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Imperials,

Today, I’d like to use an Address to bring forward a thorough review of our House. It may seem a bit strange to do so seeing as now as of today, January 22nd, it will be five months since I’ve taken this post as Quaestor and Imperator - and five months isn’t a nice, even number. However, the past five months have had a lot going on; from our initial leadership shuffle, to BTs being formed, to the GJW, and to last month’s Sithmas and this month being the new year.

That offers a lot of depth for us to gauge ourselves on and do some planning.

However, we also have some things to discuss. Like how there hasn’t been a Quaestor report since the last Address. This is another reason I want to do a new Address, because some things have slipped through the cracks; and starting a new year with a positive outlook on the changes you want to make is a good way to move forward and recommit yourself to your goals. For those that aren’t familiar with my concepts of an Address:

This is an Address. Which is something I like to differentiate from the reports, announcements, emails, etc. you will receive from this House Summit. This will be our mission statement, our mandate, our pledges; it will be what we need give attention to and what areas we will focus on to do so. Therefore this will be a piece of information we will refer back to should we lose our way. Mistakes, hiccups, and fumbles are part of the learning process; but failure is not acceptable. So we will use this as a resource, a tool in our belt, to ensure our success forward. Once every four months, a new address will be posted with an updated stance for the House as we further refine what our goals are and celebrate the success we make. I encourage you all to get familiarized with these documents so you are aware of the direction we are headed.

In the sections below, you can expect to find an outline of key focuses we will be keeping and from which we will be progressing over the course of these next months. I do not apologize for the length of this article. It is lengthy because it needs to be, we have a lot to focus on and develop over the next few months, year, and beyond. Updates and reports from this will be kept at a better length, but I believe anything in this address needs to be...well, addressed.

With that said,

Your Will, My Hands.

SBL Raiju Kang

Qauestor of House Imperium

The Imperator

What We’ve Done Well

• Leadership Stability

  Let’s not kid ourselves here, August was a rough month for Imperium. We had three leadership positions at that time, and within the span of a month we had all three position see turn over - some of them multiple times. Since then we’ve added a new Battleteam Leader and, for five months straight, all four positions have remained stable and secure. I want to take this time to personally thank Dek, Calindra, & Wagglehorn for their efforts over this time. Each has had their own personal growth as leaders, as well as grown their positions, during this time. Sometimes these roles can feel like a thankless position, so today I say: thank you!

• House Roles

  Some think positions like Battleteam Leader or Quaestor are pretty straight forward. Others think, if you’ve done it once; you know what to do. This thinking is flawed. I really want to be cleared on this. While every position within the club has a definition on the wiki with a list of specific responsibilities to be fulfilled; that doesn’t mean that it is the same across the board. These articles are written generically for a reason - because it depends. A Quaestor in Plagueis can have a different set of duties than a Quaestor in Naga Sadow; and this is because the needs of Plagueis is different than Naga Sadow. It’s no different here in Scholae Palatinae, and while we’ve made a clan-wide description of house roles there still is a bit of a difference between Imperium and Excidium and that’s because each unit has it’s only unique set of challenges. Thankfully, we have done well to identify our house’s challenges and have been adjusting our roles accordingly. This doesn’t mean this is off the list of focuses though (see Key Focuses below) and we will continue to have leadership development as continuous learning.

• Roster Maintenance

  At our lowest point, I have it recorded that we dipped to 16 members in our past five months. While not earth shattering for a house, we do have to be mindful. Why is it dipping? What makes up the 16 members? Are there groups more at risk than others? Since then we have bounced back and climbed to 22 members (as of writing this) which helped shed some light on this. While our Journeymen numbers continue to slide (see Recruitment & Journeymen sections below), we’ve grown in our Elder and Equite ranks, meaning we provide an opportunity for others in the club to resettle here and get something they weren’t somewhere else. That’s awesome. I don’t actively recruit from other clans, but if we can provide something appealing for those coming into Scholae Palatinae - that’s great. And it’s also good that we continue to maintain those in these groups already. The best news is we’ve stopped having Equites time out on the site as well, which I contribute to our positioned members developing better rapports as well as an understanding in the house that being Causal or Semi-Active is okay.

• Activity Core Has Doubled

  In connection to the above point, our activity numbers have swelled. As you may remember me outlining this before in personal emails or announcements; it’s important that people understand that we aren’t expecting you to make this club your second job or home. This is a club, for entertainment. You, the member, are the one that determines the amount of time you put into this. I can’t ask you to invest more time than you are willing and able to provide, and I don’t judge those that can’t maintain the same levels as others. We all are individuals when it comes to activity. And I’m not here to force more out of you. I am here to provide direction, opportunities, and inspiration for the time you are able to commit, however. But I want you to always understand that regardless of how much time you put into the club, the simple fact that you keep coming back is enough. I have three labels when it comes to activity:

  • Casual
  • Semi-active
  • Core

Regardless of where you show up within these three labels, you have a place in Imperium. It doesn’t matter to me where individuals end up, for we reward people based on the merits they meet - not by when they meet merits. As Quaestor, I keep a running number of what each label is at so I know how our opportunities best meet these groups and how our actions are impacting them. That’s it. But I am proud to say that we’ve doubled the number of members in the Core label (people who regularly contribute to a weekly form of activity). This is awesome news, and it provides so many more opportunities for these members going forward as well as ongoing opportunities for the other groups to join into when they are able. This is simply fantastic.

