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Briallan
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re: Kinship Elections (Fall 2014)

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Hello, everyone! I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that our Kinship Structure document calls for our next elections to take place in a couple months. Specifically, the call for nominations for a kinship leadership panel of three people is set to take place on November 1, election of the new leaders occurs on November 8, and transfer of responsibilities to the new leaders takes place on November 15. The new leaders are in charge of appointing officers for the next year.

One reason I am writing you all so early (well ahead of the first of these events) is that I am proposing some changes to our kinship structure, and I would like us to discuss these changes well in advance of the election, since my proposed changes affect such things as the number of leaders to be elected.

The second reason for me writing you all now is that I would like to let you know that I will not be accepting nomination for leadership at the next election – so I hope that some of you will start thinking now about who would make for a good kinship leader for the year ahead.

The main reason that I will not be running for kinship leadership again is that I will be going to school full-time starting in late September, and this will affect my schedule quite a bit. While I do expect to continue playing LOTRO, remain active in the kinship (and in our band), and provide moral support for the new leadership, I expect to be in the game less regularly, which will make it hard for me to keep up with people’s activities and interests. Also, I have found it sort of difficult over the last year to be both kin leader and band leader for the Remediators, and I feel I need to make some changes with back-to-school looming.

Why I think our current kinship structure should change

One issue is that I no longer think the idea of a tri-leader panel is desirable. The basic reason we settled on a tri-leader panel is that, at the time, no one person felt that they wanted to take on the responsibility of being leader. So, the idea was that, by splitting the leadership among three people, the responsibility would be spread out among three people and would be easier to bear. While this seemed like a good idea at the time, I think in practice it makes the job of leader more difficult. Requiring that leadership decisions be made on a “consensus basis amongst the 3 leaders with advice from the officers and input from the members” (as our current structure calls for) basically resulted in us doing nothing on some important issues, like recruiting, since there was either a wide variety of opinions as to what we should do in some cases, or not enough people expressed an opinion to provide a “consensus” in other cases. Once I became sole leader, I sort of felt much more empowered to just make decisions, and either do things myself or delegate things to other people. So, I think the better approach is to elect a single leader, and then let them do their thing in as an efficient way as possible.

The potential problem with having only a single leader is that there is the danger that the leadership position becomes so time-consuming that no one will want to do it (which, as I mentioned, was the reason we originally decided to go with the tri-leader panel). We do need to find a way to make sure that the leadership position does not require a lot of someone’s time, but I think that there are better ways of achieving that than having a tri-leader panel. One way (which I'll discuss in more detail below) would be to delegate more responsibility to the officers than we have been doing so far.

New Structure Proposal

Basically, my proposal is that we go to a more standard LOTRO kinship approach, and have one Leader, one Successor, and as many officers as the leader thinks necessary to carry out the administration of the kinship. The function of the Leader (as I see it) is to keep in touch with the interests of the membership, appoint officers and assign them areas of responsibility, and to coordinate with the officers as needed so that kinship activities take place. However, it is the function of the officers (not the leader) to actually plan and carry out those activities. The Successor (also to be appointed by the leader) is to take over from the leader should the leader be unable to continue in the leadership role for some reason. I think the Successor would typically also have particular assigned responsibilities like the other officers (in other words, the Successor is essentially an officer who is willing to succeed to the leadership if needed).

There are three reasons that I am proposing this structure:

First, this structure is used by some very successful kinships like the Lonely Mountain Band (LMB). LMB is run by a leader (Harperella) but particular officers are in charge of particular kinship activities. Senior high level people run raids on a regular basis. Kiralynn runs the Windy Acres Ranch section of LMB that puts on various role-playing activities and runs the horse-racing activities that culminate in the Bree Cup. Byrcha and other members of the kinship each run one of the various bands (Andune Ensemble, BBB, and Old Vinyards) that the kinship operates. Weatherstock is run primarily by Floradine, I believe, but with significant assistance from other LMB members. LMB is a much larger kinship than we are, and I am not saying that we should attempt to do that many different activities ourselves, but I think their example shows that the idea of distributing responsibility is a model that works well.

