[Artemisia] A closed mouth gathers no feet (was: Therasia for BoD)

[Cat Clark]

> >> Mistress Therasia von Tux as a candidate for the BoD.
> 
> > I second the motion! All in favor?
> 
> Aye!
> Earc
> 
> Wait...what if that's what she *wants*? 

Holy Moo, Batman! (Sounds of Therasia running for the
bomb shelter...)

I am blushing from the flattery and alarmed at the prospect,
all at the same time.

The way the BoD has evolved and what it has become is part
of the problem, from my point of view.  And at this point in
time, I doubt the BoD would invite me to become a member.
I'm tainted with being on the wrong side of the fence in last
year's Chirurgeonate blow-up.

What you don't know is that for the first time in several
years, the BoD is doing something sensible. Let me put on
my Grand Council hat and tell you about it.  The BoD has
asked the Grand Council to generate two "think tank studies"
on SCA goverance, one long-term and one short-term. The first
is position paper on where the SCA should be in 10 years.
Personally, I think this is best damn idea the BoD has come
up with in ages.  It's a good sign that the BoD in its
current make-up has pulled its head out of the sand and
acknowledged that we need long term planning.  I find that 
I am actually really excited over this - it's the fist time in
years that I've felt this optimistic about the SCA. Somebody
is operating like they have a clue at the top of the corporate
structure!  

This is a golden opportunity to do something constructive.
The effort may end up going nowhere, but it's worth the effort
regardless because it might really go somewhere instead if the
right circumstances conspire for it. This is also an opportunity
for the populous on the village common to pass on what you might 
think on the subject to the three grand council members who live
in in Artemisia.  Conrad von Z is our official representative 
last time I checked, and Dame Thea and I are at-large members. 
(So come email and talk to us - your input is always appropriate).

I have my own opinion on this subject, of course ;-) and it
springs out of my own inquiries into how the SCA evolved in the
first 15 years of its existence.  I have been extremely lucky
in having had the opportunity to pick the brains of several of
the SCA's founders and I think I understand how it all came 
together the way it did.  And this is why I hold that opinion
that "vision" of our founders is why the SCA was successful and
grew into a self-sustaining group -  and why the current 
implementation of that "vision" is now at the root for why the 
SCA may now fail as a group.  It's long and involved and 
complicated and the result of 20 years of thinking about the 
subject.  I've been trying to get it put together in my head so I 
can write it up and drop it on the grand council list. I think it
might be a unique perspective but worth circulating.  But I have 
a little time to spare since the Grand Council is on its yearly 
unofficial Pennsic recess, and until two days ago, I was in a work 
crunch that ate four weeks of my life (two peer reviews, two 
peer-review-driven scientific paper revisions of my own, one DOE 
report revision 45 pages of new report creation - all since Uprising...
somebody shoot me please!) <<The upside is that I'm now on vacation
for the next two weeks.  Yippee!>>

The sound bite version is this: there was a central vision
behind the first 2 years of tourneys in the Bay Area.  It was
very close to recreating the continental Western European 
chivalric tourney societies of the 15th C.  But there was a
twist to it and that twist was, at least initially, an overlay
of late 1960 Berkeley egalitarian zeitgeist that opened the
door to going beyond what might have turned into a historical
reenactment club of limited focus.  It's the incorporation of
the zeitgeist -at a subconscious, unknowing level - that made
the SCA into what it is today.

And it's the zeitgeist that will destroy us - because the group
doesn't understand the founding vision anymore, and how can it
since it has never been consciously and explicitly enshrined. It
is why we do things and behave as an organization in the way we
do (in bland terms, it's our cultural paradigm) - but the founding
vision and most of our founders are 40+ years behind us in a land
now long gone, the once great peoples republic of Berkeley. The
SCA worked because it captured, and in a way preserved, the best
of that idealistic chivalric optimistic EGALITARIAN and
ROMANTIC worldview  - that within each John and Jane Doe is a Robin
and Marion who have it within them to make the world a better
place, one act of knight errantry at a time...

...and that through the central chivalric rite of winning through
feats of arms the tourney by which one victorious champion crowns 
his lady fair the Queen of the May (to use the original wording 
from 1966), each person at that tourney becomes an active piece
of that vision, that dream, of knight errantry and all the selfless
ideals it encompasses...

that's the short form of the founding vision

...and this wonderful compelling vision of the world, which had NO
concept built into it of becoming an international club with tens of 
thousands of paying members, had the room to kick the door open for 
people back then to play at their own personal fantasies of being 
Elizabethans 200 years past the time of the Late Gothic chivalric
ideal or ancient greeks of the Band of Thebes, or elves from Lorien 
and Rivendell...because it wasn't a club or a real organization.  It 
was a _society_ of friends playing at dreaming a dream of medieval 
knight errantry - and at playing whatever ancillary games that went 
with the central theme of knight errantry and chivalric championship 
- like feasting, and dancing, and minstrels and jongleurs, at pages 
in the kitchen each hiding for a time the heart of Gawaine.

and that's the short version of the open-form SCA game

My considered opinion is that we are losing the vision and being 
hurt by the present-day ennoblement of the open-door game.  And that's
what I would try to fix.  Part of what I think we need is the open and
explicit acknowledgement that there are two things taken together
that make the SCA what it is:

the vision of knight errantry/chivalric championship
the romantic rite of winning the crown tourney by indiviual combat

We all share the vision of the crown tourney but only one person can
be the victorious champion and only one person can be the inspiration
and object of that championship. By our participation in the tourney,
even as just spectators, and our acquienscence of crowning and following
the new King and Queen, we implicitly acknowledge that his is at the
heart not of the SCA Inc., but of the _Society_.

