Greetings everyone. I'm going to do a little something different with this report and offer a little insight into the world of the Dark Council. Every six months the Grand Master requires the Dark Council to submit an internal review. These documents are often something that is kept between the GM and the DC due to their sensitive nature (talking about staff members, firing staff members, talking about successes, failures, personal issues, whatever). Well, rather than keep my IR a secret, I thought I would publish it to the membership and solicit feedback. What does the Voice do well, what do we do poorly, what can we do that makes our club a better place?

So, here is my latest internal review with a few additional sections added at the end. I look forward to your feedback. FYI, the format is dictated.

The IR

Strengths: The Voice Staff’s strength remains in the area of project creation and the development of new fictional material for the Dark Brotherhood. In 2014, the Voice staff created NPCs, planets, and a continuous fictional story to support the Dark Crusade, Fading Light, and in preparation for the upcoming Great Jedi War.

Additionally, the Voice staff has continued to improve upon the ACC and Character Sheets by editing and tweaking systems based on our membership’s feedback. The creation of the ACC Qualification within the Shadow Academy has been a success and reduced the time it takes for our members to become Qualified ACCers. The Fading Light ACC Tournament has allowed us to further review the ACC’s systems and will result in future improvements to our existing systems.

Lastly, the Voice Staff’s flash to bang on administrative duties remains strength. We have graded 1000s of fiction entries, hundreds of ACC matches, hundreds of SA exams, and submitted CIs in a timely manner.

Areas of Concern: The ACC Fading Light Tournament has identified some weaknesses in our grading rubric. A 1-5 scoring scale on syntax, story, realism, and continuity has led to some concerns on grading extremely close matches. The Combat Master and Voice will work with several of our ACC architects and solicit feedback in an attempt to improve upon our existing scoring systems.

A second area of concern is the cumbersome and time consuming process to submit massive quantities of Cis. The Voice will work with the SCL to establish a potential time saving submission system. This system may end up being very similar to how members or competition hosts submit Clusters of Fire.

Opportunities: The remainder of 2014 will be focused on the Great Jedi War Plotline, Great Jedi War event planning, the production of a Fiction Society Proposal, and the consolidation of the Dark Jedi Brotherhood’s fiction history under one document.

1. GJW: This document will require revisions based on our discussion. I’d like to submit the bible to the GM/DGM NLT 20 August 2014. File embedded on the following page. Click the PPT to open it. Several slides (sorry guys, redacted. Essentially, the Great Jedi War Plot has an outline and we know what we want to do, more on that on my Word below).

2. Fiction Society: The Voice and CM Teams will assemble to work on the Fiction Society, although work may not be accomplished until Fading Light and the GJW are complete. Click on the Mock in order for it to display in a larger format.

Threats: No major threats are on the horizon. The Voice and CM team are able to coordinate and work together without any major issues. All projects are ongoing and working towards completion. Member feedback remains strong despite the occasional sniping. We have been fortunate that a wide range of members are willing to provide beneficial feedback on how/when/and what to do as a staff.

One other threat is communication. I've heard some crazy stuff lately about the turn around times of ACC CIs (they are automatic at match completion), competition approval (within six hours or less), and CI approval (24 hours or less, often requires some fact checking). If there is a belief these things are slow, then the belief is the result of my not communicating the speed in which they are handled, not in fact. I'll work on that.

Personal: New home, new job, new pressures, and time constraints. Life is busy.

The Word

There have been a lot of interesting posts and news page articles over the past few days. Some of them have dealt with leadership and some of them have dealt with planning our club's events. Here are my thoughts:

I've been a part of a lot of vendetta planning over the past eight years. They are massively time consuming, seldom executed on time, and rarely meet everyone's lofty demands.

The Dark Crusade has been a monster and probably required more effort than all of my previous vendetta experiences combined. Planet write ups, fiction updates, NPC creation, competition creation, and competition grading (you can reference my past reports for the volume of fiction entries). That is a lot of effort and time. Now throw in the simultaneous redesign of our character sheets and the ACC. Pile on top of that the random administrative tasks of approving character sheets, grading acc exams, and awarding clusters ice. Throw on top of that the design of fictional rubrics, ACC rubrics, and a new social media presence. And now we have an enormous ACC tournament that will lead right into the last round of Fading Light. That requires a new fiction, planet write ups, and a new fiction competition.

These things take some time.

So, if we are looking for someone to lay the blame on for the delays, look no further than me. I just can't generate a GJW plot while also doing the things identified above. That is the bottom line.

This is one of those times where I would ask for a little compassion and empathy when it comes to the effort it takes to create new things for our members. It is not easy and it takes time. I love our club and I have a great relationship with our members, but I can't mass produce one product while simultaneously working on a dozen others. It just isn't possible.

I understand that it is frustrating to wait around for a GJW and I can promise you we are doing our best to get it out to you. It, like most things in life, are a work in progress. I'm working and hopefully the Grand Finale and the rest period we are looking for is worth it :p