Second, we have already tried this “distributed responsibility” idea and it has worked well for us. One particular event I am thinking of is the “Games” event, which was the week 2 assignment for this year’s Cousera course. I asked Bredhe to plan the event, Bredhe came up with a plan and submitted it for approval on the officer’s forum, and then Bredhe assembled a “cast” of people to handle various parts of the event: Siltharan and I arranged for the band to play at various stages of the event, Malvy both played in the band and rearranged the kinhouse furnishings to include the keg for the “sendoff” at the end of the event. Siltharan handled the bad jokes contest. I made a speech. We even enlisted people from outside the kinship to participate: Lady Ashigaru to do the trophy segment, and Krohkur and Nibun performed as solo musicians. Bredhe herself organized the backwards race and some other events. The result was a 2-hour long party that was very successful (and which we even repeated in the evening), but since we spread out the responsibility, I think everyone involved in planning it had fun, and no one felt that they were overburdened with the ‘work’ necessary to make it happen.

Third, spreading out the kinship administration functions among numerous people keeps the leadership position and the individual officer positions from being too time-consuming. This way, the leader doesn't need to feel that they are responsible for running all the kinship activities, and the amount of kinship administration that takes place is at a level that the individual officers feel comfortable with.

Officer responsibilities

So, what are the particular activities that the officers would be responsible for? I think these should be decided by the new leadership, by people who have an interest in helping out with kinship administration, and by the interests of the current active members. Some kinships are more musically inclined, some are more interested in raiding, others into organized role-playing on a kinship level; the interests of the kinship may vary in time with the natural ebb and flow of people active in the kinship. However I do have a couple general suggestions:

For one thing, I think that there are some administrative functions (like treasurer and maybe someone to keep the kinhouse chest in some sort of order) that are just practical things that we should do to. But I think the most important focus should be on having a variety of activities that the members can do together. Other people with long experience with kinships tell me that the biggest reason that people leave kinships is that “the kinship never did anything.” It is true that one attraction of any kinship is that people have developed friendships with each other, and they enjoy talking with each other on the chat channel, and so many people will stay just because of that alone. But I think we still need shared activities to both attract new members and keep old ones.

Also I think I think it would be helpful to set particular areas of responsibility for particular officers and to make it known to everyone which officers are responsible for what areas. If an officer has a particular agreed-upon area of responsibility, it seems to me that it is more likely that they will be doing things that assist in kinship administration than if they don't. One benefit is that it makes it clear to the officers themselves which officers will be active in which areas, so that we don’t have holes on one hand, or too much overlap on the other. It also allows the members to know who to talk to if they have suggestions about what they would like to see the kinship do in some area.

However, this does NOT mean that, once a responsibility is assigned to a particular officer, they are 'stuck' with it indefinitely if circumstances change; I can imagine, for example, that someone in charge of party planning might be too busy to plan a particular upcoming event, and so might either work with the leader to delegate that responsibility temporarily to someone else, or just cancel or postpone the event until he/she had more time. I think that it's important for officers as well as the leader to feel that they are doing things that are fun for them, and that they are not taking on some sort of job (or second job), and so the level of kinship activity would be more or less intense depending on the amount of time the leader, officers and other members feel that they want to spend on kinship functions.

Though I see the officers being “responsible” for particular areas, the more that our individual (non-officer) members involve themselves in these areas the better, since it's hard for the leader and officers to read people's minds or guess what things the individual members would be interested in. We have already had individual members plan group quests themselves (or suggest particular group quests to me and other officers), and I hope that will continue.

So, having given you my general thoughts on officer responsibilities, I do have a list of particular items that I think are reasonable things to consider as areas of officer responsibilities. Exactly which of these areas we focus on would be depend on the potential officers' interests, so we could discuss this in more detail after the next leadership election. Some areas might have more than one officer responsible for them (recruiting and group questing maybe?), while it's also possible that an officer might be responsible for more than one area if they had the interest and time.

Group Questing. This officer or officers would make sure that we are regularly running group quests or raids so that all kin members can participate. It doesn’t take too long to put these items on the calendar, but the officers in charge of this need to understand what levels people are, what times they play, and what particular group content they are likely to be interested in. For example, doing a group quest that both our American and European kinmembers can attend might involve running the event on a weekend afternoon (server time), or running the same event twice at different times.

Treasurer. Holds on to and disburses whatever we have in the treasury. Currently, this is only gold, but if we ever collect real money for some purpose, the treasurer would handle this as well.

