Monica

The situation I'm writing about occurred in an SCA context, but the principles generalize at least to any "unusual" community.

( Read more... )

For the last several years there's been a gradual decline in the number of events my local SCA group holds, and at the moment there is nothing on the calendar at all. We're a large, old barony, so this really shouldn't be the case. This prompted someone to ask, on the baronial mailing list, the quite reasonable question: why don't you (plural general) autocrat events?

(Translation for non-SCA people: autocrat = convention chair = organizer.)

I used to; I've run about a dozen events, give or take, some small and some large. It's been several years since I did so. I haven't posted a reply to the mailing list (the silence has been deafening, actually), but I've been thinking about my reasons (which I wouldn't post there in these words, but this is my journal).

First there's the Shabbat problem; almost all SCA events are held on Saturdays (or, less-commonly here, over weekends). There's no reason an event can't be held on a Sunday, but people don't seem to like the idea when I bring it up. But I'm going to set this issue aside for the moment, because if this were the only barrier I'd push the officers for permission and I'd run a successful Sunday event and that would prove the point.

I would not be willing to autocrat an event that collects the corporate tax, because I find it offensive, deceitful, and actively harmful to the long-term health of the SCA. Free events (which don't collect this tax) are certainly possible (we've had them recently), but they do limit the options a bit. It would take some work to convince the officers to go along with one that isn't held on a university campus, but that's what I'd want to do. We've got some officers who are staunchly pro-tax, so this could end up politicizing the event before it gets off the ground, which would be unfortunate. I'm not afraid of the fight at officers' meeting; I'm mildly afraid of the consequences. But that's a relatively minor point, I think.

A big reason that I don't autocrat any more is stamina. The autocrat is expected to be first on site and last to leave. Yes, you recruit people to help with setup and cleanup, but the autocrat is expected to be an active participant in those activities too. It looks bad if the autocrat goes home early, or sits there while cleanup happens. I do not hold such things against an autocrat, because I've been there, but I've heard enough to conclude that most people haven't been and do. I'm just not up for the extra-long day like I used to be. And that would be harder on a Sunday because of the need to be at work Monday morning. (Tangent: running an event is not attractive enough for me to be willing to spend a vacation day.)

For a while we've had some vocal members who expect every event to cater to the needs of every sub-group. I've seen autocrats get publicly chewed out for not having organized children's activities, for instance -- and I have not seen the populace rise to the autocrats' defense. There's been a bit of a trend in the other direction recently; yesterday's event had fighting and fencing and schmoozing but no feast and no other organized activities, and I didn't hear any complaints about that. If this keeps up I'll re-evaluate this point. And while I'm perfectly willing to tell someone he's being unreasonable (especially if he's doing the entitlement thing rather than the volunteer thing), the existence of the mindset does make me ask myself "do you want to invite hassle?".

Writing that helped me realize something important. Autocratting used to be fun -- just my way of pitching in. Now it seems like a job, with more demands and less personal pleasure, and it's a job I don't need to take on -- so I'm not inclined to take it on. Am I getting old and cranky? Maybe. Am I less invested in a group that has done some annoying things over the last decade or so, and thus less inclined to help out in ways I don't enjoy? Yeah, I think so.

Autocratting isn't fun any more, but cooking still is. If we had a Sunday event (that does not collect the tax) I would be delighted to cook the feast, if someone else were to be the autocrat. But I think we've got more interested cooks than interested autocrats, and the others can cook on Saturdays and don't mind the tax, so I doubt I'll ever get the opportunity to cook another feast.

I was discussing my decreased involvement in the SCA (over the last decade or so) with a friend who suggested that I've shifted my social allegiance from the SCA to my synagogue. This is something I've thought about before and I want to record a comment I made in that discussion.

Certainly the degradation of the SCA over the last decade [1] has made it easier for me to find time for my synagogue. The SCA began its descent for me in 1994; it wasn't until 1998 that I even started showing up at my synagogue. I've thought a lot about how these are related, actually, and I think that had the SCA not gone the way it did I would still be involved in my synagogue but I would not be in a leadership position and I'd probably be a less-regular attendee. (Not infrequent, mind, but that I wouldn't have had a problem skipping Shabbat services to go to an event.) My synagogue has replaced the SCA in providing leadership opportunities, which have accompanying time commitments -- but, interestingly, I don't actually socialize a lot with the synagogue people outside of the synagogue context. I'm much more likely to go out to dinner and a movie (or whatever) with my SCA friends.

