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SCA: the lawsuit
I wasn't sure whether I was going to post about this (the discussion is happening in lots of places already), but a few people have asked what this relatively-long-time-SCAdian thinks, so...
I can't help feeling a bit of Cassandrafreude over this. A few people, most notably Duke Cariadoc (a real-world economist who knows a thing or two about organizational structure and law, and from whom I take a lot of inspiration), have been arguing against the centralized corporation for decades, for reasons including the giant target it paints on the corporate coffers. People called us paranoid. (Granted, I oppose the current centralization for many other reasons too.) Since the corporation asserted its ownership over all local-group funds about 20-25 years ago, I have been expecting something like this to happen. (Before then, a group could maintain its own bank account, absent the benefits of being part of a non-profit, if it wanted to. Some did.)
I have lots of questions about the current situation -- about what options were considered and why others were rejected, and about the timing. This post is not about that.
I have met the president of the SCA and several of its directors. I have had polite, respectful, and challenging conversations with them about various corporate doings. I have found them to be decent people, not at all like the situation in 1994. They are in a difficult position and, frankly, out of their league. This is not about the individual people who are in charge of the corporation. I think the problems are institutional and uncorrectable within the current structure and common mindset of the SCA.
So long as that giant target exists on the (new-reduced) coffers, and especially now that the SCA has settled once and thus demonstrated its willingness to anyone who wants to sue regardless of merit, there will be no end to the problem. Lawsuits are pressed when the potential payoff exceeds the expected costs of prosecution; big bank accounts mean higher potential payoffs. If the target had instead been "SCA Kingdom of the East, Inc" with a tenth the assets of SCA Inc, the settlement probably wouldn't have been $1.3M.
And not only are we a target no matter what we do (the precautions put in place after the current case would not have prevented that case), but every case and every precaution does some incremental harm to the society. People get deterred from volunteering because of either the risks or the new regulations, and meanwhile the level of discourse in these discussions is often rather far below what you would expect from a society founded on chivalric ideals. It's ugly and tiring, and I suspect we lose as many people to the arguments as we do to the underlying situations.
A single corporation holding all those assets does harm to the society. There's just no way around that. The directors of any corporation have a fiduciary responsibility to protect those assets; they do not have a duty to protect the culture that makes the society what it is. A corporation must protect its assets, and fears around that will always trump other concerns. It's not reasonable to expect otherwise.
It's funny: the most consistent argument I've heard for why we need a central corporation is insurance coverage. We're currently suing our insurance provider for refusing to pay a claim.
People have been advocating decentralization since the very beginning -- in fact, the society came first and the corporation only some years later -- but the idea has never taken hold. People like central authority, uniformity across the society, and -- while they grumble about the rent -- a central office that you can call when your newsletter didn't arrive or you need proof of membership for Crown Tourney. Demonstrations from other organizations that a decentralized structure can work are met with indifference or dismissal -- "we're different". Questions about whether the current structure is worth the cost, financial and otherwise, are often met with emotional, not logical, responses, preventing conversational progress. People do not see the possibilities that loosely-associated independent organizations could bring -- that An Tir could have same-sex royalty and AEthelmearc could adopt new fencing forms and Atlantia could reduce the fighting age to 14 and Caid could choose its royalty by vote and... (I'm making up some of these examples, ok?)
As I said before, I believe the president and directors are acting with the best of intentions. But even the best-intentioned people can end up perpetuating something that ought to be re-examined. If the current situation causes the society to re-examine its structure, to allow kingdoms to spin off and make the rules and cultural changes they find appropriate, with the consequent distributed liability, then $1.3M will have been a small price to pay for that change.
But that won't happen, just as it didn't happen in 1994. Too many people in the SCA are too eager to preserve the current structure unexamined, to avoid the responsibility that would come with independence, and to call anyone who says differently a bad person. The biggest fight the SCA has been through during my time was the fiasco that started with the mandatory-membership decree, and that did not rally people for a change in the end. This will not either. We rush to gather the payment for the disaster that has just occurred, but we are unwilling to ask what we should do to reduce the chances of a repeat occurrence. We think new rules will save us and we ignore the sights trained on the bank accounts. People have already compared the current and forthcoming fund-raising to the outpouring of support in the face of hurricanes and floods; I instead compare it to rebuilding on a ten-year flood plain.
