Election Ship
Questions for the Candidates - How To Never Be President Again In An Apathetic Club
Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - How To Never Be President Again In An Apathetic Club
Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - How To Never Be President Again In An Apathetic Club
Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - How To Never Be President Again In An Apathetic Club
SNIP
I’ll ask my follow up in another post so I can ask all the candidates.
Fair enough. I’m going to trim this post accordingly.
SNIP
If the club has a serious problem with apathy, and the people who try to run it usually are too apathetic for your liking, and the people who end up running it are often too inactive for your liking, how are you going to change the club and the people in it so much this term that you will be comfortable not needing to run for President in the future?
Adam W.
I dispute the characterization that “the people who try to run [the club] usually are too apathetic for my liking, and the people who end up running it are often too inactive for my liking.” Most of the people who ended up getting elected after I wrote that post were sufficiently present; the exceptions were the people who were not. I will not name every case where I thought people were too inactive; I’ve focused specifically on Daniel Lerner’s third term and Robert Archer’s second term as ones in which there is insufficient activity, because those are directly relevant to our current set of problems. Since you dredged up the post from 2015, I will say now that I wrote that post in the election after Jack Dipper’s third term, and he was an absent President during his term also (I think he was deployed to Afghanistan? I don’t remember if it was that year or country), so the similarities between this moment and that one are relevant.
I think that’s a fair point you didn’t think the people running were usually too apathetic for your liking. I can think of a couple of times when you probably were satisfied enough with people’s responses that you concluded there was an acceptable reason that was not apathy.
This is correct.
Silence is not a good thing to let linger; one can never be sure how to read it or how it will be read. When I am not a candidate, I nudge people on the Election Ship like this when there’s silence so that we can see what the silence means. Sometimes it means someone is just having a bad week; other times it reveals more serious problems with their leadership style that we ought to know about before we cast votes.
It’s interesting that you don’t think you often find our Presidents too inactive. How exactly does one define often? I recall another term you made similar comments about and there might have been another one. But maybe it seems like more than it really is because when you do find our Presidents inactive you do you frequently and publicly express it. Do you talk more frequently than anyone else about inactive Presidents? I think, perhaps, that you might.
I think you are right; I do talk about it more frequently than anyone else, and I actually do this to try to help those Presidents out.
It’s very easy when you are the President to have your time monopolized by a handful of people who talk to you in private the most often. When those people are close to you, sometimes those people end up being the only people in the club who end up with any information about what is going on, including whatever real life distraction might be taking place that is derailing you from doing what you’re expected to do. But if you’re not in that close circle, all you see is total silence and nothing outwardly happening. Most outside observers get demoralized by that because they assume the President just doesn’t care to be here, and don’t bother to directly say anything about it. I try to say something about it in order to give the President a chance to explain in a way that everyone can see, so that people know at minimum that the President actually still cares. It gives the guy a chance to pick himself back up… if he’s willing to take it.
As for how to change the club so that I don’t need to run again, what I wrote in 2015 still applies today:
What I think would be useful is having someone who actually wants to do things be in charge of the club and try to find other people who actually want to do things to help out. Not any with any grand plans or policies or projects or reviews or any of that; I mean “help out” just to keep the lights on and the trains running on time. And I think what would help most with that are people who actually want to be President and Vice President, look like they want it, and act such that other competent people end up wanting to do it too. Preferably younger, competent people, so those of us who have been pitching in consistently for the last five years or so can take a vacation from STF-work without having to worry about the club falling apart while we do it.
I actually want to be the President of the club, to fix this exact problem in this exact way. That’s what all of this stuff I keep prefixing with Re- is supposed to do in a structured fashion.
More importantly, I know Steve and I can do this, because Steve actually already did it once. Steve became the President in 2019, in an uncontested election. Uncontested elections are blazing red flags for high levels of club apathy; they don’t happen often. Steve did a good job, and then after Steve, we had a hotly contested election between Sarah and Jerome; those of you who saw it know there were no problems with apathy there! Sarah got elected, did a good job as President, and then we had a race between three different tickets who were all rather polite to each other the entire time. Daniel won that election, had a decent start, and… then proceeded to be absent. Then all of the problems I’m talking about started again.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about Presidents who you think did a good job. I only recall you saying something like that about a President in regards to Daniel’s role in the Exodus transition.
That in particular I make a point of doing, because I don’t want Exodus to be seen as something I just did by myself as some kind of super-duper coding exercise. Even if I did 90% of the work for Exodus myself (a made up number, but probably close to true), it took the combined effort of a lot of people to complete it and have the transition to it go as smoothly as it did. Many people contributed in an important way to that success even if their contribution seems small; it’s something I appreciate a great deal. I talk about Daniel in particular as the President, because he correctly acted as the President in deciding when to make that transition and what to prioritize; there are a lot of Presidents who would have just said “Do whatever you want, Joe” which isn’t really right.
For Presidents who generally do a good job or an OK job… there’s not really a time or place to talk about that which would be natural and public. Usually if I am talking about how a President is doing well, it’s because some private conversation I’m having with them has derailed into an unwarranted negative self-evaluation, and I think they need a pep talk to bring them back to reality.
So I think if the club elects Steve and I, and we get people feeling like contributing here matters again, we’ll break the cycle. I think we will succeed and people will start stepping forward. Part of my master plan to do that is to say up front that I’m not going to run for a re-election, and to mention in the realignment posts at strategic points in the term how to run for President effectively and win. Because I think there is very much a right way to do that, it’s a bit of a lost art, and it’s an important part of how the club is supposed to work.
I would love to expand upon all of this in any direction you or anyone else would like.
Joe
I understand you expect you will break this cycle. What I am wondering is if it will last. And for how long. You didn’t say you would turn around the club forever. Just that you had a goal. It sounds like an unattainable goal to me.
Adam W.
It will last as long as people manage to put the effort in to make it last. If the goal you are talking about was to get things so I felt I didn’t have to run as President again, I would point out that I was President in 2012 and didn’t feel the need to run again until 2022, despite quite a few moments where things were worse than they are now according to some measures, so 10 years is actually a pretty long time. It’s not literally “never”, but I would argue it’s fairly close to never in practical terms, and that was not an objective of my first run as President.
Joe