Good afternoon everyone in STF. So as I mentioned at the end of my introduction post Matt and I plan to approach going into the next term with 4 focused areas to do things in STF. The first I will outline today builds off of lessons and outcomes from just the last 8 months. To provide context this past term I ended up having to decommission several ships, mostly due to shortages of qualified people to fill roles, interest in the areas by players, lack of GMs, etc. I also had to find a balance of enforcing ship/fleet awols and such as defined in FCOMM with my own fcomm/afcomms with the realities of everyone’s life. In the end it became clear to me that even with the cut backs in ships to help balance the work load and requirements of filling FComm/AFComm roles possible adjustments would have to be done next term.

With that in mind Matt and I have formulated two approaches to handling the ships and fleets, this also ties into the 2nd term goals which I’ll expand on there. So for now the focus in on two sub-set goals for helping the cabinet and how many fcomm/afcomms we need or how much work they need to do.

So option 1: We keep the existing number of fleets as we got now four in this case, but after doing an audit of any other trouble ships in the fleets (this is where it ties into the 2nd goal I mentioned), we then readjust where ships are if needed to balance things out if any more ships/areas are cut due to being beyond saving. The pros of this is we reduce the workload of ships that need to be spot checked by the fcomm/afcomm in expectations. Both of which should have a good handle on where and what they’re ships are facing if they’re communicating with their CO/XO/GMs. This also means newer people of experience as AFComm’s may feel learning and doing such a role is less ‘work/unfun’ to do in the club. The Con is that we still need 8 people to fill said roles which may or not in the future be a remaining issue.

So option 2: We cut a fleet and reassign the ships from that fleet to the others in a balanced pattern, assuming we dont cut any more ships with the audit plans, then that’ll mean 6 ships in one fleet and 7 in another two. The pros to this means we need two less people to fill an fcomm/afcomm role, but those remaining six fcomm/afcomms would have more work to split up between them, which could mean some people feel overworked, or due to a sudden increase in their lives have to step back and we got openings yet again.

To me either option has its pros/cons if implemented, likely in regards to steps the fleet adjustment part here would take place after ship auditing were done and handled. For me assuming no further ships were cut personally speaking I prefer option 1, but I’d be open to also discussing other ideas/options in the course of this coming up.

The second part of this 1st goal is stream lining the cabinet departments. Last term, pretty much from the get go of the term, James and I had a bit of a rough time filling some department directors mainly in EDept, Russ did step up to fill in the gap but life demands eventually forced him to step down, this opened up a gap of several months with no edeir/aedir and so people like Ray Branch who had ship designs waiting to be reviewed got left behind. Thankfully Katy and Gavin stepped up after I spend considerable time with each outlining how to do the very basics, and we soon got back on track. This got me thinking how we could reduce the amount of people needed in these roles, but still provide opportunities for interested members to create ships, tech, worlds, species, and govemerent powers for the tech and reference manual (in the gm dept).

With this in mind I came up with the rough idea of combining both departments. The EDept and GMDept would merge to be called something like ‘The Reference Department’. The setup in my mind is at the top of the chain you got the Reference Director, then directly below them you got the Engineering Director and GM Director. The EDir and GMDir would perform their duties as normally done now in their respective areas, and the RefDir would help oversee both departments, help with any reviews (if say either other dir was doing submissions) or handle any complaints or problems for either sub-department. So at a minimum a president would only need to fill 3 roles a term vs 6 as now (edir/aedir/dockmaster/gmdir/agmdir/archivst). Obviously these assistant roles could also be filled if there are people to do so in these sub-departments and the handling of the GM exams etc would be done as now. But otherwise only 3 people would be needed vs 6. It would also have the benefit of allowing the gmdept/edept to better work together if say a gm or submitter of something wants to tie it into a larger lore in STF. There would also be overlap in that all three people would get some exposure to the other departments providing better points of contact, answers and the like. The reference department could also provide faster turn around hopefully in new approved submission in either sub-department to the library in a more timely manner.

Obviously this would require some work on a department charter, reworking ENERGIE and OGRE and probably some other documents I’m not thinking of atm. But if pulled off would I think provide a better experience for the club members as a whole.

Robert Archer