I have been drifting away from the SCA over the last couple decades, and this is not my fight. Not this time. Fortunately for me, there are really only three things about the SCA that really matter to me, and the demise of the corporation (were it to happen) would not harm any of them. They are:
1. All the interactions and shared projects with friends across the world-wide society; we'll keep making music and researching clothing and brewing beer and cooking feasts and so on regardless.
2. Local activities. The absence of a tax-exempt corporation with an insurance policy (now shown to be of dubious reliability) won't stop us from gathering for tourneys and feasts and academies. It may affect where and how we do those things, but people who want to have fun together will keep having fun together. Other small groups do things at least as dangerous as we do; surely the liability problem isn't completely intractable.
3. Pennsic. Pennsic is nominally an SCA event, but it is unlike all others I have attended in structure. It is also the largest source of annual revenue for Cooper's Lake Campground, and I have no doubt that were SCA Inc. to vanish, the Coopers would make official what has been true in practice for years, that Pennsic is a Cooper's Lake event.
So if SCA Inc. were to go away, then after some local fund-raising efforts to replace seized property like crowns and loaner armor and kitchen supplies, I think the only impact I would notice would be the refreshing freedom to return to a society that's about the re-creation and the people and the fun. I don't think I'd mind that outcome at all.
no subject
But a question: why do you believe that a group can only function with officers? I've been worrying for years that creating more and more officers is one of the SCA's biggest sources of liability.
Consider: we have children's officers, so it is apparently reasonable to assume that we provide some measure of safety for children's activities. (So say the lawyers and board who settled this case.) We have officers in charge of publications (newsletters and web sites), conveying some level of corporate sanction over what they publish. If you or I were to publish someone's copyrighted material or abuse children (perish the thought), we would be on the hook for that. If the officer in charge of those areas does it, the SCA is on the hook for that. Officers are agents of the corporation. We should have as few of those as possible.
Ironically, the corporation made exactly this argument about 25 years ago when they ruled that local groups could no longer have chirurgeons. Today we have chirurgeon liaisons, which is somehow legally different. They are not a required office. Before that we had (required for baronies, IIRC) chirurgeons, responsible for providing first aid at events. I don't know why that was dangerous but children's officers aren't.
I suspect (I am not a lawyer) that we would be in a much better position, legally speaking, if we had no children's officers. This does not mean no children; far from it. It means that -- just like we did before we had children's officers -- children participated in the main part of the event to the extent they were able, parents were responsible for keeping their kids safe and happy, and any group of like-minded people could get together to share oversight (babysitting) or teach crafts or whatever. This wasn't perfect -- we had our share of unruly children of negligent parents -- but it wasn't ridiculous either, from what this non-parent could see. I grant that youth combat, which didn't exist then, complicates this, but martial officers are a smaller set than what we have now.
As for insurance, I'm not saying we don't need it; I'm saying that we are not the first group to engage in martial arts and other dangerous activities without the backing of a big corporation, and I strongly suspect that the insurance/liability problem is solvable. I've been to non-SCA events (and SCA events of course) that required me to sign waivers. I've heard of groups much smaller than our kingdom getting liability coverage for their activities (not to protect corporations, just people). I admit I'm punting somewhat by not doing the research; suspect but can't prove that this is solvable. If it ever looks like AEthelmearc (or the barony) would consider going independent I'll try to help with the research, but that seems highly improbable now so I won't spend that effort.
no subject
But if you want something to happen, someone's got to take responsibility for making it happen. And if you want stuff to happen long term, you have to create buy-in from the participants. In order to create buy-in from people unwilling to take on creative responsibility (those that play the game, instead of facilitating it - which is most people, as it should be), then they must have a voice with those that do facilitate. So you create a voice by creating an office. It's one way to do it, of course... There are other ways. But it's a way that lifts the burden of individual responsibility for the meta-game from those that don't care to have it.
