Posted by Gavin Burkhardt in Questions for the candidates - reallignment

Posted by Joe P in Questions for the candidates - reallignment

Posted by Joe P in Questions for the candidates - reallignment
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻
For Joe and/or Steve:

I note that in one of your goal statements you recognize the need to realign STF to be an 80 member club and not a 120 member club. What might this look like? It sounds like downsizing, though I know that’s not exactly what you’re going for.

Thanks in advance!

Gavin

Hi Gavin,

Steve and I are currently drafting an entire post about what “restructuring the organization” actually means. We’ll likely post that tomorrow; we were both traveling for Independence Day and need an extra day or so to finalize the draft. But you’re right that downsizing is not exactly what we are going for, even though it sounds like that. It’s really about changing our attitude toward people, what we ask them to do, and how we ask them to do it. We have to make sure we’re asking people to help out in ways that aren’t off-putting, and that the things the club is organized to match what people actually want to spend their time doing.

I’ll link you to our HQ post when we put it up, and then I’d be happy to talk about it further. I just wanted you to know that I saw this and do intend to answer it fully, it’s just going to take a day or two more. Hope you don’t mind.

Joe

Hi Gavin,

Here’s our HQ post on restructuring the organization: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/command/election/posts/178928/

Feel free to ask any follow ups you might have after reading that.

Joe

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I do have one follow-up, coming from someone still learning the upper command structure of the club.

You said you and Steve have some ideas, the short descriptions of which intrigue me. How do you plan on deciding on which to use? You said you don’t have any fully fleshed out yet, so I don’t expect a full rundown. But will they be subject to club-wide approval (something I haven’t seen much), a discussion in Command like you’ve suggested elsewhere, or an internal conversation within the Cabinet?

If you do have any more information to share re.: the ideas themselves, I’d love to hear that as well, but I don’t expect it.

Gavin

So, the key thing we need to know before we commit to anything specific, is to know who out of the current membership is really around and interested in helping out, and what they are interested in doing. We won’t know this until we ask people, and the only appropriate time to ask people would be after we’re elected (if you do it before hand, it looks really inappropriate, because it seems like you’re trying to bribe people with cabinet spots for votes, which is just gross behavior). After we’ve know who is really here and what they want to do, we can compare that to what work we know needs doing, and see where we have gaps. Then we figure out how to close the gaps.

How we close the gaps depends on what they are. There are certain things that the President can do by themselves, other things require collaboration with a cabinet member, and there are things that require public club-wide discussion. There are also things where a discussion is not strictly required, but would be wise, and things where I think club-wide discussion would be inappropriate. Here are some examples of each:

1. If we couldn’t find enough Fleet Commanders, even after going spear-fishing for them, then I can just decommission a fleet as the President, with no strict requirement for collaboration. In reality, collaboration would likely take place, because decommissioning a fleet would require moving the ships in the fleet being cut to other fleets. So, that would require conversations with the COs of those ships, and the FComms of the other fleets. I don’t think it would require a club wide conversation except before the decision to cut that fleet were made, simply to be sure we didn’t miss anyone who would be willing to be a Fleet Commander.

2. If a particular ship had trouble filling major command positions after a lot of effort to do so, then the decision to decommission it would be one that the relevant Fleet Commander and I as the President would make together. We are required to agree in order to cut a ship. We would also be talking to the CO in question and members of the crew of that ship, to make sure that we had really done the appropriate things to avoid this, and that it was the right thing to do. We would absolutely not have a club-wide discussion about cutting an individual ship, because I think that is highly inappropriate. I am of the opinion that what happens to specific ships is the business of the people who actually play on them and the chain of command that exists to support them, and nobody else.

3. If there were more than one ship with trouble like above, I would deal with them all as individual cases as above. I do not believe in treating the number of ships as some sort of macro-economic thing, where we cut some number of ships at once and expect some magic to happen. I wrote a post on this the last time I was President and it made a lot of senior people with a lot more experience than I had at the time very mad. I think I was right to not cut ships in that situation.

4. If we couldn’t find someone to fill the role of a Department Director, then that would be the type of thing we would bring forward for a club-wide discussion, because we would likely have to write a bill to change a bylaw, which is a process that requires public discussion under the Bills And Bylaws Edict. We would have to also have a serious conversation about what we really want to do with the work that that department does.

5. If we couldn’t find someone to fill the role of an Executive Assistant, then we could proceed as above, but also we could simply appoint someone in the interim to fill the spot until we’ve fully redefined the role. Executive Assistants have a lot of leeway in how they do their work, and can appoint as many assistants underneath themselves as they want, so we don’t have to wait for the full legislative process to take some action to keep things going.

6. If we find out that there is something a person wants to do that would help the club, but we have no role for it defined anywhere, then that would also require a club-wide discussion unless it’s something that made sense under an existing Department or EA. The Easy Option in that case is to just appoint the person as some sort of new assistant to the Department Director or EA; that usually doesn’t require any legislation.

Does that illustrate our thinking a bit more clearly here? It’s not that we don’t have ideas; there are lots of ideas. it’s that we don’t yet know which ones are appropriate until we know what our gaps are. We will not know that until we’ve had a conversation with the club that can only appropriately happen after we’re in charge.

Joe