Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - Updated Academy Materials

Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - Updated Academy Materials
This is a question for Joe.

As has been brought up to Rob in a question, a significant amount of work sounds like it has been done by Cale and others to update the handbook and various courses. Yet these efforts have not actually made it on to our website.

As the current Librarian, are you able to shed light on why these materials have not been updated despite having been ready quite some time ago?

As President, what actions would you take to ensure that when people put effort into updating things like training materials that results in our website being updated?

Adam W.

Hi Adam,

I am happy to inject facts into the discussion on this topic, with my perspective of what has been happening this entire time as the Librarian. To do that, we actually need to go back more than a few years. I apologize in advance for what will be a lengthy post.

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In 2015, I wrote software for what was to be a replacement for the Library. The goal was a vastly simpler to use system that did not require the knowledge of Docbook XML for people to write content, and did not require someone to be familiar with XSL Transforms and other complicated XML tooling in order to build pages. The Library you see when you go to https://www.star-fleet.com/library/ is all based around those technologies, and basically you need to be a professional software engineer to figure all that stuff out. I know because, I actually was a professional software engineer, and I had to figure it out without any documentation left behind at all from the person who put it together. My goal was to enable people without deep technical skill to be able to update Library content on their own, so that someone other than me could be the Librarian. I put a demo of this thing out in 2015 and invited several people to try it, primarily in the Academy and the Engineering Department, because they were the frequently making Library content updates under the old system. Of the beta testers who were invited at that time, none of them actually cared to use it except Rob Archer, and Rob didn’t actually use it very much. So, I understood this to mean that absolutely nobody cared about this at all, and since at that point it was becoming clear I would have to re-write the entire website (e.g. with Exodus), all of this went on my back burner.

Then in 2020, Sarah became President. Sarah actually cared about the Library, and asked me what was going on with this. I showed her the demo, and we talked about it at length. She thought this was important, and wanted my New Library updated and integrated into Exodus. So we did that as a kind of “quasi-private beta” that you can see here: https://www.star-fleet.com/beta/library/

The thing that prevents us from making the New Library the permanent replacement of the existing Library is data conversion. We need to convert the data from the old Docbook XML format into the kind of Markdown that the New Library accepts. Doing that data conversion is going to require a lot of tedious manual effort, which I was too busy (with other things the club was asking me to do that were considered more important, e.g. adding features to Exodus) to do on my own. The good news is that it is tedious manual effort that nearly anyone could do, because the format of content in the New Library is actually very similar to how we format roleplaying posts. So, Sarah was interested in getting a group of volunteers who could do this to work together to speed this whole thing up, and also to beta test the New Library in a more robust way. The idea was also floated that out of this group of volunteers, one of them could be picked as the new Librarian, so I wouldn’t have this job anymore.

This is where Cale and her course updates enter the story. Cale was one of the people who volunteered for this, and at the time, she had updated the Counseling course, which was the first of her updates that she was talking about in her question to Rob. The thing about the changes she wanted to make that was difficult, is that she was very focused on the visual presentation of the content. The Old Library is almost primarily text, and I designed the New Library to be a replacement for the Old Library, so it would take a lot more changes to the New Library to present the highly specific visual differences that Cale was interested in. There would be tradeoffs involved in adding features to enable people to do this sort of thing; we probably couldn’t have a user experience where editing the content is just like writing a bunch of posts if we have to deal with stuff like text alignment and image embedding and video clips and all this sort of thing. We’d have to do additional design to figure this out.

Sarah did not want to delay the conversion from the Old Library to the New Library over what was at the time, a single Academy course, so she made the decision as the President that we should proceed with the conversion of the existing content, and then the new courses that Cale was working on would be dealt with separately. That was the last time I heard anything about this as the Librarian, and that was still in 2020.

