Posted by Thomas B in Question for the Candidates - Accomplishments
This question is for everyone, but especially the Presidential candidates.

We haven’t talked much about your past accomplishments. Both candidates have been in the club for a long time. Jerome has been here probably much longer than me and I’ve been here going on 10 years. Sarah’s profile reports her join date as July 2001. I want to know what you two feel you have accomplished in that time. So:

1. Over your time in STF, what would you cite as your biggest accomplishments (note: this is PLURAL)? I want specific information, not a nebulous “love and appreciation for the community” which is surely an answer common to us all.

• As GMDir, I led a productive discussion that resulted in the creation of the version of OGRE that is still used today (with one very minimal change).

• As a member of the IDept (2IDir), I was the first person to create a MOTD template based on CSS layout techniques, moving the club from table-based MOTD and web page layouts that were mobile- and accessibility-unfriendly to XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant designs (this was more important when web browsers liked to display things completely differently from one another, but I promise it was a big deal then!).

• As President, I led the move from effWeBB to WeBBspace, from defining the Coder role to begin the process to directly contributing code to the actual migration. While there are certainly things I would have done differently about this process in retrospect, the end result was that the club ended up on a platform that met its needs for quite a while.

• As President, I addressed the desire for a formalized “STF Constitution” by initiating a more flexible system of foundational edicts that serve to define our club’s structure, such as MOO and GO.

• As President, I created the first formally structured Command discussions to handle the proposal and revision of these foundational edicts. Many of the revisions that went through this system (e.g. LEGOE) are still in place today with minimal changes.

• As President, I addressed the need for there to be a go between between the club and the “public” by creating the Marketing and Advertising Coordinator position.

• As President, I began the idea of an edict offering my formal thanks to members who might not be ready for a promotion of member rank, but deserved recognition for their hard work in the club over the term.

• As Vice President, I took the New Member Taskforce recommendations from last term, organized them, and assigned responsibilities to the various teams in STF to ensure that the hard work of this group was acted on and that the new member experience would be a positive.

• As CO of the Challenger, my ship broke Exodus.

1. Do you have any accomplishments that you think are under-rated or otherwise don’t get much attention where you feel they perhaps should?

Thanks,

-VAdm. Thomas

This is one of those more “top level” accomplishments that you didn’t want, but one of my biggest accomplishments in STF has always been to encourage transparency. I hate secrecy. I’m an anxious person and it just strokes those thought processes to think that there is something missing. STF is great about the positive and explaining why we’re happy with people, but sometimes, we want to avoid the negative by not explaining what happened. I really tried to change that as President with detailed edicts like these: https://www.star-fleet.com/prez/edicts/hemenway/#e19 and https://www.star-fleet.com/prez/edicts/hemenway/#e38. I’ve tried to continue this as VP over the past seven months, although it’s not quite as public since I’m not the one writing the edicts, but I hope that I’ve maintained the idea that anyone can come to me with a question about anything that happened. One of my biggest pet peeves is to find out about someone being unhappy about something on the Election Ship. :)

• Sarah