I'm having a hard time understanding why people that are not involved in the community would make good Council candidates.
If people need to be on the Council in order to be able to contribute to the community then that's a much bigger problem. They don't though.
I think other people deserve a chance to contribute. Contribute as in... "appoint staff members, make sure the forum's running, plan out larger events like War and Brawl prior to execution, and make sure the Newsletter gets posted." It doesn't sound that hard. I bet we have enough people that care about the community to make it happen.
Mmm...but what defines "caring" in this situation? If I were to donate $1,000,000 to UTAlan to go towards funding the forum's expenses or the same amount to zanz to contribute to the game does that mean I care more about the community than everyone else? Or what about if I've been a part of the forums since the very beginning of time, have never left once, but never post at all; does my passive dedication indicate that I care more about the forums than a person who actively participates in discussions geared towards bettering the community in some way? I would say no. What these people don't prove is if they have the sensibility to contribute to positive private discussions, the activity to be available for discussing issues when needed, and the ability to cooperate and collaborate with their peers for the sake of a common goal. I'm simplifying things here, but the point is that there are quite a few criteria that go into what the ideal Council member should look like. Simply caring about the community is not enough to satisfy these criteria. We appoint staff members based on who we think is the best for the job out of what is available to us. Likewise, the 3 admins who rose up to take the place of Scaredgirl were the best suited for that position. So if we expect for our staff to be the best people for the role they're appointed to, I don't believe it makes sense to overlook quality for the sake of "fresh blood"; by doing so (especially in the case of our current Council) you have a very good chance of omitting someone from the next term who would have been able to bring more benefit to the community through their contribution than someone who took their place. The same can also be said of the popular vote system, which was changed, and for good reason.
Now, there's also an entire world of issues created by being a newb to Council which I think should also be discussed here.
The idea of actually being a Council member is not as simple as most people seem to believe. We have a few systems and protocol which we are required to follow before performing some actions; I will not go into detail for most of these since they are within private sections for a reason. It takes quite a bit of time to get used to the new system, and new members will normally spend the first week or two familiarizing themselves with the system before really getting to work. I want you to note that this all takes place
with the presence of senior Council members. If no seniority exists aside from Higs (assuming that she alone is responsible for managing everything) then I imagine there's going to be quite a bit of confusion and becoming familiar with the actual Council process will take quite a bit of time. Several people have asked why Council stopped being a 3 month term. The answer to this is two-fold: It was both because 3 months was too short and because we were faced with an admin who was either inactive or was involved in other tasks which put Council duties on hold. There were times when it seemed like we had just managed to accomplish something meaningful when it was nearly the end of our term, and then the entire process would repeat itself. What was even more frustrating was that various topics and posts were moved into a "secret secret" section with every new term to a) reduce clutter and b) prevent new Council members from seeing information that may have involved them. This resulted in even more confusion as newbs would make a suggestion only to discover that it had been discussed during the previous Council, which would then mean a debriefing would be required to get them up to speed, and this consumed even more time.
However, an even bigger issue revolves around the current Council system's dependence on an active Admin in order for it to be productive. SG had the idea of creating a system where Council would be self-functioning and would rarely require her input, but this idea was just not realistic then nor is it realistic now. This isn't because Administrator input is needed to facilitate discussion, but because there's quite a bit of information that we do not have access to as Council members. I, for instance, have no idea what goes on behind the scenes in the CI&A section which then creates a problem if I wanted to suggest something for that section. Sometimes Council is fortunate enough to have a staff member who manages that section, but even then you still have to wait for that person to actually be present before getting any useful information. To make matters worse, what is and is not our responsibility to discuss has never been well defined. People have the impression that it's our responsibility to discuss and fix something whenever there's a problem somewhere in the forums. It's not. A few ideas that some (anonymous) members have attempted to discuss and hopefully fix have included the old Deck Archives, Trials, the PvP Parasite system...every single one of these was considered case closed on the grounds that the staff members who managed the sections that each of them belonged in was responsible for fixing them, not the Council. So when people come to me and tell me that the Crucible system needs to be fixed, there's not much I can do besides tell them that it's not our responsibility to fix. If it's because a staff member hasn't been active for quite some time then that can be discussed, but otherwise, nope. The boundaries of what we can and can't do can be fixed and made clear but that will require the system itself to be fixed, and that will take some time as Higurashi has already stated that her current situation makes her unable to do so. SG was in the process of revamping the Council system with the current Council, but was run over by a bear before it could be seen through to the end. As a result we're left in a situation where we're both still trying to put the pieces of the old system back together while considering what to do for the new system. Needless to say, it's not something that's going to be fixed by just bringing in a new team of people or beginning a new term. So the only thing left for me to say here is to be patient.
Will, Zblader, would you rather just keep doing what we've been doing... or?
I'm personally in agreement with what most of what Higs said earlier today regarding this. I will note right now that I have no problems with bringing in new members. However, I refuse to believe that a system which forbids any 4th term members from returning is really what's best for the community. Ideally what I think would be best would be one of two options. Either we simply add new people to make the 12 complete again (with a chance to offer any current members to step down of course) as Higs said or we just do open applications and have the admins pick between them. I personally don't really see a reason to have the Admins act as part of the Council myself, though things are very different from when we only had 1 Admin running around so I may be omitting an important detail here. However, we should not even consider bringing a new Council into term until what SG left behind has been fixed because we'd be back to square one in no time at all.
