Good morning everyone. This morning I and Matt want to highlight part 3 of our term plans if elected. This third part I will admit probably has fuzzy wording in its title. But I couldn’t come up with something better for the title part, so I will try to explain the plan below.

So this plan is focusing on building on those things I felt were successful from this last term. The biggest being my Voice Of The Club events in Discord. Again the idea will be to do them once a month, ideally if I can manage it more then once. I will also be making strong efforts to mentor my VP Matt to either be there himself when possible, or else able to run one if for some reason I can’t do so that month or time. As last term a write up of the event’s happenings will appear then in the ooc area ten-forward. I sadly know that I did not get every event’s write up done each time, but that was mainly because I had to do it myself. My plan going ahead will be to include Matt in this write up process where this last term I felt I could have done it on my own without James’s help. On this point I was mistaken, ah well live and learn!

The next thing I want to focus on with community participation is giving bigger vocal and visual focuses to areas that club members can contribute early on in STF. In this scope I would like to ask the Academy to talk about ways new cadets can get involved in the club as part of their times as Cadets. Same as having FComms and CO/XOs doing the same (or any member really) seeing something creative that someone does in a sim and looking into if it’d be appropriate to submit a more detailed version to either Department. In turn other areas to bring more to light is having a more community oriented view of talking about players among the ship levels. Meaning if a CO/XO sees a creative player at their JO level and they currently do not have an opening for them to fill as a DH they should totally be informing that person if they don’t already about other ship openings that would be a good fit around the club. This leads me to my next point and is semi-related to the earlier auditing of ship/fleets, ensuring that CO/XOs keep their ship profiles up to date regularly for this specific above purpose. This same idea for the JOs should be applied for promising DHs to get move up to possible XO/CO roles.

On the point of more constructive discussions. First off let me say any discussions whether in Command, on a Department board, or anywhere will have its dissenters both for and against an issue. That’s a fact, and nothing STF can do will ever change that nor is there really any way to avoid it by edicts, bills, or anything else in totality. What I mean here though is when an issue is raised instead when the obvious dissenters against a topic arise, then instead of those who support it (or vice versa) becoming objected or the like we need both sides to go ‘ok we disagree on this but both feel we could be right, how can we meet in the middle on this?’ basically the idea should be more compromising where we can and find agreement on an issue raised, rather then letting a handful people on any side of an issue dictate the tone of the topic or what is ‘best’ for the club. We need to start looking at discussions from both sides of an issue and how people bringing it up may react if a person against replies in an aggressive or passive aggressive negative way. This last part does not help such discussions and only creates ‘drama’ which drives off future productive discussions or the willingness for new and old members to get involved in the ‘dirty club politics’. Which in turn only snowballs to having hard to fill government roles come up, or gives STF a negative view in the larger internet community. On this point no edicts, or bylaws, or such can be passed really to ‘fix’ this. My only approach will be to lead as much by example as I have this past term, and encourage others to follow suit even if you disagree with me or others on a topic raised.

I feel if we can embrace this idea moving forward to be more accepting others ideas or views, whether they are ‘right or wrong’ in our personal views, over time we can make progress to make future discussion more ‘healthy’. For proof of how a this larger version of concept would work I point to how often the EDept was many years ago and viewed by the community at large. It took me a concentrated effort of years to turn this around, I feel Command and such would be no different but unlike EDept who’s turn around was in part aided by those more negative folks leaving. Command and such roles will need a shift in how the community approaches such things in constructive ways. It will not be something solved in one term, but it will take many. But I hope with other inroads to having constructive talks this can become a reality.

Robert Archer