Introduction

Hi, I’m Arch, and I don’t want to take it for granted that everyone already knows who I am.

I joined the Brotherhood in 2015. A little over a year before that, I’d quit my job as a high school Latin teacher and was struggling to find a new career. Two or three months before I joined, my wife and I moved across the state and into her parents’ house while she started a new job and we figured out what we were going to do with ourselves. I did find a job a month or two into my time here, but it came with a commute that was roughly two hours each way. It was not a great time in my life.

This club gave me a lot in terms of ways to pass commuting time, but it also gave me some much more important things. After the move, I didn’t have a social support network and I wasn’t going to be able to develop one in a rural area when I was away from home sixty hours a week and exhausted on weekends. The Brotherhood gave me a community to belong to. For the first two years in my new career, my job was usually boring and unfulfilling. The Brotherhood gave me a chance to make an impact, however minimal, on other people’s lives.

What I’m getting at is that I’m not here to do puzzles or write fanfic or gush over how much I love watching ISB meetings. I enjoy all of those things, but I don’t need the Brotherhood to do any of them. I’m here because this community and the friends I’ve made through the DB make my life better. That is our real selling point as a club, and that is the experience I want to pass on to new members.

What I want to do in this report is outline my general vision and intent without trying to cram in 50 different announcements as well. I will be releasing another report shortly that covers news and announcements. Going forward, that will be the more typical format. I’ll also open a thread up for questions.

State of the Brotherhood

Since I joined in August 2015, there have been many positive changes to the club. You can have NFU characters now. Members have up to four CS slots. Possessions launched and has seen numerous updates and content expansions. We moved to a much more site-integrated chat platform, Discord, and it’s easier than ever to hang out with members outside your clan thanks to the Tourist role. Equite promotions are regularly attainable and Elder has opened up immensely. We support chat roleplaying. We support almost any game you can convince another member to play with you. The standard for civility and the acceptable way to treat other members is better than it’s ever been. All this amid a Star Wars renaissance playing out on TV. In many ways, we’ve never had it so good.

Yet at the end of last quarter, the club’s roster stood at 254 members. When I entered club leadership as an Aedile in Q1 2016, we had 448 people on the roster. We had 178 members participate in a competition last quarter. In Q1 2016, we had 295 members do a competition. While 2022 so far has actually been a big improvement over 2021, the fact remains that the DB is smaller and less active than it was five or six years ago even though we offer a better experience in other ways and Star Wars as a whole is arguably in a better place.

So what’s going on? I don’t think that there’s a simple, straightforward answer. But I do think there are a few factors solidly within the HM’s purview that I’m going to try to address, beginning with…

Making the Brotherhood a Welcoming Environment

Now, the DB isn’t hostile by any means. Our members are, on the whole, pretty nice. But one thing I’ve caught myself saying a lot to new members is that “it’s a lot to take in.” Our experience is really built around, and caters to, those of us who’ve been here, five, ten, twenty years. What the DB offers is almost unique, which is nice, but also increases the learning curve. If you’re used to the wider fanfiction community, say AO3, the way we approach fiction is weird. If you’re used to DeviantArt or social media, the way we approach fanart is weird. The way we approach gaming is at odds with the modern industry that, MMOs aside, has tried to render player clans unnecessary through automated matchmaking. Even the way we approach roleplaying is quite different from how most Discord RP servers operate, to say nothing of tabletop. To join the DB today is to step into over a quarter century of lore and interpersonal relationships and it can be daunting to say the least.

Qormus and I will be working with the DC to do what we can to make joining and getting used to the club as smooth an experience as it can be, and that’s work that was already well underway before I came along. I’m also doing what I can to personally reach out to new and returning members and make sure they can form links to people that I think will be good for them to know. But building those relationships between members is too big a job for just me. The Council needs to be better about it. Unit leaders need to be better at it. So I’m also going to be doing what I can to make it easier for them as well. This will probably be unglamorous, under-the-radar work, but I think it’s very likely the most important thing I’m going to be doing in this role.

