Posted by Calé Reilly in Questions for the candidates (both prez and veep)
In your opinion what is the purpose of the fleet reports and of posting the fleet report in command.

Thank you

Calé

The stated reason for them is right on the report archive index page…

Reasoning for Reports

The Fleet and Department Reports began during the Bourdaa administration and have since become a permanent job of the Cabinet member. With STF growing everyday, it is quite easy to never hear about how the other fleets and departments are doing. The reports were started to keep all the cabinet together so everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It also serves to keep the president informed if a problem arises in a fleet/department. Both the Fleet Reports and the Department Reports are posted on the Command Ship at the beginning of the month.

That said, there are additional benefits to reports that go beyond that.

• Reports are pretty much the only place where we praise people publicly for roleplaying content on a regular basis.
• Reports are a decent place for ship staff to advertise vacancies (there is a feature request to have the report form automatically update the Ship Profile as well).
• Reports are usually the only way the membership knows what people are in government are doing; it’s not just the cabinet and the President who benefit from knowing this.
• The unexcused absence of a submitted report with no explanation is a strong indicator that a person is not really doing the OOC work that is expected of them. Ship reports and Fleet reports don’t take much effort to write most of the time, so someone who doesn’t take the time to do it probably isn’t taking time to do much of anything. Department reports are quite a bit more complicated because there’s usually other data that goes into them, but it doesn’t take much time to explain to the President or even on the Command ship itself that the report will be a little late if you need to gather extra data or have some other issue.
• Contradictions between the CO, XO, and GM reports will tell an attentive reader whether or not a ship’s command staff is actually working as a team or if there’s some dysfunction that the FComm needs to sort out.
• Reports are good way to raise club-wide issues to higher attention if people are ignoring them in the chain of command, e.g. for the PDept to point out that too many ships across the club have AWOL trouble that prevents placements, or if a CO isn’t getting support from their FComm to get a replacement GM.
• What is not said explicitly in a report is often more revealing than what is said.

Joe