideas have come forth as to how to deal with it, integrate it, or formalize it. One random morning where I was still in that limbo of waking up state I happened to have some ideas float across my mind which struck me as a surprisingly good start to get a formal grouping started with these external games. The idea revolves around a slight re-working or adding onto a person’s profile on the RS so that they can fill in information about their external gaming interests that they would like to share with other members of the RS, and then the database will take this information and group people together at a central site by game or gaming platform. Hopefully, with the extra brains that the Execs email brings together will be able to put these grand ideas of mine into ideas which are more concrete and usable for the club as a whole.
Something that I was less than impressed with, but willing to give leeway to, was the reintroduction of HHC. Granted though, I’m even less impressed with a number of the responses from HC over it. Particularly how some who were very adamant on it’s removal during Kaz’ tenure were so overjoyed to see it’s return now under Sconn’s purview. Personally, my past experiences with HHC have been less than appreciated: back during my days as RgF XO and then CO, I saw a lot of, for lack of a better word, useless emails from them. There were plenty of “this is pointless” or “this won’t work” emails where the statements weren’t backed up with some sort of experience that they had with the situation being discussed. Then there was always a lot of plain whining and complaining. However, this did not describe the entirety of their emails, as some did provide some decent discussion, or at least jumpstarted a conversation back up which became stagnant. So, although being less than happy about the return of HHC, Sconn’s approach at selecting on a few (somewhat) more invovled members on the list is a decent step in the right direction.
While on the topic of HC, something that I’d also like to write down in words is my opinion of the Alderman positions. We are supposed to be a group of people who contribute to HC discussions, have a vote on those issues, and, as was discussed when the Alderman position was first introduced, are supposed to be the voice of the club as a whole and as such bring issues forward to HC on a regular basis. I know that for one, I have been rather lacking in the bringing forward of issues. I have also noticed that another particular Alderman has been rather vacant for the past month or so, having not voted on any of the issues recently, including the vote for FC as far as I am aware. Essentially, an Alderman position should be very similar to being in a Division CO position, but without the responsibilities of running that Division. That being said, Division COs are under a purview or performance review by the members of their Division as well as the FC, whether it be on a formal or informal basis. If a CO is not performing his or her duties (for any variety of reasons), that Division begins to falter and club activity starts to fail in that area. When this happens, the CO is given some general warning that things need to be turned around or they are replaced with someone who can do the job better. The Alderman position however, doesn’t have such a review system. There is no “do or be replaced” system of monitoring. I see Alderman as being those who ideally should be interacting with a good portion (not necessarily all) of the membership on a regular basis across multiple divisions and be taking note of the issues that he sees people being affected by or aware of. Then, on top of this, they should be holding their voice on HC by taking part in the discussions and votes on HC, not leaving things to the dry, bitter end. So far, the only real way that people are removed from an Alderman position are one of two ways (which I have seen): they retire from the position, or they are gone/out of contact with anyone for a large amount of time (generally on the order of months). The Alderman position, I think, needs a revisit of their job description and what is expected from that person, as well as how we are dealt with when we don’t perform our duties. HC is supposed to be a governing body. They don’t tend to work particularly well when there are members who don’t do anything to help.
Well, that should be enough ranting from me for one day, I suppose. I’ve got more on my mind, however, so do expect to see more coming from me in the next couple of days.
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