DGM #3 - Trying Something a Little Different
Hello there! There are a few big DC projects coming to fruition, which you'll hear about in the coming days. For now I want to touch on just two things:
First, the GJW Survey is still live for a few more days. If you haven't already, please a few minutes to give us some feedback. We do read all of the responses and they inform how we approach future vendettas, both on the macro scale and in the individual competitions offered.
Second, we're about to kick off an experiment in the leadership composition of our clans. Since the dawn of time (not quite that long, but you get the idea), Clans have been led by a Consul and a Proconsul, and Houses by a Quaestor and an Aedile. Until this year, Clans also had a Rollmaster position that historically was responsible for maintaining the roster but, since the advent of our fancy new website, has had duties that vary widely based on each Clan's preference. Rollmaster is now a deprecated position and the few remaining spots will disappear at the end of the year. But we have heard from many leaders that their RMs do important work that doesn't necessarily cleanly fit the traditional roles of CON, PCON, QUA, and AED, or that they believe the RM duties place too much burden on already overworked leaders.
Over the last couple of years, the DC has periodically discussed possible reforms to the longstanding Clan structure. Removing RM was one of the items discussed and implemented. Another possibility we've discussed is the replacement of House leaders with a more flexible magistrate system similar to DC staff offices, the basic idea being that the CON and PCON remain the "leaders" of the Clan while one or more M:CONs take on whatever other duties the Clan needs performed, which may or may not include duties traditionally performed by a QUA and/or AED.
After the GJW, I presented this idea to the CONs to gauge their interest. At the time, there were no takers -- understandably, some were concerned about overcomplication and others thought it amounted to reshuffling deck chairs. However, last week, Appius and Teebu approached me to ask for permission to close Taldryan's two Houses and replace the four House leaders with two new M:CONs. They had concluded that it made little sense to employ six leaders for a clan of 24 members, with the population split between two different subunits. Instead, they wanted to consolidate everyone onto a single roster, and thought that it would be beneficial to keep a couple of additional members on the summit team to focus on community building tasks rather than slimming down to just a CON and PCON. They proposed position descriptions for their M:CONs that differ significantly from the typical QUA or AED:
Magistrate 1
- World and Fictional development focus
- Recruitment and retention
- Roleplay development and running RP sessions.
- Clan member liaison
- Clan Lore Development
Magistrate 2
- Clan Lore development
- Non-roleplay related competitions
- Non-roleplay recruitment focus
- Clan member liaison
After some follow-up questions and discussion, we have decided to approve their request on a trial basis. Houses Ektrosis and Thanatos will be closed, their members combined into the single Clan Taldryan roster, and two Magistrates to the Consul will be created. The M:CONs will not be expected to produce regular leadership reports or to review members for awards; instead, they will focus on community building, RP, competitions, and wiki work.
At the end of the year, the DC and Tal summit will evaluate how the new system is working and decide whether any changes are appropriate.
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Bold moves for bold leaders; I look forward to hearing all the feedback from my peers and from the membership. I will be especially curious how the house identities translates into this new arrangement.
Sounds great! Interesting idea with fresh takes on lore and retention.
The Supreme Leader is wise.
Curious, since wouldn't just closing one House have basically led to the same situation? Looking forward to seeing how this experiment performs and I've crossed my lekku for luck.
Interesting, looking forward to great things from you all!
Love it. Been looking forward to streamlining out clan structures given our unit sizes these days.
Also, factions > clans ;)
so instead of creating new leadership for those who have a hard time getting a position to help get promoted, they remove them? seems unfair. also, they are not doing awards either? I liked being able to recommend awards when I was aedile. now the Con/PCon have more work added to their already abundant workloads.
I get it that we are a small club and of the 15k registered IDs that have joined, perhaps 300-400 are even still around. but with promotions being hard to obtain for eq2 and above without leadership, removing 2-4 of them and closing houses seems unwise. especially when so many houses have history and traditions not pertaining to other clans/houses.
like myself, I did aedile to not only help the house, but get my exp for promotion. I even stepped down to allow others a chance to get their exp for promotions too, a requirement that I think hurts members who are told by the leadership and/or dc staff, that they can't be promoted without leadership. not everyone is built for leadership, i get that part, but "soing all the things" isn't enough for the rewards many want. some want to get the leadership to get the special powers/abilities. some want the custom sabers/weapons that come with it. some want to be a Lord/SithLord with the title.
Was I leadership material? hell no I wasn't. but I did my job when I got it, gave out a few shinys, and did a few reports. I ran the house as a second in command and even created comps to keep folks going.
as I said before, 15000+ registered IDs are in the club. instead of cutting leader roles to the few hundreds, we should be focussing on getting those 14k+ re-engaged with the club and find ways to make them want to stays. I dunno all the reasons behind their exits, but I can safely say a majority is them going stagnant with promotions after eq1/eq2.
