Posted by Admiral Joe P (Election Coodinator) in Question for the Candidates – The Site Changeover
These questions are for every ticket. Let’s give you all something topical to talk about, hmm?

Two weeks ago, we finally switched from our old site using Drupal 5 to our new site, after a lot of people spent a lot of time talking about doing that in various forms for the past 10 years or so. It was a big deal and affected everybody in the entire club. Even though we like to talk about this as a technical project, it was also an organizational one as well, which actually required the President and pretty much the entire club government to work together to get us through the switch. I don’t think we’ll have to change the site again, but we might come across problems that would need the same sort of coordination in the future, so I think it’s worth knowing how you all thought it went and what (if anything) you might do differently.

1. How do you think the change went? I mean specifically the event of changing from the old site to the new site that happened on June 23 of this year.

Great questions Joe. For those who don’t know, my perspective during the transition was as a CO, the Assistant Personnel Director, a Discord channel operator, and a busier than normal human being.

First off, thanks to all of those involved in this changeover as it’s kind of mindblowing to me that you could all pull this off. We have a new site that will be stable for us and it really functions very well. Just looking at it feels really good to me. Some of you poured an extremely intense amount of time and energy into pulling this off, all as volunteer work. The results of that are noticeable.

Lots went very well. The Personnel Department round of testing was very well ran with excellent communication. I’ve personally brought up many Exodus-related issues to TECH and I’ve very impressed by how they have been responding to them and making improvements. There was an unexpected delay on the day of the changeover that TECH needed to deal with. The TECH members did a wonderful job of being as patient as possible, despite needing to field the same questions from different people over and over, which looked stressful from my perspective. The volunteers helping the Personnel Department with placements were amazing. Thanks to their help I was able to focus more on the oddball cases. I think the Exodus Primer that Linds and I created turned out to be helpful. As a CO I had an XO who took care of the thread transferring without me even needing to suggest it, which I was completely thrilled by. That was a huge load off of me.

As for things that could have been better, I found the public round of testing to be lacking instruction. Some of the questions the participants were asking I thought should have been addressed preemptively. Also, I personally didn’t understand that the personnel department needed to contact each tester after setting up their test account. I eventually figured it out, but a little more instruction could have avoided that as well. I’ll continue touching on what could have gone better in the next question, but all in all this whole thing was a big success.

1. Imagine that you and your running mate were the President and Vice President this term. Is there anything you would have done differently than the current President and Vice President with regards to this change?

Hats off to Daniel for wanting to be President during all of this and handling his part of this transition well. I think it was really good that the decision was made not to wait longer to make the changeover happen as the problems the old site was creating were becoming apparent. But yes, there are a couple things that I would have done differently that I noticed as the Assistant Personnel Director. Some of the communication that occured in the Exodus Discord channel I felt would have been more appropriately handled by e-mailing the Personnel Department instead.

The other thing that should have been addressed was the staffing of the Personnel Department. Matthew reported that the department was functioning at half strength during the portion of the term I was working with him, which was an accurate assessment. Daniel himself recruited some of the department staff at points he felt it was needed, which included myself.

During the actual transition, I was partially unavailable due to an LOA I needed for a funeral, traveling plans, and other commitments. I provided notice of this, which I thought would be especially important since I seemed to be the primary person functioning in the department, something I did not view as sustainable. A response to this was the gathering of volunteers, including the execs, to assist in the transition. However, two days after the transition was complete this extra support was removed. While it may have been the right thing to let the volunteers go, it left the Personnel Department understaffed with an increased workload in the days following the transition. Unfortunately, this remains true today. Ultimately, while some actions were taken, they were band-aids, and did not address the larger problems within the department. Had these been properly addressed before the transition, I feel that it would have gone much smoother.

Adam
Adam W. / Thomas B.

I know the second one there might be a little unfair to Sidney and Tony because their ticket doesn’t have any members of TECH on it and thus may not have the full context with which to answer (since there was lots of “behind the scenes” discussion before the thing kicked off), so I’ll allow any candidate to ask me for any context about the situation this term either publicly or privately before they give their “official” answer to that question.

I will ask follow up questions based upon your answers, most likely.

Joe