October 25 Meeting
Date and Time: Noon server on Saturday, October 25, 2008
Location: Dandred's Fold in the Alterac Mountains
Ventrilo Server: voice58.dallasxtreme.com port 4047, password "stranded"
Contents |
Meeting Agenda
Let's see if we can get some conversation going about the following topics. Feel free to add to the list!
- Guild name. Lots of ideas around already, any others? Feel free to add your own to the Guild Name Ideas page. If possible, try to come to the meeting with your favorite three in mind so that we can take a poll and figure out what to call the guild, which will allow us to sign a guild charter as soon as possible.
- Leadership/management structure. This depends on what you want in a guild, and the best way to provide it. Do you think people will want to "progress" in the guild, where rank is used to help recognize people but is otherwise mostly meaningless (like in original SC)? Or where everyone is the same rank? Will officers be needed, and what would they do? Could all members of the guild be responsible to uphold guild expectations on their own, implying that almost everyone has the ability to kick, invite, add/withdraw from bank, etc.?
- Leaders/managers. What leadership do we need to fulfill that structure, and who would be best for it?
Meeting Notes
Marwyn had problems connecting to Perenolde so we ended up all rolling Blood Elves on Malygos for this one.
Guild Name
A poll was taken of what everyone's three favorite guild names were. The results are as follows:
| Votes | Name |
|---|---|
| 7 | Angry Penguins |
| 6 | Consensus |
| 3 | Proudmoore Privateers |
All other names received two or less votes.
A few concerns were raised with <Angry Penguins>:
- The word "Angry" isn't very positive.
- There's already another 200-toon casual guild out there with the same name.
On the other hand, people liked the creative potential the name had. At least one individual was strongly not in favor of the name, so we turned our attention to <Consensus>.
No one wasn't in favor of <Consensus>, but some had concerns regarding how thematic it was: was it too "abstract" a name? We started thinking of things that could make it more thematic, such as taking the word "sense" from "consensus", and using names/organs of sensation for rank names and such. Karin also proposed <Synesthesia> as a spin-off candidate based on the senses.
We ultimately decided to mull it over for the next day or two, discussing the top candidates on the forum. But we also set a hard deadline of no later than Tuesday, October 28 to decide on a final name and sign a guild charter.
Management and Leadership Structure
We talked a lot about myriad issues related to management and leadership structure.
In general, everyone seemed fond of "standards"/"blueprints" over "rules", distinctions between them being:
- standards make you think more and be a more considerate person, while rules make you think less and become a more mechanical person
- standards are something you aspire to, rules something you obey
- "rules are made to be broken"; the same is never said of standards
All of this suggested that we give our guild members as much freedom as possible, encouraging good behavior through standards rather than requiring it by imposing rules.
The question of age limits came up, and it seemed generally favored that younger people be allowed to join the guild, but be held to the same standards as everyone else (thereby implying that it will be harder for young people to get into the guild on average, but that the ones with exceptional maturity would be welcomed).
In regards to use of language, it was suggested that different social elements of the guild have a "rating" similar to MPAA or ESRB ratings: guildchat could be "E for Everyone", while a 10-man raid team could be "M for Mature", and so on. It was also encouraged to not be "blind" about language: if a word offends someone, it would be better for them to explain why to improve everyone's understanding, rather than merely to say "let's keep things family friendly". Words have different meanings for different people; Mareyn brought up the fact that he'd used the term "suck" since childhood, yet a high school teacher of his was offended by it because she thought that it had overtly sexual overtones. Political Correctness could be said to resolve this through blind rules, but we'd prefer to resolve it through standards, which means that open communication and understanding is key.
In regards to heirarchy, everyone seemed in favor of a flat one. If we have ranks, it's preferred that each one mean something important about one's privileges, because this is what they were intended for by Blizzard and it's likely to be how they're interpreted by new guild members. This implies that there should be very few ranks: at minimum, they would be Guild Leader, Full Members, and Initiates/Trainees. Trainees would still be given a lot of freedom, but they'd be limited so that any catastrophic and intentional damage they did could be mitigated: for example, a malicious trainee should at worst only be able to liquidate 20-30% of the guild bank's total assets. In general, privileges and freedoms would be given out in the spirit of "If you give someone twenty bucks and you never see them again, it was probably worth it" (see also this forum thread).
Snowmiser also suggested perhaps adding one rank below Initiate called Guest, which could be used solely to have people visit the guild for a day or a few days without the intention of becoming a full-fledged guild member or anything like that. This suggestion was very well-received as a good way to increase the guild's participation with the rest of the WoW community at large.
Karin also explained his idea of a "Guildarium" to help improve transparency and lower barriers to participation in guild management while allowing certain conversations between members of management to remain private, and everyone was intrigued by this.
A number of forms of management structures were proposed. Snowmiser suggested the idea of dynamic management teams to be generated in response to particular problems and dissolved after they were resolved, which could be comprised of anyone who was interested in a problem and/or had specific expertise on it.
Mareyn brought up the concept of a Westminister System in which a sovereign head of state (e.g., the Queen of England) has no actual political agenda, but rather serves as the final "stamp of approval" to ensure that all decisions are made in the best interests of the people. One possible leadership structure may be to have a council consisting of a so-called team of rivals as an advisory panel to a head of government, who then works together with the sovereign to make decisions that are best for the guild at large.
Also brought up was the idea that the leadership structure should be conducive to the mantra "RL > WoW": that is, even those of us who are very interested in management and leadership may not have a lot of free time, so we should optimize the leadership structure to work well in this context. This is different from when Karin led the Sleeper Cartel, during which time he was able to invest a significant amount of time into leading the guild as a benevolent dictator. The price for this, understandably, will probably be slower progress, and perhaps more time spent convincing others of change.
