Hi all,

Over the past two terms, I’ve been mulling over the current fleet structure. It’s clear, as I said prior to last term, that there are too many government posts in the club - we simply cannot fill them. This has been evident with some FComms not filling their AFComm posts, which causes problems later down the line when the FComm takes an LOA or has RL to contend with. Another example is the lack of FComm candidates - during last term, we only had 4 people apply for 4 FComm roles; this term it was 5.

The result of that is an increase in involvement from the President in the management of fleets. As you saw in my last post, I have had to intervene with 3 ships to improve their health, and I will be intervening with another later this week.

In short, the current fleet structure, designed in the 1990s, is not working 30 years later. But we shouldn’t be surprised by that - the club’s size and demographic has changed over that time. But it means we do need to review how we are structured, especially if we want to maximise the opportunities that will come with the new Academy series and Voyager game.

One of the ideas that has been suggested is centralising the FComm responsibilities into a single team. Whilst there would be fleets (which are a useful tool for fleet identity, and also making the site more navigable) the concept would be to have a single team who provide the FComm function across all fleets, chaired/lead by a nominated individual. This would allow the team to support each other if RL kicked in, or if a particular fleet had multiple ships that needed support. Similar in a way to the boards, but with perhaps different selection criteria.

Before we go down that rabbit hole, I just wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas for how the fleets could be restructured.

Yours,

Jack