• We’ve Established Two New Battleteams

  When we started Project Krennic, it was a dream that we’d find the success and support for opening a second battleteam. We knew that even if all went well, this could be a challenge and I know many people doubted we would keep the second team when we announced it. Yet, five months later and we still are seeing progress from our Battleteams, and this is all because of the teams themselves. They are making it a success story and driving this forward. So to everyone involved in establishing these teams and continuing to be apart of them today - thank you! Your work continues to pay off and we all are excited to see what happens next with these teams.

• Creating Opportunities For Inclusion

  I’m excited to see our “Member Driven” philosophy taking off. Whether it was the active channel discussions regarding the Battleteams, the astounding number of responses we had to our Identity survey, the number of people that respond when we email or message about events, the community we are creating in the House telegram channel, or the individuals that step up to help out with projects - or those that take charge and bring forward ideas and projects of their own. This is the type of community I wanted to build when I started as Battleteam Leader of IC and I’m glad to see everyone embrace the philosophy and pushed it to a house level. Keep up the great work all!

• Timely Membership Evaluations

  For those that aren’t aware, we have two methods of tracking the membership and their activities for the purposes of recognizing them with promotions, awards, and such. One method is through the website; which I have to say is SO MUCH BETTER THAN IT USED TO BE. I mean damn, let me be a dino for a moment and say it used to be so labour intensive in the past. Most things are now easily traceable through the website and it spits out in a nice summary format for positioned members to see when we review your dossier. Not everything is tracked through the site though. However, we are light years ahead of where we used to be with the site. The second method for tracking membership activities is manually, and while it is again labour intensive, much of it is automated and we only have to double check what the site is doing. This means we can evaluate the membership more often, since so much of the time intensive stuff is gone. Yet, CSP (and in turn it’s houses) was still operating under the old system that tended to only reward people after major competitions. From clan summit down, we’ve changed this. Evaluations are done on a weekly basis now. I have a prompt in my schedule to check it out every Monday, and as we’ve come to find out Braecen as one on Sunday so between the two of us we’ve been checking things out regularly for Imperium members since our appointments. This is will change in a bit, I will be spreading responsibility to the rest of the summit now that we have a pattern; but for the membership - it means the same as these past five months: Weekly, a member of the summit reviews your progress and checks it with the clan’s spreadsheets. Insuring that as soon as you hit the necessary requirements for your next promotion or award; you will have it within the week. This also means if at any point you are curious where you stand or want to know what you can do for that next mark of recognition, you can reach out to me and we’ll have a frank talk about where you stand and I’ll give you some pointers on where we can go to help you out.

• Sithmas Competitions

  While the final announcement and winners were already awarded for this competition I do want to highlight some numbers I crunched after the competition:

  • 17 total participants
  • 3 from clan summit
  • 7 from Excidium
  • 7 from Imperium
  • Total points:
  • 42 - Clan Summit
  • 71 - Excidium
  • 82 - Imperium

When I took people’s temperatures last spring when I first arrived back in CSP, I noticed a lot of people (rightly or wrongly) had the opinion that Imperium could not compete with Excidium. I’ve been trying to tell people ever since not to count Imperium out of the game. We have a lot of great, talented individuals who are dedicated. These numbers show that not only can we compete with Excidium, but we can out place them as well.

Where Can We Improve

• Leadership Visibility

  I make no excuses for the lack of reports since my last address, it’s inexcusable and I’m sorry. In addition, with there being four leadership positions there should have been four reports, monthly, for the last 5 months. Meaning we should have had 20 reports from the house in total when in reality we only had 6. This isn’t to say we haven’t been around for the membership. Wagglehorn and Calindra ran the BT discussions and been emailing their members, Dek has been a friendly face in all clan channels and pushing individuals, and I have been making announcements, using the mailing lists, and reaching out individually as well. Our leadership has been around, but our reporting have fallen through the cracks and we can always do better in our other forms of visibility.

• Journeymen Development

  In the past five months we haven’t had someone knighted and we’ve only had, by my count, four journeyman promotions. Part of the health of a house is making sure we have a good foundation for entering members to become connected with the teams, the house, and community we have established here. This will in turn provide member retention and we must be well structured to develop them to knighthood. As it is, while we are providing early engagement we aren’t getting a good conversion rate on entering members and we will have to examine this.

• Recruitment

  Connected to the above point, a strong supply of new blood needs to be established for Imperium. There will come a day that I, just like many others will no longer be able to carry the torch for Imperium. Life gets busy or complicated, or interest levels fade for people. Time will erode the numbers of this house. So that is why development is so important, and equally as important; recruitment. This can’t be just a leadership issue either, we need to work on this issue as a team with direction and inspiration coming from the summit.

• Fiction Updates

  Another inexcusable issue that has fallen through the cracks. For a while now I’ve been promising fiction updates, and if you have seen Dek’s report you will see mention that we’ve been working on it. Unfortunately, we held things off for over two months now because we’ve been waiting on the conclusion to the GJW. This was an error. The club fiction won’t have too much to impact our immediate fiction goals and therefore it shouldn’t have been held off for so long. This was an error in judgement, but I hope you understand it was made with the best intentions not to clash with the club fiction. This stated, we have worked out the story arc we will run through in the meantime and will have this chapters out shortly. I look forward to the stories we will tell together from these developments.

Conclusion

As you guys can see from the review above, we have quite a bit to work on and hammer out but we also have a lot to be proud of from these past five months. And this is because of each of the individual efforts you all have made. Please continue to keep up the great work.

Should you have any questions, comments or concerns regarding the material above, please contact me directly at [Log in to view e-mail addresses]

Your will, My Hands.

SBL Raiju Kang

Qauestor of House Imperium

The Imperator