Ah, SCA Officialdom, your ability to screw up member interactions knows no bounds...

[jducoeur]

So, the SCA has just released (like, minutes ago as I start writing this) a survey about SCA Peerages. Great -- this conversation is many years overdue.

Corporate being what it is, the very first question is "Are you a member?". Because of course it is.

That would be okay -- but if you say yes, it requires you to enter you member number. Moreover, it requires you to enter your expiration date. So even those of us who have our numbers memorized have to go find the damned card before we can take the survey.

Right by itself, this illustrates perhaps the Society's worst failing at this point: it is so obsessed with paid membership, and so terrified that all Those Evil Non-Members might try to stuff the ballot box, that it is going to lose a lot of respondents to this survey. Because, really -- many people aren't going to be arsed to go find their blue cards in order to do so. They'll just decide that the survey isn't worth the hassle and drop it.

Seriously -- the club needs to get its bloody priorities straight. Being so bloody paranoid should not be a priority; getting feedback from the participants more than once a decade should be...

ETA: and wow -- now that I'm actually into the survey, I am very disappointed at the number of assumptions built into it. Just offhand:

• It has a lot of questions about whether you have seen specific, tangible effects due to the creation of the MoD (which is nonsensical -- the average member isn't in a position to observe a statistical effect like that), but nowhere asks if the Society is improved by the existence of the Order. There is an apparent implication that the Order shouldn't exist if it can't justify itself with more memberships.
• Many of the questions are way too narrow, and provide no "Other" option. For example, "Do you think there are enough Peerages?" is just plain wrong. I think there are too many Peerages, because I think that the Chivalry should have had the basic decency to open themselves to the other martial arts. And I don't want yet more awards. But it is IMO vital that there should be a good path to Peerage for the practitioners of the other martial arts, so in practice I must answer this question "No", even though that isn't really true. (Fortunately, there is a later question that more correctly asks what forms this recognition might take.)
• Many of the questions are just plain inappropriate, IMO -- they illustrate just how important (and hard) it is to write the right questions. (And why we spent the better part of a year designing the SCA Census.) For example, it asks whether membership has increased since the creation of the MoD. Even if the average member knew that, what does it prove? That's pure correlation, demonstrating no causation at all; given how many issues surround the Society, the chance that this is relevant is low. But it does provide a fine excuse for spurious and harmful arguments.

There is one open-text field at the bottom, which I used to explore these topics, and to encourage them to start an open conversation on the subject. I'll be curious to see if there is any sign of them listening to it...

ETA2: for those on Facebook, see this fine, fiery and correct rant on the subject, pointing out just how insulting the whole thing reads to the fencing community. Somebody seriously blew this one...

Comments

[sporky_rat]

I sent an email to Bearkiller asking him wtf about that.

I mean, yes, I have my number and date memorized because of officer forms, BUT STILL.

Feel free to email him as well, he reads them. president@sca.org

[mermaidlady]

I think that the Chivalry should have had the basic decency to open themselves to the other martial arts.

Yes, this, so much this.

EDIT: apparently I've had this opinion for a while...

[jducoeur]

Yep -- I've been making much the same argument. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that one is lost...

[danabren]

So glad I walked away. Ugh.

[drwex]

they illustrate just how important (and hard) it is to write the right questions

And this would be part of why a Master's in psychology is more or less two years of "how to design surveys"

[jducoeur]

There is that. One of the reasons the whole thing burns my butt is that we *did* do the hard work of carefully crafting the survey for the SCA Census (admittedly some years ago), so the institutional knowledge existed but apparently wasn't consulted...

[cvirtue]

My one email to the BOD (so far) on this survey was:

"I found the survey to be structured very strangely, and it had the feel of a political "push poll" which, as I'm sure you know, is a poll designed to give the response wanted by the sponsoring organization. I hope that was not the intent, but I would encourage you to find an Analytics Professional to create polls in the future."

(had all the courteous intro/extro stuff too...)

[jducoeur]

Admirably polite! (And probably moreso than I can manage right now...)

[aryanhwy]

Two other issues which are probably not apparent to people outside of the "mainland" kingdoms, but which intimately affect Drachenwald and Lochac: A lot of us ARE paid members, but NOT of SCA, Inc. Our membership numbers are different from SCA, Inc., membership numbers, and may in fact collide with them. Since there's no way to indicate which affiliate you're a paid member of, this could result in more than one person filling in identical membership numbers.

And then there's the question of whether or not the people running the survey and collecting the data have even heard of GDPR.

[(Anonymous)]

You know, that didn't even occur to me when I filled in my member number and expiry date. I wonder if they will completely disregard my survey as a result. OTOH, they did ask for Kingdom name, so _maybe_ it'll be okay??