[1] We were talking about increasingly-obstructionist policies at the corporate level and their effects on the rank-and-file participants. The modern incarnation of these problems began with a major policy change, founded on false premises, in 1993. I spent a chunk of 1994 investigating those false premises, along with several other members, lawyers, and a judge.

A question has come up among some SCA folks, and I'm interested in hearing a broader perspective. Particularly because I've been a peer for a while and have become less active in recent years, it's possible I'm a bit out of touch.

Non-peers: to what extent do you look up to peers (define "look up" however you like)? Are you negatively affected (again, define how you like) if a peer does something bad?

Peers and non-peers: if a peer does something bad, is that significantly worse to you than if a non-peer did it? To what extent does the behavior of an individual peer reflect on his order or on the peerage in general? Does the answer vary based on what the peer did?

I'll post my own thoughts later; I want to hear others' first.

Clarification: "bad" = "behaves badly", not "produces substandard work". Sorry I didn't make that more clear.

I'd like feedback from SCA folks on this. (Others are welcome to comment if you like, though this may be a bit cryptic.)

There are some activities in the SCA that you can take in a "service" direction or an "art" direction, or sometimes both. Scribal work (calligraphy and illumination) is an obvious area; cooking is another; others exist. Some people thrive on producing six scrolls for this weekend's event or feeding 300 people at a feast or clothing the shire for the upcoming theme event or something to that effect, and they tend to be recognized with service awards. Others are less concerned with throughput and are more interested in doing research and crafting things that are "right" and well-done, and they tend to be recognized with arts awards. Most people, of course, aren't so easily pigeon-holed and are a blend of both approaches. (It's possible to do good work quickly, after all, but it's more of a challenge.)

I find myself wondering, when considering a service-oriented person for an arts award, what the baseline quality standards ought to be. If most of the work a candidate has done is sloppy but most of that work was also done quickly, to meet a deadline, how should I weigh that? If the candidate has produced one or two high-quality pieces (to show that he can), is that enough? Is his decision to work only on the quick-and-dirty work a choice about his art, or an unfortunate effect on his art (for which he shouldn't be judged) due to a choice to serve the larger group? It would be foolish to expect everything a person produces to be top-quality, but how much high-quality work do we expect and is it mitigated by the demands of the service component?

Hey look -- the interview meme is back. :-)

( life update, On the Mark, SCA topics )

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
2. I will respond, asking you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

A member of another large SCA group recently posted about changing patterns of activity and participation. This got me thinking about my own barony, which is one of the older and larger groups around (30+ years, around 250 people).

For several years now I think our group has been in decline, and that the slope has increased in the last couple years. There is always a danger, of course, that the "glorious early years" I remember were nothing of the sort and that my brain has become adled after (pause to count) 23 years, but I don't think that accounts for all of it. Or, at least, if that's it then such factors are affecting several of my friends, including some who are not dinosaurs.

This is not a whine. I don't expect anyone else to "fix" whatever problems are there. I don't make any promises about my own efforts to fix problems I perceive, either. I'm just trying to analyze it from a sociological/anthropological point of view, because I'm curious about how such things happen, what can be done to reverse trends, and -- most importantly -- what can be done by groups that aren't yet there to improve their odds of not getting there. ( Read more... )

No answers here -- just possibly-flawed observations and speculation.

I didn't know about this when I wrote my previous entry (and most replies to it). It's just a coincidence.

The SCA is conducting a survey about membership issues (requirements, a little about decentralization, etc). They'll accept comments both from current corporate members and non-members. We of course can't know if they'll heed the results should those results call for change, but I think it's important for everyone who cares about these issues even a little to fill out the survey. Go here.

( my answers )

In some organizations I frequently hear the phrase "children are our future", usually right after a demand for other people to provide child-support services. I generally perceive this as arrogance on the part of the parent (it's almost always a parent) making the statement, and withdraw whatever help I might have provided. (Sometimes it's just misguided and can be gently corrected.)

In the SCA, for example, where I hear this phrase a lot, children aren't our future: recruitment is. College kids are the best candidates for "our future", if we have to choose a demographic target. Kids who are dragged along to SCA events by their parents won't necessarily stick around when they're old enough to stay home on their own. On the other hand, lots of people who see us in parks and the like get curious and turn into active, contributing members of the organization.

Any social organization will ultimately stand or fall based on how interesting it is to adults. Because there's no obligation to participate, and kids turn into adults. So while you certainly don't want to drive away families, no social organization is ultimately well-served by the "children over adults" mentality. Don't place roadblocks, of course, but don't revolve around children either.