Social Director. This would be any group activity that is not questing or deeding. Things like the week 2 games for the Coursera Online Games course. We could have theme parties (Xmas, Halloween, etc) or just occasional get-togethers with no particular theme. Maybe we’d have scavenger hunts, whatever, it depends on what's of interest to a substantial part of the kinship.

Kinchest Maintenance. When the course is in session, we should focus on keeping the kinchest full of useful items for new characters, such as crit-level crafted equipment for levels 10-30, and the earliest tiers of crafting materials; at other times the contents of the kinchest should be more balanced. Any items not needed by kin members can be sold at auction (if valuable), or just disposed of to NPC vendors.

Crafting. Who is in charge of this could do things like organize craft gathering sessions. There are probably a lot of other creative ideas to further kinship crafting activity that I just can’t think of right now.

Webmaster. There are plenty of things we could do to improve our website: remove ads (this would probably involve working with the treasurer to raise cash money to play for this); upgrade our website to a different provider that has such features as forum search and a better WYSIWYG editor for forum posts.

Outreach. The person in charge of this would expand and deepen our contacts with other kinships. The point is that we can expand the number of people available to join quests and raids, and provide additional types of events to our members that are organized by people other than our kinship. This person might follow the activity in the LOTRO Landroval forum and post there in order to make us more visible to other players on our server, and use that forum to make additional contacts with other kinships and individuals (and of course make such contacts in-game as well). So I see this function as supporting our various group activities (for example, we were able to get the required numbers of characters needed for some raids and full fellowship quests that we did recently, only because we grouped up with players from the Knights of the White Lady and other kinships we have close ties to).

Recruiting. This would involve being in-game on a fairly frequent basis during ‘recruiting season’ (when the Coursera course is in session), for the purpose of chatting with potential kin members and offering kinship invites to people from the course (and to anyone else who seems to be an appropriate candidate). We need a variety of people doing this since officers and potential candidates for membership all play at different times during the day around the world.

Leader and officer responsibilities when the course is in session

We are unique among other Landroval kinships in that one of our key functions is to support the students who take the Coursera Online Games course. One way this affects us is that our recruiting efforts are mostly focused on the students taking the class (on the other hand, most Landroval kinships are in continuous recruitment mode, but at a much lower level of intensity).

Another way this affects us is that our kinship activities focus on course activities while the course is in session, and reverts to more normal kinship activities the rest of the year.

One reason I am bringing this up is that it may seem that the leader and officers will be a lot busier during the period of time the course is in session (which, according to Prof. Clayton, may now occur twice a year instead of only once). However, I don’t think that the course being in session will necessarily be a particular burden on either the leader or officers going forward. The main reason is that, now that we have been thru the course once as a kinship, we have accumulated a lot of posts on various topics on both the Coursera course forums and on the Courserrim website. Since the course is unlikely to change much in the future, and the questions that new players ask are likely to be the same, for the most part we can simply save these posts and recycle them the next time the course is offered (I saved off all of mine from the most recent session of the course before the forums closed down). Most of the weekly mail I send out is simply some chatter and links to more detailed discussions on our website and other forums. So, I anticipate that, for future course sessions, our leadership will have a lot less extra work to so, since it’s essentially been done (the new player FAQs, various how-to posts in the Coursera forums, and the website news articles that accompany each week of the course are good examples of this).

And Finally …

I realize that this is a very long post – partly because I've been thinking about (and writing) this over the last month or so – so thank you for reading it all the way to the end :) Anyway, please let me know what you think about my proposal for changing the kinship structure – and if you have other ideas that you think might work better, please let us know! And please think about what kinship positions you might like to hold when the new terms of office start in November!



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Malvy
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Alyksandrei
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re: New Website?

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I have a little experience with WordPress and web design/maintenance, but I haven't tried to integrate forums before. If that is useful and you would like my assistance, just let me know!

Willamae
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re: Kinship Elections (Fall 2014)

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I think this sounds good :) Like Malvy said, whoever is elected leader should be responsible enough to handle things themselves, and members are wise enough to not need three leaders to manage their activities. Delegating tasks to officers is also a smart move, since different players enjoy different aspects of the game. One officer may love crafting, which can lead to lots of material swaps, etc set up by them, while someone else might really enjoy group questing and run two instances a week.

Anyway, enough examples. I definitely support this idea! And good luck with school, Bri :)



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