Good luck Taldryan with being the crash course dummy for this experiment.
The requirement for holding a position to be promotable above Battlemaster hasn't been a hard one in like 9 years?
It's what the wiki says for the timing of working in positions, or a project or something beyond being a regular member.
I’d rather focus on keeping the 300 - 400 people here rather than trying to get 14,000 rogues to return.
Magistrate is one of the positions you can hold for advancement purposes anyway, plus the MAA's office are extremely reasonable. God knows there have been issues in the past with recognition, but I feel that Evant, Bubba, Howie and his team have taken huge strides to correct them.
I really like this idea. I think it definitely needs a guinea pig to sort out the kinks, but I can see this as a decent long term solution due to the general decline in membership numbers. There is a reason I haven't had an AED for most of my time as QUA as personally I don't feel that there is enough work to justify having someone in the position. As far as I am concerned, the primary benefit of an AED is to train someone to take my place which is good, but there must surely be a better way.
M:CON also allows for specialisation. I think I've been a pretty good QUA except when it comes to lore development. It is not my strength and something that has been sorely lacking in House Ventress. But having specialised M:CONs means that they can focus solely on what they are best at, without adversely affecting the clan as a whole.
Another big benefit to clan Magistrate positions is that the number of positions can work the same as they do for the DC. A larger clan like Arcona might just add an extra Magistrate if there is enough work to justify another position, while a smaller clan should be fine with 2. Taking out redundant and unnecessary leadership positions is a good thing, too many chefs and all. Rollmaster was a good first step, and this is a solid second step.
You can groom M:CONs on leadership as well, it's not like this has "gotten rid of" positions. It's changed them for something that can be specialized and tailored, while still grooming members for leadership as well. Because lets face it; if your clan is smaller than 30 members, that's what individual houses used to be. A Consul and Proconsul should be more than adequately equipped to handle the administration and core leadership duties such as recommending people for promotions and medals for that amount of members, and can onboard Magistrates as to how that process actually works versus "Hey, you're an <AED/QUA> now, go recommend some promotions and medals for people". In reality this doesn't add much if any overcomplication, as just like a DC Magistrate you can tailor the job to what you need done, and what that person is capable of doing.
I don't believe that this format wouldn't be the be-all option for every clan, but I do believe that pretty much every clan could make it work if they personalized it to their clan's unique situation. Overall, I'm very happy to see this change and hope it works out for any clan that decides to give it a shot down the road.
I have long held that BTL is an unnecessary role, since it gives little reward to BTLs, and is ultimately catered to making competitions to 6-10 or so members. Aedile in recent years has slowly been falling into the same pit, since most of the work of micromanaging 20 or so members can be done by one person quite easily — and even then, it's not that hard to gauge activity across the rest of a clan if you're already in the process of doing so on one half of its population. Competitions held at the house level are often discouraging to Aediles and Quaestors when there are three or so submissions to a graphics competition (sometimes not even enough to fill placement slots.) Which, isn't a good thing when we want our Quaestors and Aediles to be our future Consuls and Proconsuls. I am looking to mitigate this through hosting competitions at the clan level for house events, but at that point, M:CON seems to be a better denomination for the roles if we're treating it as such already.
Love this concept. Very good, Bubba.
My few takes from this is this seems to best work for the clans that structurally would benefits from reduction of houses and QUA/AED to clan roster and M:CON. So long as this is not the standard for all clans, that's fine. Not every clan is going to benefit from this. Another is the lack of adequate "grooming" as it were for future generations of leadership to take over seems partially counter productive with removing expectations from QUA/AED in the change to a M:CON role. There isn't really a good set of expectations for roles as well as how to improve skills in said roles. The issue of focusing all of certain set of skills into one person leaves the other to not learn or improve those skills. Examples but not limited: removing promotion writing from M:CON expectations but then expecting someone who worked as an M:CON to suddenly know how to write a recommendation for a promotion in a higher position. Or writing or developing lore.
Each Clan, and leader, has a structure that works best for them. It's possible that this is a good structure, and also the House structure used by many Clans today is also a good structure.
That aside, this "trying something different" reminds me a lot of how Guilds run in MMOs which is a very time-tested structure. Leader + a flexible number of officers with tasks. Yes, you could have your entire Guild be officers. I've actually been in some that did. It somehow worked itself out.
I was in Clan Arcona when Proconsul Braecen Kaeth instituted a structure nearly identical to this (he considered himself a Praetor and the Aediles were Magistrates. . I saw a lot of promise it it then, I'm looking forward to seeing how it runs now.