pennsicdance: An Apology

[Tibicen]

> And apologies are owed elsewhere as well.  I know that trying to pick up
> the pieces of the Pennsic Pile at Pennsic really made the first week of
> Pennsic hard on Greg.  I had promised Greg that folks in the Debatable
> Lands would take care of revising the Pennsic Pile.  We had even made
> progress on it, until Sol moved away.  She had assured both Greg and
> myself that things were going apace, but mundane life (she got married in
> July) got in the way and suddenly she realized she was not going to be
> able to finish.  

Yes, and that was in some significant degree my fault -- I had
promised to help and got eaten by life, for which I sincerely
apologise.

One of the things which this has particularly motivated me to think
about is ways to make people -- most especially me :) -- redundant.
If I get run over by a bus, my pieces of the puzzle should be
publically availabe enough other people should be able to find them
and run with them. Something perhaps we should all think about.

> Now, the issue is, how do
> we keep the improvement going?  How do we keep developing?  

It's time for us to think about democracy.

I'm not an enormous fan of democracy, per se.  But right now, right at
this very instant, we have a treasure and a problem.

The treasure is that we -- that amorphous group called the "pennsic
dance community" or the "pennsic dance scene" or as I like to think of
it the "Pennsic Dancemasters' and Dance Musicians' Guild" (for that is
surely what we are in all but name) -- have a level of "member by-in"
which most SCA projects would sell their mothers for.  That is to say,
we have a big bunch of people who feel invested in this community and
it's collective work, who care about what happens to dance at Pennsic,
who have a sense that they want to make dance at Pennsic their work.

The thing is, we are at a cusp of our coallescing.  We are right at an
important break point.  People are giving a lot, and want to be able
to give more.  But one of the things hanging over them is the idea
that they have no sure sense of *say* in how things gets done.  People
don't want to invest a lot of themselves in something in which they
have no control at all. 

We have a couple really pointed examples of that, I think right now.

At Pennsic, we had a meeting to discuss plans for next year, and I
think that meeting went very well and had a lot of enthusiasm and
energy going forward.  Then when we got on the list, Greg told us
that, essentially the decisions we made were null and void (I'm not
sure that Greg realizes that is what his post meant to us).  I think
the group was pretty shocked.  We thought we -- the
scene/community/guild -- had gone about its business as we have for a
few years now and made perfectly legitimate decisions, only to be told
"You (collectively) don't get to make those decisions."

Similarly, we have this mess with the "head of musicians" position,
which you all read right here.

And that's the problem.

So I'm asking, because I think it really does matter, that we figure
out how we decide who does what, and come up with a method which feels
adequately fair that we can live and work with it.  And I don't think
appointment meets that standard.

And that means figuring out who does and does not get a say in
whatever method we use, and if that doesn't daunt you... just wait.

Think for a moment about the idea of making decisions at Pennsic.
Should Greg not have a say because he wasn't at the meeting?  There's
a certain virtue in saying "be at the meeting or you don't get any
input"; it keeps things simple, it rewards putting in the effort to be
there, it encourages face-to-face communication.  I'm not saying it's
a wrong thing to do.

But if we're going to decide "The year you miss pennsic is the year
you don't get a say, no matter how much prep work you did, no matter
how much you've contributed previous years" then I want us to *say*
that, and make it clear so everyone *knows* what the rules of the game
are.  

Perhaps it sounds odd to people that what I'm saying is that the group
needs to formalize a collective decision making process, to carry the
work we're doing to the next level.

But that's exactly what I'm saying.  I'm saying that when everyone
gets some say, even a tiny bit, in how we plant our garden, everyone
is more content to pick up a hoe.  Or a power screwdriver as the case
may be.  When people are told they don't have any say, but are welcome
to work if they want to, they'll go find other gardens.

I think a lot of folks here feel the way we do things isn't
particularly fair to anyone, and it's rather loosy-goosy, and that's
not a comfortable environment to make commitments in.  Maybe democracy
isn't the answer, but we need something a bit more formal than we have.

-- Tibicen