(Aside: In the case of the SCA, the best thing we could do would be to find ways to integrate children into regular activities. Special children's activities, off in a separate room somewhere, are exactly the wrong approach. The kids are isolated from the organization instead of becoming part of it. I'd bet those kids are more likely to bolt when they can, too. Of course, there's nothing wrong with parents forming a babysitting cooperative for the younger kids, but that should really be up to the parents, not the officers of the organization. And, of course, children who participate in the general activities will be expected to behave, and some parents have trouble making that happen but refuse to remove the kids. So I'm talking about an ideal here.)

People sometimes say "children are our future" in religious contexts, and while it's more justified there (there is generally more of an obligation to participate, at least), I still don't think children's interests automatically trump everyone else's. Balance is important, both on its own merit and for enlightened self-interest: if you drive away the single people and young couples before they have kids, those kids won't become part of your congregation later. So if children are our future, then more care of the potential producers of said children is called for.

On a broader societal level... well of course in one sense children are "our future", in that if no more kids were born the race would die out in 100 years. But mere children aren't enough; educated, functioning children are our future. Kids that aren't cared for appropriately are a net loss, not a net gain. And there are an awful lot of such kids around already. One of the best things we as a society could do would be to make birth control freely available to all who seek it, worldwide. It's a pity the far right doesn't see it that way; they seem to have enough power to stomp on aid toward that end.

Within my lifetime I have seen a sharp increase in what I call the "cult of the child". This is the attitude that children can do no wrong, that children should be allowed to behave badly because it's part of their "actualization" or some such, and that society owes parents. Parents with this attitude do a major disservice to all parents, and if I were a well-behaved parent I'd want to slap these folks upside the head. One otherwise-intelligent friend even told me that because he has kids and I don't, he's contributing to society and I'm not. After all, he says, when I'm old and in a nursing home I'm going to need nurses and cooks and whatnot to take care of me, and he's producing that. Hmpf. In addition to all the logical flaws in that statement, the whole thing is downright arrogant. Having kids isn't the only way to provide for one's future. And if you aren't going to regulate their behavior, having kids does harm to the rest of us.

I think people who want kids (and can care for them) should have them. While I could wish for more of a decline in the rate of growth of world population -- I'm not excited to see another doubling in my lifetime -- I don't agree with the folks who apparently want everyone to stop having kids at all. That's just silly.

But I also think that people who don't want kids should be left in peace, not demeaned or pressed into service or ostracized because "family-friendly" has turned into "childless-hostile".

Non-SCA people probably won't be interested in this.

While cleaning up the pile of mail that arrived during Pennsic, I bumped into a message I had sent a few weeks ago to someone who asked what I look for in candidates for the Laurel, the SCA's peerage (highest-level award) for arts and sciences. This is what I wrote (cleaned up a bit):

After the basic requirements given in Corpora, here is what I look for:

• Superior skill in some SCA-appropriate field. I define fields broadly; research, court heraldry, period archery, and recreating period tournaments would all qualify.
  
• Knowledge of what is period and what is not, in detail within that field but to some broad level in other fields. The person should have done enough work with period techniques and materials to know first-hand what the issues are. You don't have to hand-sew all the garb, but you do have to have done it enough to understand which sewing-machine tricks aren't found in nature. :-)
  
• Peer-like qualities that can be summed up as "I would send a newcomer to this person for guidance without hesitation".
  
• Sharing the knowledge -- teaching, writing articles, one-on-one tutilege, I don't care so long as it happens (and isn't restricted to "only for my friends" or the like). I don't care how spiffy the stuff you make is if you don't share your knowledge with the rest of us. (This is aided by activity level, but I'm perfectly happy to give a Laurel to someone who mostly doesn't leave his home group if he has some other way of getting the knowledge out there.)
  
• A degree of inquisitiveness, intellectual rigor, and general approach to research that I find hard to describe. Critical thinking -- about your sources and about the conclusions you can draw from them -- is a big part of it. There is also a creativity aspect that is exemplified by projects such as the various "experimental archeology" efforts.
  
• Impact -- is the society a better place because of this person's presence? Not all fields are conducive to ground-breaking work (and this is certainly not required for the Laurel), but when the possibility exists and the candidate comes through, I consider it to be highly significant. The person who opens up a new field -- credibly! -- scores major points.
  
• "Tenure": while I don't have a set rule here, the candidate has to have beeen active in the SCA for several years. If a real-world expert joins the SCA and seems to acclimate within a year or two, he's still not ready for a peerage.