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how not to welcome the stranger
The SCA is organized around both specific activities and broader social activities. We have general get-togethers like events, but we also have fighting practice, dance practice, choir rehearsals, brewing guild, costuming workshops, archery practice, and so on and so on. Sometimes people are attracted to the SCA as the SCA, and sometimes they come in through a specific activity. Of the latter, some then broaden their interests and become part of the society, and others remain focused on that one activity and (often) drift away because it can be hard to pursue just the one thing. (Eventually you've got to start going to events, which can be a shock if you haven't been prepped.)
Except for fighting, most of the activities that people enter through have non-SCA analogues. My husband, for example, was an experienced folk-dancer and entered the SCA through dance practice. Our choir has had several people over the years who wanted to sing in a choir and renaissance music was fine. We've gotten people who do costuming at SF cons who want to learn about medieval clothing. And so on.
The important thing to remember, when dealing with such a person, is: this person isn't already sold on the SCA. He just wants to fence or dance or make beer or whatever, and if the SCA turns out to be hospitable he'll stick around. But it's not as sure a thing as when, say, someone moves in from another group and is looking up the locals. (Yes, you can blow that too. That's not the focus of this essay.)
I was recently contacted by someone who participates in a particular activity mundanely, had heard we do it, and wanted to be hooked up with someone local to him. I talked with him a little about the activity (how the SCA tends to do it) and about the SCA in general (he already knew what you can know about us without actually meeting us; in fact, he'd even done research on the medieval forms of his activity of interest). The activity has a weekly gathering local to him, so I then sent two pieces of email. The first was a private message to the person in charge of that activity saying (essentially) "yo, I've got an interested mundane for you" with a little more background on what I knew. The second was a message sent to both of them making introductions and asking the SCA person to include the newcomer on his distribution list for activity-specific announcements. In that message I was careful to use no SCA jargon, and I used mundane (not SCA) names.
The SCA person responded and welcomed the newcomer (good). He also said something akin to "practices are at the duke's house" and suggested the newcomer join the local group's mailing list (which is a discussion list, not an announcement list, and covers many topics not related to this activity). He signed his SCA name.
*cringe*
I suspect that wasn't the best way to make a good impression. Was it so bad that the newcomer will punt? No, I doubt it -- but it would have been easy to be more accessible, and seeing this reminded me of just how bad many SCA people are at being accessible. Newcomers who show up at events don't fare much better; we assume they share a context, know what the jargon means, understand the social norms, etc. We've gotten better at arranging for loaner garb and telling them to bring their own dishes, but we still have a way to go to bridge that gap between committed SCA folk and not-sure-about-this curious visitors. Sigh.
I'm not suggesting that we hide what we do. The SCA is about much more than any specific activity; we should not over-compensate for fear of weirding people out. But you can ease them into it and increase the odds that they'll think this is interesting. And small changes can be immensely more welcoming: for instance, when sending out announcements about practices, is it so hard to send it both to the group list and the small set of people who want to be directly notified? Especially if the alternative is to bury the newcomer in discussions of Robin Hood movies, BoD antics, the new rules about children's activities, and the college of arms (to choose just a few)?
I can, of course, take this up with the specific individual involved (who is a good and generally-clueful person). But while one incident prompted this ramble, the issue is much broader. How do we encourage SCA people, as opposed to this SCA person, to put themselves in the shoes of the newcomer before responding to inquiries? Are there lessons we can learn from other "weird" subcultures, like fandom? (Fandom is probably a bad example because it very much organizes around the convention, not the sustained local activity. But there might be sub-fandoms that are different, or other groups.)
Latching on to one tiny piece ...
No, not really.
There's a social mailing list of rather long standing that wound up being used as the main medium for party invitations among the group of friends, friends-of-friends, and friends-of-people-you've-heard-of-from-friends that the list membership comprises. But before LiveJournal stole away some fraction of members' attention spans, it was also a rather high-volume list. (It's still not exactly slow -- about thirty messages a day last month.) And not everybody who is a member of that social group has the time or inclination to deal with that many messages a day. So, some time well before I joined, they created a second mailing list, specifically for things like party invitations targeted at "the usual suspects", and made the original mailing list a subscriber of the newer one.
So if you're announcing something like that, you needn't remember to send it to two different mailing lists or to subscribe to two lists: if you just remember to send it to the correct mailing list for announcements, it gets delivered to all the members of the discussion list as well as the members of the announcements list. Clean. Simple. The only problem is when somebody mistakenly replies to the announcements list, having forgotten to change the destination to the discussion list when replying. (There are solutions to that problem which aren't a good fit for the lists in my example but could work well elsewhere: make the announcements list moderated, or rewrite 'Reply-To:' on announcements, for example.)
(So effectively the messages on list S are a subset of the messages on list E, and the membership of list E is a subset of the membership of list S.)
Re: Latching on to one tiny piece ...
[1] Actually, I'm "sort of" on the discussion list; I run a moderated feed of that list for interested subscribers, because the discussion list gets a lot of noise sometimes. So I have to see all the noise to do this job, but my subscribers don't. In case you're wondering, I rewrite the reply-to line to force discussion back to the discussion list, so there's no fragmentation.