(On the inside of the old crowns of Caid was the inscription:
"you reign because they believe.")

This is why SCA combat is NOT a sport: at its best conception, it is
both an act of knight errantry (with all the overtones of strength 
being the bulwark against evil through choice), which is the heart of
chivalry (victorian/modern) and an act of romantic love (crowning the 
Queen of Love and Beauty) - and it is single combat that's important 
here.

In our guts, we know this to be true.  To be tactless and blunt,
that's why the variants concepts of Avaloc's and William the Lucky's
crown tourney experiments failed to gain approval.

My thought is that the vision has to be openly, explicitly placed at
the heart of the SCA's mission statement (we have one, believe it or
not, and it's not up to the job because it does not outline the
central vision and the central act of the Society).  And the game has
to hauled back into line with the founding conception of our tourney
society.

The way I see it is that the game has taken over as The Dream(TM)
and the founding vision of the SCA is getting forgotten.  I opine that
if we keep the heart of the founding vision at the center of what we 
do in the SCA Inc., then we keep the gameside organization in line.  
We have fallen into a understandable trap of trying to be all things 
for all people - and this is an organic outgrowth of our founding 
egalitarian and individual-can-change-the-world roots.  It is both our 
greatest strength and our biggest weakness. And because we have let our 
grasp of the central founding vision slip, the game is taking us apart 
through dilution of efforts.

Here's a tacky metaphor: if we remember that we all have the same
destination - the same shore, to put it at its tackiest - only then 
will it be possible for all the rowers in the royal barge to pull
their oars together to get to where we want to go.  If we remember
and affirm the founding concepts of the SCA, then the gameside 
organization will follow naturally - but don't think that I'm saying 
it's going to be easy.  It's _simple_ but it is not _easy_.  Don't 
mistake the two... Crewing a big rowboat like a royal barge is a lot 
of work - it takes effort to get a lot of individual rowers to pull 
together.

Anyway, that's my take on what we need to do FIRST to fix the growing
malaise of running the SCA - we need to remember what it is we're 
doing as a society.  Only then will we have the unifying vision to 
get the rest of the job done.

And that's what I intend to convey and try to sell to my fellow members
of the Grand Council and, down the pike, the BoD - which has ASKED for
opinions on where we need to be going 10 years hence.

The short-term request of the BoD is for the GC to provide a template
for a business plan.  I have been on this soapbox for at least fix or
more years, actually, in that the SCA has never had a formal business
plan.  I've seen the need for such a thing for a long time now, as 
far back as the late 80s - an artifact of long conversations with my
former next door neighbor in Oakland, who was the President of the SCA
for 8 years and the Treasurer of the SCA for 4 years before that - 
someone who minored in business at Stamford.  (I'm not ashamed to steal
ideas for the best... ;-)

What you don't know is that I've been doing a bit of research on the
side over the last three years into business plans for non-profits, a
little project of mine since I've been thinking of maybe trying to start
my own little organization aimed in part at replicating the lost
function
of the now-late office of technology assessment - but that's just a
little
pipedream of my own, but the outfall is that I've done a bit of learning
on what a biz plan is and what one might look like for a successful
non-profit...  So as far as the BoD request to a business plan
template  
goes, I've actually been outlining what I myself would put together to
post 
up for consideration to the GC list... I know at least one other GC
member 
is doing their own version IIRC, and I expect this to be a topic of 
discussion for the time immediately after Pennsic on the GC list.  

(FYI - anyone is welcome to subscribe to the Grand Council list and non-
members may also post to the list with the proviso that all non-members
are subject to active moderation, which means anything you wish to post 
will often be delayed by a day while one of the moderators looks it
over.
I think it's a good policy, especially as a GC list lurker for years
prior
to actually becoming a GC member.  The Grand Council is the "think
tank" 
of the SCA and it's a place where a lot of high-quality idea vetting
takes 
place.  Check it out sometime.)

Anyway, if you follow my reasoning on how the organically grown game of 
the SCA is fundementally at fault for the "run-away" development of SCA
subsidiaries like the College of Arms.  We get these organizational
flaws
and failures just because we grew organically instead of having growth
and
development that was planned...  "Organic" growths without planning can
lose sight of what should have been our central vision and therefore get
out of control and set us up for the problems we are seeing today.

I have never given the BoD any serious thought because I doubt I would
ever be invited to join.  Really - I'm too much of a heretic. Doing 
stuff as a member of the GC, on the other hand, is in someways more 
gratifying and effective because it's an organization that thinks and
vets
(and gets listened to by the BoD), instead of being trapped in the
grind 
of trying to run a flawed corporate structure like the BoD does.

Anyway, that's just my opinion, and as I've said many time before:
opinions are like... oh, never mind...

ttfn
Therasia von OpenMouthChangeFoot