In 2021, Sarah’s term ended and Daniel’s term started. There was a hand-off of the data conversion effort during that time; Nathan Miller ended up spearheading that effort. Cale ended up becoming Academy Commandant toward the end of Sarah’s term and was re-appointed during Daniel’s term, and so she kept working on the course updates in that capacity. I’m pretty sure that’s when she finished that stuff? I don’t honestly remember exactly, because nobody asked me to take any action on any of this in any of my roles (e.g. as Librarian, or TECH, or even Academy Vice Commandant) at this time. Then Library content updates kind of stopped, because Nathan Miller had to leave the club, Daniel got really busy in real life so stopped paying complete attention as President, and Cale had to vacate the role of Commandant as well. So… yeah, this is where everything started to actually get lost. Nick Villarreal has been getting Engineering Department stuff in there, but that’s largely on his own initiative.

Rob has never said a word about any of this to me at all while he has been President. Rob has not expressed any interest in the Library whatsoever this term. Rob also has not asked me about Academy courses or the Academy. I had a telephone conversation with James when the term started about several of my concerns about what was going on with the club that I thought he and Rob should address; during this conversation I mentioned that I didn’t want to be Vice Commandant again; I do not recall if we ever discussed the Academy courses or how I did not want to be Librarian again (it was something I explicitly told both Sarah and Daniel when they were President). Nobody else, including Cale, requested that I do anything as the Librarian with any of the course content. Nobody has mistakenly requested that TECH do anything with it either.

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With that background to give us fact base to work from, I can answer your questions rather directly and briefly.

As the current Librarian, are you able to shed light on why these materials have not been updated despite having been ready quite some time ago?

I was explicitly ordered by the President not to do it in 2020, when only one such course was ready. Nobody has asked me to do anything differently since that time.

As President, what actions would you take to ensure that when people put effort into updating things like training materials that results in our website being updated?

First thing we do when elected, is sit down with the Academy Commandant, show them this material, have them parcel it out to the course tutors, and just check briefly “Is this the content we actually want for courses?” I assume it is, because it sounds like Cale worked with the tutors to create it. We should just double check that, especially if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a little bit. If it turns out that all of that is good, then we direct the Commandant to get the courses up to date with that content.

The reason we talk to the Commandant and not the Librarian here, is because the Commandant owns the responsibility for the course content being up to date, not the Librarian. There is no requirement listed anywhere that Academy courses must be in the Library. The Library is not an excuse for having courses that are not up to date. There is no reason why we couldn’t just start with the updates by putting up links to those Google documents and directing people to read those. It might not be optimal that we’re using Google documents, but it has the benefit of being the simplest thing to do that can be done very quickly. The fact that nobody has bothered to take this simple step up front completely baffles me.

Now, if it turns out the Commandant comes back to us and says “Well, I’d really like the courses in the Library/on our website somewhere”, then the next step that I would take as President is to facilitate a conversation between the Commandant and whoever else needs to be part of that effort. If that’s the Librarian, then it would be the Librarian. If it’s TECH, it would be TECH. In this case, it could be both TECH and the Librarian at the same time, since we might want the content in the library, but we also might want the library to be upgraded with some additional features to support that content. So we’d talk about it, and my role in the discussion as the President would be to set a clear direction for everyone to follow at the end of the discussion. “Clear direction” means we all understand what the solution will be, and who will own the responsibility to take what specific actions. Then we let people go to work on those actions, and we check back on a regular basis to see that they are actually getting done. If they’re not getting done, then we see what we need to do to fix that problem, and go from there. We don’t just say “Oh, well the Librarian has it,” and just shrug our shoulders if it didn’t get finished, as if we’re passive observers who are not actually in charge of the club.

Please feel free to ask follow ups; it would help break up this giant wall of text I dumped on you.

Joe

I was going to break this up with a follow-up and explain that if I was in the situation I wouldn’t link to a google doc, as I would expect some long-term member to yell at me if I did so. But I didn’t have a question and it wouldn’t have been super interesting, so I’ll thank you for shedding some light on this instead. It always has struck me as odd that the Library is difficult to update when it looks like it is mostly just a bunch of text.

Adam W.