Good morning Jerome,

Thanks for answering these questions, I do have some follow-ups and I’m going to draw a few points together. Note that I’m going to SNIP extensively just for brevity.

1. What do you plan to do with your term, if you win?

Work within the system to allow new members in each of the FCOMM slots, young qualified members to be shored up by experienced AFCOMMs that each have former stints in command of Fleets. The QDirs I want to draw from the ADirs and move current Dirs down to ADirs, ideally with each being first timers. When I leave office, I want a slate of experienced folks that can take what they learned and continue to impact the club’s future long after I’m gone. Most significantly, while I have my goals for the term, I want my Cabinet to develop their own. Once those are in place, I fully intend to assign duties needed to accomplish my goals for the term and then I’m going to do something revolutionary… I’m going to leave them alone and let them do their job! Each will have been hired and therefore trusted to manage a part of the club. And if their part is doing what is needed to keep the club healthy and what I need to accomplish my goals, I intend to support my chosen leaders to accomplish theirs.

I have seen this mechanism is most all Presidential platforms, I may even have referenced it in mine (I can’t remember), but unfortunately I don’t think it is very effective. In my experience, moving the more experienced people into AQDir and having new people in QDir is a kind of “reverse training” and I’ve never seen it be effective here. I do think it makes sense to look at current or former AQDirs as good candidates for QDirs if there is desire in them, but swapping seats doesn’t actually solve our problem long term. Ideally you want a fairly consistent flow of new folks -> AQDir -> QDir with their knowledgebase expanding at each step. A good QDir is able to reach out to past mentors for guidance without that past mentor holding an AQDir spot away from someone else - if they don’t know to do this they should not be QDir. Your description here is kind of inconsistent with your Board of Admiralty idea, so it is surprising to me. Do you have any thoughts on this? (Side note: I think you would be very hard-pressed to find a QDir that feels seriously micromanaged in the past several years, especially undeservedly - you’d probably have to go back to my term and I was pretty laissez-faire with a few exceptions).

Importantly, I pledge to do the following:
1) Never interfere with the selection process of ship Command staff. It is the FCOMM’s job to select Captains and I will NOT impose my will or push a particular candidate. As the Executive, I serve the club as a whole and by moving to name a personal selection, I feel I would be violating the trust of being an unbiased leader.>

What would you do if you understood that an FComm was selecting Command staff specifically as favors or to recruit their own friends, and not looking at who would best serve the ship?

2) Further, unless demeaned absolutely necessary, I will NOT decomm ANY ship in the Fleets. Our RP environments are the foundation of our club and I have no intention to play hatchet man.

This is really the one I need to address, and to do that I want to bring in the comment your Veep candidate made in the GM Crisis question:

The final solution may not look anything like this; or it may end up being a part of a much larger program to ensure we have solid GM’s available going forward. I would be skeptical of anyone saying they have the perfect solution to this issue.

Unfortunately, the GM Crisis is not difficult to understand, and it is only “hard” to solve because of scarcity. You may recall my term where I did have to make what possibly was the largest round of ship cuts in the club’s history - which was critically necessary, but not popular. It was necessary because we had very few GMs, no capacity to train more in a rapid way, and we had a myriad of poorly performing ships. This meant that my Admin had to make difficult but necessary choices - choices based on data and not a whim. During and at the end of my term, I warned the club that this problem would return if we did not improve our capacity in the GM Department, and we have largely failed to do that. We are rapidly approaching a time where the club will be in the same situation as about 6 years ago (frankly I’m shocked it took this long). I share this because I know that what we did was both necessary and right, and I’m curious as to if you will have the capacity to do what is necessary and right if the data says it must be done. With that in mind:

1. Your proposal for the GM Department does not actually resolve the problem. In fact, I am concerned it would exacerbate it. A critical part of the GM Dept’s capacity is the number of Gamemaster Mentors - these are GMs who have both met guidelines and expressed a willingness to train new GMs. Our club only has three - Lindsay Bayes, Gene Gibbs, and Tyra Schroll. Lindsay has 7 positions including Co, XO, and GM. Gene has 8, including two GM spots, one GMM spot, and an XO spot. Tyra has 16 positions including CO and GM. All have several DH positions. Have you consulted with any of these three on your proposal? Do you have any thoughts on what I’ve outlined here otherwise?

2. I understand your proposal is a starting place, and I respect that. I worked on TECH for months before I proposed it and it went through revisions and debate after that, but those months of careful consideration were important for creating something that has worked well and facilitated excellent progress on the TECHnical side of the club. So understand that my questions are to prompt reflection and consideration. No one likes the idea of cutting ships, but what would make you recognize that it was necessary? And, recognizing that necessity, what metrics would you use? I can respect that RP environments are the foundation of the club, but foundations crack and require work, and ship cuts are often the critical tool that facilitate repairs of that foundation.

Thanks again for your answers James, I look forward to hearing your Veep’s responses to the original, and you might have missed my follow ups last week to a different question here: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/command/election/posts/88364/

-Thomas