[jducoeur]

Good point -- others have pointed out that this is a mess from a privacy POV, but it hadn't occurred to me that it might not even be *legal*...

What about the Order of Precedence?

[pryder]

One problem with the current notion of creating yet another Peerage is that the members of it will perpetually have lower precedence than people who participate in martial arts that were recognized earlier (except for those who are already Peers in another order). Archery in the East Kingdom, for example, predates fencing, but since the Order of Defense was created first the fencers are higher in the pecking order. (And of course all of them, even the fencers, will be behind heavy fighters whose distinctions may have been earned much later.)

I still think the correct solution would have been to force the Chivalry to accept people from all martial arts rather than create the Order of Defense. But that ship sailed a while ago, and it would have had to be rammed past the resistance of a lot of the Chivalry. Right now I think that expanding the Order of Defense to additional martial arts would be a better solution than creating yet another peerage.

But then I also think that we have way too many awards, and that we should instead have more encompassing ones and fewer levels of awards. For one thing, fewer awards would mean less time spent in court, which I would see as a big step in the right direction. (I also think that we should dissolve the monarchy and become an autonomous collective, but I know that idea isn't going to fly.)

Re: What about the Order of Precedence?

[jducoeur]

the members of it will perpetually have lower precedence than people who participate in martial arts that were recognized earlier

Um -- that's simply not true. Peers are Peers. When you were elevated matters; the date of creation of the Order is irrelevant. I outrank most of active Chivalry of the East, even though the Chiv came before the Laurel.

(*Royal* Peerage is a whole 'nother ball of wax, but that's a fundamentally different category than the bestowed Peerages.)

I generally agree with the rest of your point, but let's keep our facts straight...

Re: What about the Order of Precedence?

[pryder]

My point is that deserving people in the categories that do not yet have peerages (archery, thrown weapons, equestrian, etc.) will have later dates of elevation because they did not have the opportunity to be elevated when they first earned it. Therefore they will always rank behind people who may have earned their elevation more recently, but were elevated earlier because the rank existed. So, for example, a fencer whose distinction was earned in this decade would come before Li Kung Lo, who has been deserving of a peerage for archery since at least the 1990s. It doesn't actually apply in his case because he's also a Laurel but I'm making a point here.

The only way to fix that would be to retcon the date of elevation of people who have been deserving for a long time. I'm not proposing to open THAT can of worms though!

Re: What about the Order of Precedence?

[jducoeur]

My point is that deserving people in the categories that do not yet have peerages (archery, thrown weapons, equestrian, etc.) will have later dates of elevation because they did not have the opportunity to be elevated when they first earned it.

True, although I'd be careful about pushing that argument too far. In practice, many of those folks wound up getting Pelicans, which has served as a bucket where the exceptions get dumped into. (Li Kung is a Pelican, not a Laurel, and is a good example of how this has often worked -- there are actually many others.)

But yes, the situation has been unjust to many people, and that has a minor but real lasting effect in terms of many elevation dates. I don't think that's fixable, but it does help motivate fixing the problem as soon as possible...

[cellio]

They'll just decide that the survey isn't worth the hassle and drop it.

Or decide that answering that question differently is more expedient. Placing any value in the results of that question would be foolish but, alas, consistent.

Lots of annoying questions there, with no "other" + textbox options. It's almost like they plan to stop at pie charts and bar graphs and don't want to actually read thoughtful commentary.

I answered "yes" to "are there enough peerages?", while also saying that those other areas deserve a path too. There was no way to express that the paths might be *different* for specific martial endeavors.

There are no questions about the effects of the order of defense on the Laurel, where we used to try to fit those folks in -- how did this change work out in that regard?

If they want to know whether membership has increased since the new peerage, don't they have the data to answer that already? Why ask us -- unless it's just to reinforce their "membership is the primary goal" mindset? (Which I suspect isn't working anyway. Are people taking this survey going to say "gosh, this *has* made things better -- I should go get a membership right now to show my support!"?)

[pearl]

Something interesting looks to be happening behind the scenes. The SocSen page (http://socsen.sca.org/2019-peerage-committee-survey/) has removed the hyperlink, and added "(link removed 31/01/2018)."


With that said, copy and pasting the URL into your browser still gets you the active survey link, and they don't seem to have updated the official facebook announcement with this change. So... who knows?

[jducoeur]

I've heard from one of the authors of the survey that it has been officially withdrawn; this sounds like they just haven't finished all the technical steps to do so. (Not surprising, since I think they did so in haste.)

They are reportedly going to go back to the drawing board, bring on some people with more serious experience in survey design, and try again. I *hope* (although don't have full confidence) that they start out by asking what they are trying to accomplish with this exercise, and whether a survey is even the right approach...