The Shadow Academy

I think it’s a worthwhile question to ask why we have a Shadow Academy at all. There’s two main justifications for its existence, in that it provides content for member activity and serves as an educational platform.

When held up against our main activities (fiction, gaming, art, and now roleplaying) the SA is both markedly less popular and more expensive to maintain. The Fist office manages gaming with half the staff I have and serves more members in the process. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who enjoy taking SA courses–I’m one of them–but those members tend to burn through that content faster than we can feasibly create it. Additionally, every HM I can remember has talked about doing a full course audit to remove outdated and irrelevant material but nobody has yet managed to complete one. I think the ACS is in a great place and I’m not interested in burning an enjoyable activity format to the ground, but the reality is that just “being something to do” is not good enough as a justification in this case.

Where I think the SA has the most potential is in enhancing members’ experience with everything else the club has to offer. That includes things like the Fundamentals courses, obviously, but also things like increasing your comfort with and ability in writing. Courses in lore and combat studies should, I think, feed directly into your writing, your roleplaying, and your battleplans. We have a few courses that simply repeat content from Wookieepedia or our wiki (I’m looking at you, Galactic Languages), and that just doesn’t add any value. A good SA course should make some other aspect of your DB experience easier and more enjoyable and that’s the standard I want to aim for with new and renovated courses.

When I came on board, Zuza was already working on courses in the Brotherhood Fundamentals department and Qormus and Zentru’la presented me with well-developed plans on how to update and improve the departments of Leadership, Law, and Communication and Writing, respectively. I’ve spoken to Bentre, Crysenia, Sanguinius, and Aldaric about how I want to improve the relevancy of courses in their departments to other member activities. None of this is going to be a dramatic, overnight change, but I do hope to provide somewhat regular updates on that front, beginning in a few days with my next report.

Education

As I mentioned at the top, I used to teach high school. That itself was a fallback from my original (terrible) plan to get a doctorate and teach at the university level. Even though I work in a technical field now, a large part of what I do is really teaching people how not to get their devices and accounts wrecked. I value education. And one thing that I think other educators will agree with is that a page of notes followed by a test is not always the best way to teach something.

We have a lot of people in this club with a lot of wonderful skills, but we don’t always do a very good job of leveraging that. This club needs artists, it needs programmers, it needs leaders; honestly, I’ve hired for a lot of different positions across the club and it would probably be quicker and easier to make a list of skills that aren’t in demand. Just because SA course notes might not be the best way to teach someone how to use Photoshop or get something working in Rails doesn’t mean we don’t have a vested interest in teaching more members how to do those things.

So it was easy for me to conclude I want to push members to learn from each other, even or especially if it’s outside of the SA. Unfortunately, the hard part is figuring out how to make that happen. I do have a few ideas but this is another place where I’d like to invite the community to help me brainstorm.

Trivia

I like trivia, I think Kanal has done a good job with it, and I don’t think there’s any reason that it should be a “HM thing.”

Currently, the bot we use for trivia has some pretty severe limitations. The developers are attempting to address this and plan to fix the (thankfully infrequent) crashes and allow us to set up trivia sessions in advance. Currently, Kanal or I have to be around to kick the session off, which limits when we can schedule sessions and in particular how well we can accommodate members in far-flung time zones. My hope is that, as the bot improves, we will be able to open up trivia sessions so that anyone in the club can organize them as easily as they can run a puzzle competition. We’re just stuck waiting on programmers outside the club to either improve the bot we use or develop a better one.

That said, while I think the bot provides a more enjoyable experience than the old-school chat trivia we used to do on Telegram and IRC, if anyone would like to run a session that way you are welcome to use #trivia to do so. The point of having a M:HM position dedicated to trivia is to ensure that we have a steady stream of events for people, not to lock everyone else out of running trivia sessions themselves.

Closing Remarks and Homework

I’d like to thank everyone, especially the SA staff, for their patience with me as I’ve slowly settled in.

Your homework for this report is to share, in the comments or over on Discord, why you’re here. What does this club give you? What do you hope our new members will find here? It’s a pop quiz but don’t worry, there are no wrong answers.