Discussion Topic: Balancing the Fleets

As you will see from my intro post, for non-Academy ships, the second most important tie-breaker is to see which fleet has received the fewest placements in a calendar month.

Why did we have this as a priority? The idea was to try to keep the number of new members balanced between the fleets, to reduce the workload in each fleet.

STF has changed a bit since we added this to the policies.

First, measuring by calendar months is kind of silly these days for non-Academy placements. It’s usually between 1-3 non-Academy placements per month (less since we made changes about alt-RPGs on the application form). So even if balancing the fleets is still important, I think we need a better measure than calendar months.

Second, is this still important? I would really like to hear from FComms/AFComms - current and former. Right now, the only thing more important than this is the size of the department. It is higher in priority than the size of a ship or how long a ship has gone without placements.

Another interesting point as a result of changes to STF is how to address the fact that there are alt-RPG ships that can accept new members (Chernov and Ogawa). A new member must specifically request this for us to place them on the ship, but let’s say we do place them on an alt-RPG ship. Is that a placement that calendar month for that fleet? I guess it depends on what our current purpose is if we keep a balancing tie-breaker.

What do others think?

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director