Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - Promotions
This question is for the Sarah / Rob ticket. It is largely a restatement of a question that I already directed to Jerome and James this morning (here, for those of you who are curious: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/command/election/posts/91680/)

I observed previously that the way that higher rank promotion criteria are written, people will naturally begin to “top out” at various points because the promotion criteria increase dramatically with every step past Fleet Captain. If we keep the rules as written, there are a lot of people in the club who will never be promoted ever again.

1. What prompted this line of questioning was the explicit claim your opponent made, that “Many times, members are promoted thanks to having time to hangout in chat/Discord and not on the body of their work.” Do you think this claim is true?

While I can’t speak for the Presidents in the last 12 years or so in the club, I can say that this is definitely not true for my own time as President and for how Steve and I are viewing promotions during his term.

1. Regardless of your answer to question 0, do you think the documented promotion guidelines are a problem? Why, or why not?

I can understand what’s compelling about documenting promotion guidelines, but it concerns me. I was pretty surprised to come back and find an entirely new rank and strict guidelines on who can be what rank. I don’t think we need to have strict guidelines, but it’s probably a good idea to write down the general criteria somewhere so it’s not one of those things that’s passed from Exec to Exec kind-of-sort-of. As President, I typically handed out Fleet Captain to someone who had, for at least one term, served the club in some role beyond just being a CO (although I also used this to recognize people who chose not to be involved in government, but who were exemplary COs). Commodore was reserved for people who contributed to government in some way for multiple terms, usually in various ways. Admiral was reserved for people who had contributed to government for multiple upon multiple terms, in various ways or had had a particularly large impact on the club in some way (e.g. new site software).

During my terms, I promoted people for things like:

• A member to Fleet Captain for being an exemplary FComm during a stressful situation
• A member to Fleet Captain for significantly contributing to government work, although not yet in a Cabinet position
• A member to Commodore for being former President and Vice President and continued Cabinet member over several terms

1. Your opponents claims there is a problem with consistency; that some people are under recognized and other people might be recognized a few too many times. Do you think this is true or not? Why or why not?

When you have occasionally wildly different Executives every eight months, there is always going to be problems with consistency, but these aren’t magically cured by having guidelines (unless you were to try to automate the promotion system somehow).

1. Your opponents have proposed creating a Task Force to investigate the particular issue of promotions past Commander, with some additional criteria. Do you think any similar thing is necessary, or do you have any platform plan to deal with this? Please elaborate in the fullest detail on this topic however you see fit.

Joe

It seems like there are already a lot more promotions flying around than there used to be (I mean, I only promoted three people past Captain in my 2.5 terms), so my biggest concern is whether we need to take a step back and consider if promotions are the best way to recognize talent and service. As President, I instituted the foundations of formally recognizing members at the end of each term for their contributions and the PDept has taken on the task of documenting these recognitions now that that has been formalized. Also as President, previously, I recognized that the club needed a consistent way to recognize member contributions, particularly in role-playing, and took the STF Awards from a “run whenever someone wanted” to a more formalized setup with a consistent schedule.

Member recognition is huge for me and that extends so much beyond promotions. When I came back, the topic of an awards/ribbons system came up in a group chat between the Exec, the PDept, TECH, and CMM and I know that Cale, who proposed the system, did quite a bit of work back then with Joe to see if they could come up with something. Steve and I briefly have discussed this term about a tagging system where COs could flag particularly awesome posts (this was totally brought on by the single best post I’ve ever seen on STF from one of my cadets and a desire to show the entire universe it) and have them be displayed on the front page… a total spitball idea, but this is where we were going trying to make sure that not only service to the club, but roleplaying (aka the reason we are all here) contribution is recognized and appreciated. Another idea is an almost LinkedIn style system where people can “endorse” other people for various positions (CO, COS, ACmdt, whatever). Rob and I are really looking forward to digging into this topic further and figuring out the best way to ensure that members get the recognition they deserve.

• Sarah