Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - How?
This question is for every ticket.

This election is very strange because we seem to have lost the point of what Election Season is supposed to be. Part of the point of having questions is to help everyone determine whether or not candidates have sufficient understanding of how things work in the club to be effective Presidents once they are in office. Effective Presidents accomplish things and leave us all feeling like we’re going somewhere, even if we disagree about where we should be going. Ineffective ones accomplish nothing, which tends to generate apathy and frustration in the membership. It’s very important to know whether we’re in for 8 months of accomplishment or 8 months of apathy.

So, I have a hypothetical exercise that I would like every ticket to participate in, to test whether or not people really get how to make change in the club happen. This takes the form of two questions:

1) Regardless of what your platform actually is, take one of our executive departments and totally gut it. Throw out its charter and start from scratch. Reimagine how the department could work, or if it should even be a department anymore. Don’t just propose a few tweaks. Think outside the box and completely reinvent a department in a novel and useful way. Sell us on why it should be revamped the way you say. You don’t have to commit to doing this if you’re elected; it’s just an exercise.

2) After giving a detailed answer to 1), describe how such a revamp would have to be implemented. What “legislation” would need to be passed, and how? What would that “legislation” do? If your idea needs to create positions, what kind of positions would they be? What specific procedural challenges would you likely need to address, and how would you address them.

Candidates may use any resource at all at their disposal to come up with answers to these questions, including other people.

Thanks in advance,
Joe

I’m having a tough time coming up with a department that I’d entirely revamp, since I’m pretty happy with how all of them are running at this point (that’s not to say there aren’t minor tweaks here and there of how I would do things, but I just don’t have any overarching dissatisfaction).

For the purpose of this exercise, however, I’m going to go with the Academy, which meets about 50% of the criteria you specified since it’s an Executive Department, but also a Fleet. :P In my dream world, the Academy would be reimagined as simply another Fleet and all of the new member training aspect would be moved to a separate Executive Assistant position for New Member Relations. This EA position would be empowered to fill the gap between the PDept and the Academy when it comes to handling new members; the PDept could focus solely on member placement and supporting ship vacancies (which is along the lines of what it’s tasked with now), the Academy could focus solely on the training ships (and perhaps the courses?) and the New Member Relations would handle ensuring all of the documentation for new members is up to date and accessible and running mentor programs. An EA position provides greater stability term-to-term because these positions are typically retained, versus the shake-ups that can occur in QDir positions that can dramatically change the new member experience without any warning for the new members. The New Member Taskforce revealed plenty of tasks that need to be maintained consistently to keep this EA and an assistant busy supporting our amazing new members.

Implementation-wise, this would require two separate proposals: the first would be the modification to CADET, which would become more along the lines of FCOMM customized for a training ship, and the second would be a charter for the EA position. Both of these would require discussion first on what would actually change, and then a formal proposal of the bylaw language, and then finally, after sufficient time for discussion/revision, bills to make them official. The task of updating all of the documentation for the new position would be monumental, so it would likely require some extra assistance from the community to get everything moved to a cohesive experience under the purview of the new EA. We would also likely have to glance at PDICT to make sure there was nothing that needed to be updated there and, if so, that would have to follow the process outlined above.

• Sarah