Posted by Sam Pennington in Question for the Candidates: Fostering Community
This question comes in two parts and is open to any candidate who chooses to answer it.

The first part is about the cabinet. It has been my experience since I first joined the GMD, and particularly in the terms I have been GM Director, that the cabinet is not a particularly unified body. (Shocking, right?) What I mean by that isn’t that we don’t always agree, it’s that we don’t even talk to each other that much. Unless there’s a proposal we need to find a highly technical reason to kill or a fire to put out somewhere, we don’t talk to each other. Is this something either ticket would seek to address, and if so, how?

Speaking purely as a matter of abstract organizational principle, I do not see this as a problem that necessarily requires addressing. There are very few things that actually require the entire cabinet to be in lockstep to address, so it’s OK that most departments operate independently of other departments, most of the time. Usually when there needs to be some form of coordination, it happens between two specific departments, and the President doesn’t necessarily have to get involved unless it’s a question of setting priorities between conflicting things. An example of this is the kind of coordination that takes place between the Academy and the PDept; they usually work together to help manage new member placements. As long as the collaboration that needs to happen is happening, I don’t think it is automatically a problem that every person in the cabinet is not regularly talking to every other person in the cabinet.

That said, I do think that you are on to something, and it is something a little strange about the times you’ve been in the cabinet specifically. If I’m not wrong (please correct me), you’ve only been in the cabinet after we’ve had Discord. And in Discord, we have that #cabinet channel (there was no equivalent before under IRC or any other platform). The #cabinet channel is strange, because it’s relatively new to us and no President has really used it in any consistent way. I don’t even remember who asked for it first and what their ambitions were for it. It is also strange because it feels like we are all sitting in the same room at the same time not saying anything. Which just makes it even stranger to be someone who says something in there. I think that makes it a lot more palpable that a lot of the day to day stuff is actually being decided somewhere else, by someone else, and that the majority of us who are in the cabinet or are cabinet adjacent have nothing at all to do with that decision making process. At least that’s how it’s felt to me being in that room in Rob’s term, especially because discussions in there start with Rob throwing something in out of there out of the blue, that seems to have been workshopped by people who aren’t in that channel, and if you have a concern about whatever it is the reply back you get is basically “Well, all of these other people who aren’t here that we talked to already liked it.” Well, that’s great for them, but why did you ask us in the cabinet for our feedback if all you were going to do is just say that?

Something I want to do differently, if we are going to do anything at all with the #cabinet channel, is have some recurring, focused discussions on how things are actually going. We’re going to talk about this a bit more in our Reassessment HQ post, but the idea is to have some regular checkpoints where we ask ourselves simple questions - like “What’s working?” and “What’s not working?” - and then seeing how those could lead us to change things. I do something similar to this at my work; people who work in software will recognize it as the Sprint Retrospective from the Scrum methodology. The reason I want to try a similar thing here is because I’ve seen this work really well, because the changes are all stuff that actually matter to people in the room, and if action is taken after the meeting, people feel like their input matters, because it actually does. Because I’m not telling you what I’ve already decided to be doing, and the burden is on you to tell me how much you like it; instead, you’re telling me what you think we should do, and the burden is on me to translate that thought into some sort of action. I want to take that kind of attitude to the entire club, but a narrower, more focused and slightly more intense version of that might make sense within the #cabinet as a team discussion format.

That said, that assumes we’re going to do anything at all with the #cabinet channel. I don’t actually like Government-By-Discord. The club is primarily asynchronous; we’re spread out all over the world and we interact with each other over the span of days (e.g. through posting). Discord as a real time chat platform is synchronous, e.g. it’s assumed anyone who is there is actually there, and the interactions happen over the span of seconds or minutes. I think the mismatch between these two modes of communication causes a lot of awkwardness around here. You end up excluding people who can’t use Discord or who live in timezones other than the one you do. You also create the expectation that people in Discord are available to talk at any time, when in fact they aren’t. It’s understood that I might need between two and five days to write a roleplaying post on our website, but on Discord I’m expected to answer a technical question in less than 10 minutes of someone asking it, no matter what it is I’m doing. I find it crazy, but I know that I’m also probably a little more of a crumudgeon regarding Discord than many people are now-a-days. So it’s something I’m willing to put up with if I end up with a cabinet that really wants things to run that way.

Second, is club community. We really should get some. Both tickets mentioned in their intro posts plans associated with membership and getting us all on the same page. I’d like to hear in detail how those are intended to work and how feasible you honestly think they are over one term.

So, like I said in our post on realignment, I want to get us all on the same page by making the Command Ship by having regular, weekly discussions on how things work. That, I think can be the starting point for a healthier club community. If we can’t talk about the primary things we are actually here to do (e.g. play by post roleplaying in the Star Trek universe), and how to enable us to do those things (e.g. how the club works to support that), then we probably can’t really talk about too much else at all, and some sort of larger “club community” is going to be really, really hard.

You can’t really “plan” community from the top down. What you can do is ensure there are places where it can emerge naturally, and opportunities where that emergence is encouraged. We view Command today as a sort of place that is a mix between being spooky and boring, but it should be the natural place where our community can spring forth from, or at least parts of it.

As for what could or could not be achieved in a term, I’ll say this: The ultimate goal of my second Presidency is to ensure that I never feel that I have to run for President ever again.

The traditional way to do that is to pick some young hotshot CO with some relevant government experience to run with as your VP, teach him everything you know, and then set that guy loose on the club for his own term. I didn’t do that here because… there aren’t that many hotshot CO types right now who seem interested in doing that (Matt Bongiorno would perhaps be one, maybe; I haven’t talked to him too often). The problem with that is that it’s oral tradition, and as Rob himself has pointed out, that isn’t working out so well for us right now.

We need to scale up the understanding of things instead of having select few people pass knowledge to each other. The way you do that is to teach more than one person the same content at a time. That’s kinda the idea behind the having a little thread every Sunday to talk about how stuff works, it’s a low stakes way of doing that interactively with potentially everyone in the club, instead of whoever the Robin is to my Batman (Steve doesn’t really fit the paradigm; he’s already been effective as a VP and a President before). That’s the whole point of the realignment strategy. If we all get the why of things, then

“Community” as a broad thing, can’t be done in one term. It’s not actually right to think of it that way. A good community is something that takes constant effort all the time, by everybody, not just the President. What I can do as the President is set up a basis upon which other people could build that community can last after the 8 months of the term are done. I think if I succeed at getting other people understanding how the club works, how to keep it going, and how they can successfully improve upon it, then I won’t feel like I need to be President, because things will be stable enough around here and enough people will know how to keep it stable. Then the people after me can build more stuff on top of all of that.

Thank you,

-Sam Pennington

I hope that answers your questions satisfactorily, but if you want me to clarify or expand on anything I’m happy to.

Joe