jducoeur

Pardon a brief grouse. From the Gazette's unofficial summary of Curia, in the Chatelaine's report:

Every group will now need to submit a demo form so the Kingdom office is aware in advance that demos are taking place. The required demo form is available on-line.

I'm sure many people will go, "Oh, it's just a little bureaucracy", but I'm sorry -- it still would have deterred some of those demos from ever happening. Many people like doing things, but don't like paperwork: force them to do paperwork, even a little, and some of them will simply nope out of being involved at all. This is doubly true of younger, newer officers who have recently gotten started themselves and are still figuring out whether they like this "officer" thing, who often run the best demos because they connect best with potential new folk.

In some domains, paperwork is necessary; in others, it's at least extremely useful. It is not necessary in this case -- we've survived for 50 years without it, and I can't say I've ever heard anyone say that they needed the higher-ups to be managing them more.

And seriously -- this is the domain where every little bit hurts. We need new blood, more than we need very nearly anything else: without new folks replacing those who leave us for one reason or another (at the age of the Society, often due to death, sadly), we aren't going to survive in the long run. And if this causes even a few percent of our demos to not happen, that's real harm to the Society.

So I'm going to call Bad Idea here. Encouraging folks to do voluntary writeups, sure, particularly if after-the-fact is fine. But mandatory paperwork for demos is actively harmful, and should be scrapped.

All of this is purely IMO, but I'll claim a little moral high ground here: I suspect that I have been directly involved with more demos than anybody else in the Society. (Well north of a hundred, at least -- I was Carolingia's point person for college outreach for a long time, and was thus involved with a large number of demos per year for a couple of decades, and taught many people how to run them.)