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

[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...