Posted by Robert Archer in Question for the candidates - Archer/Bongiorno - why 2016?

Posted by Daniel Lerner in Question for the candidates - Archer/Bongiorno - why 2016?
This question is for the Archer/Bongiorno ticket.

In your introduction post, Rob stated: “For me the growing major issues of club numbers declining, burn out, position shortages being filled, and such is not something that is recent. If you ask me this is an issue which has been gaining steam more and more since at LEAST 2016.”

Why 2016? I can’t see anything special about that year, other than it was the end of the end of Rob’s first term as president. Is this meant to imply all of STF’s woes began after your last term as president?

I also don’t see how that even is the case. While we don’t have the best stats for WeBBspace, we have excellent membership stats for Exodus, which begins just two years later in 2018 (https://www.star-fleet.com/stats/membership/). We officially moved to Exodus on June 24, 2018. Assuming it took two weeks for all active members to transfer over, we reached an initial membership in Exodus of 94 members. By mid July we were at 100 members. And while there were ups and downs, we had a relatively good overall increase, especially October 2019 to July 2020, reaching Exodus’s peak membership to-date of 120 members.

How does the statement I have reproduced above correlate with an increasing active membership rate after the year you have indicated the problems began?

Daniel

There wasn’t anything ‘special’ about the year. And no I don’t mean to imply all of STF’s woes began with my last term before as president. What I mean is that smaller things like feelings of burn out, harder to fill positions at times, slowly gained steam in my opinion till our current point of time in the past 2-3 years since 2016 to me. Again this is my view of things from that time. Also while our club numbers did peak to 120, looking at those numbers over that time I recall many ships which were in poor healthy straits with open roles, and often a revolving door with awols and retaining members. So while we may have had around 100-120 members, we had a growing portion of awols/loas happening which means that on paper sure we got 100-120 members, but active posting members were probably not quite as high, the same could be said now I am sure.

Robert Archer

That link I shared indicates the numbers are based on members who posted within the past 30 days. I would also remind you that in the spring of 2020 (before the peak of 120 in July 2020), we had so many posts and active members that the Challenger’s posting rate broke the site temporarily. What is your basis of saying those 120 members is not an accurate representation of the actual active membership at the time?

In addition, the logic in your answer does not make sense for two reasons. First, assuming some percentage of the reported “active membership” numbers are not, in fact, active (a fallacy I have responded to above), that rough percentage should be somewhat consistent, which means any upwards trend would still be an upward trend regardless of the reported numbers. Second, how do you get an upward trend in active members if, as you say, less and less members are active at that time?

These are important questions. Your campaign intro made it clear you were responding to an overall decrease in membership since at least 2016 (i.e. the time your first term ended). But I would suggest the current trend of lowered membership numbers is reflective of a more recent trend, over roughly the last year to year and a half. Which calls into question the other points of your campaign.

Therefore, again, where are you getting this from if the stats don’t support what you are saying?

Daniel