This happens everywhere. Think of all the technically non-SCA, Inc, households that exist. They are not beholden to our structure, and yet the larger ones, the healthiest ones, have people with particular titles and/or responsibilities, many of which mirror geographical groups' set-ups at least partially. Of the ones that aren't so healthy, what you have is people taking on the responsibilities (really, someone has to), but without formal authority. These folks tend to get tired of it and burn out if the household is active, and if they continue to have no real or perceived authority.
Officers will happen, no matter what you call them. Why can't this be limited to a local level? I dunno, maybe it can. Maybe it really would be better. But the meta-game can be tough to handle. I really do think that we'd burn through people a lot faster if some of the burden of authority wasn't taken up at a high level.
I also like having a combined vision... overarching rules and ideals, some of which are codified. Don't you?
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I have been using "officer" to mean "real-world in charge of something". We've both seen people in the SCA in positions of leadership and influence who aren't officers. For example, the heads of major households can, directly and indirectly, make a lot of stuff happen. But they're not on any list of agents of the corporation. Many SF cons operate the same way: you can make a music program or an art show or a games room or whatever happen without necessarily being on the concom. Religious organizations have this in droves, or at least the ones I'm familiar with do. I suspect but do not know that LARP groups operate this way.
I also like having a combined vision... overarching rules and ideals, some of which are codified. Don't you?
Sure, within reason that permits local variations that make sense to those involved. But overarching corporate rules aren't the only way to do it. Treaties can do that too. One example is the White Scarf Treaty; another is the rules of how the Pennsic War operates. And "inter-kingdom (anything)" tends to operate this way at strictest.
no subject
I have two issues with informal leadership: One, that it can work really really well (and does) for in-game play (like organizing events), but it's harder for it to work well for meta-game play (like arranging long-term insurance or writing and maintainting rules, for example) and still have internal consistency.
Two, informal leadership is good when it's working, but when it goes awry, it can get very bad. A formal structure provides more avenues of recourse for the wronged, and a base for rebuilding interest after folks have drifted off or been driven away. Even our formal groups combust sometimes (I can think of 3 in AE alone just in the past 14 years). I think it would happen much more frequently in an informal set up, which I believe would be very bad for retention and would lessen the fun factor considerably.
Consider our own Barony's first Baron, too, and that whole situation. We are a personality-driven society. Formal structure can limit the power of individuals, and with the type of person our hobby sometimes attracts, that can be a very good thing.
On the treaty thing - yup, I like it. I've thought before that such a set up may work fine. I just don't see that it would be any better than what we have now. It would have issues, too, just different ones.
no subject
That could well be, yes. I haven't made a study of it, but what you say rings true. I have seen it work well for meta stuff (for example, I was on the committee that revised my congregation's bylaws last year), but certainly more people want to play than enable play.
Two, informal leadership is good when it's working, but when it goes awry, it can get very bad.
This can go badly awry with formal systems, too. When a volunteer organization needs to remove someone from a position, it gets ugly no matter how it happens. Plenty of local SCA groups have been damaged by fallout from such things. :-(
On the treaty thing - yup, I like it. I've thought before that such a set up may work fine. I just don't see that it would be any better than what we have now. It would have issues, too, just different ones.
It's better in one key way: treaties, being agreements among peers rather than rules from above, can be revoked if they are no longer working. Members have absolutely no recourse other than pleas to the BoD if they don't like how something's being done.
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Organized children's activities irritate me as a parent. With the little children, it makes more sense to have an informal parent-staffed area, and with the older ones I'd rather just have them in on the regular classes and things that they're up to. I think my 7 year old may be just about there. Obviously, child specific martial activities make sense to have. But all that bureaucracy for a craft activity... ehhh, no. If I never again see a sugar cube and frosting castle, or "draw whatever you like on a shield shape and it's your HERALDRY YAY" it will be too soon.
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Too often, children's activities manage to combine the worst aspects of SCA bureaucracy with the worst aspects of babysitting ("just stick them someplace out of the way for the afternoon"). I'm particularly glad to see youth combat flourishing because it's fun for them, on-topic, and right there in the event proper.