Summer 2022 Executive Meeting

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General

The Executive team, made up of the Officers and Directors, meet four times a year to check in as a full group, review our progress together, and make some strategic decisions.

The Directors and Officers met on July 16 for our quarterly (Summer) strategic update meeting and multiple subjects were discussed, one of the most important being the budget for 2023.

The members of the Executive team in attendance were:

Announcements

Siera al'Cere joined the team as the new Director of Marketing!

Notes

Amyrlin Seat

The Executive Meeting Discussion forum, which opens after each executive meeting for posting the notes from it, has been intended to be a short term information sharing method and has not consistently remained that way. Going forward, this forum will be open with new meeting information for 4 weeks. If at the end of that time there is still discussion being held on one or more topics, those topics will be moved to the Community Feedback forum for continued discussion/debate. This allows the informational forum to be cleaned out for the next meeting while allowing continued discussions if the topic is unsettled.

Since the Community Feedback Forum is an opt-in forum, the executive team is committing to ensure any topics we are requesting feedback on are at a minimum cross-posted in Site Announcements. Additionally we will be including some standard text for how to join the Feedback Forum or if joining this forum is not desired prompting direct communication with the officer/director making the post or your membership admin. Additionally, links to the anonymous feedback form will be provided for individuals who want to provide feedback while remaining anonymous. Items which are expected to be extra sensitive or contentious (such as major changes) will be cross-posted in the Membership department forum first to provide notice and an additional way to be informed of the item under consideration.

The Executive Team is going to start developing performance indicator metrics. The main goal is to simplify completion of the annual report. Each department will present their metric ideas at the next meeting. This is currently being developed as an internal tool and is not being designed for additional sharing to the site at this time. That possibility is on my radar, but is a farther down the road idea not a starting point.

Keeper of the Chronicles

The Annual Reports Project Manager and Survey Project Manager positions will be merged into a single admin role under Keeper to help and assist with both the Annual Reports and future surveys. This will be a new position and will help manage the workload of organizing data.

2021 Annual Report is under development. We may be able to pull together some of the data for 2020 at some later point, but it was felt the 2021 report was the higher priority to start with. These make-up reports are likely to not be as comprehensive as previous reports due simply to the fact that the Exec team has had so much turnover and some data may not be easy to reconstruct. Going forward, the expectation is information will be updated for the report quarterly in conjunction with the Exec Meetings.

Forum Restructure - The final list of forums based on feedback was shared in Site Announcements previous to the release of these notes for additional advanced notice. The changes will be implemented during the weekend on August 6, 2022.

Cordamora

+1 Bond Slots for Ajahs was voted and approved by all Ajahs. Effective immediately, all Red Ajah members are eligible for one bond, Green Ajah for three, and others for two. This does not change the ability to earn one additional bond based on merits.

Shatayan

The Fiscal Year 2023 budget was approved. The budget is the same as previous years with a few changes related to items discontinued because they were not being used or are no longer supported and increases in technology related costs including the costs to maintain the small number of critical email accounts (Officer, Board, and Directors only). As part of this budget update, the expenses for JordanCon will be broken out more granularly to show what we are spending for the Con, why we are spending it, and if we should reduce or increase these expenses starting in 2024.

Patreon is being actively worked on between Shatayan and Director of Outreach. We are currently looking at a Pro Account which costs 8% monthly income, transaction fees shared; additional 1% surcharge for non-US PayPal transactions. Additional information will be shared as it becomes available.

Archivist

Merits

Survey Feedback, Tracking breakdown of responses is below. At present, no changes to the structure of the merits is going to be pursued based on the feedback. This can be revisited in the future if more specific suggestions or more general interest in changes are demonstrated.

  • In general, we received 14-15 replies on the survey
  • Most people felt merits are not too hard
  • People who said they were too hard did not specify specific merits being too hard
  • One person felt the Mentor Merit should be removed
  • One person asked for information on what could qualify as an Epic Prank
  • A couple people said that they would be interested in a Merit Discussion Group

Discussion has happened about adding a 1-line description for Merits earned by nomination to explain what they are for, and possible examples of what would qualify on the main Merits page; (may or may not happen)

Potential Merits
  • Participation on forums
  • Participation in Discord
  • Participation/interaction with Social Media
Mentoring Merit

This was a specific concern based on both the potential that people could be "collecting" mentees in order to get the merit and the concern that some mentors may not be actively interacting with assigned mentees. The final resolution was that the merit will not be changed retroactively in any way but some additional tools will be put in place to ensure the Junior Members have the best possible experience. These tools will include a form in the Abandoned Corridor forum that JMs may use if they feel their mentor(s) are ineffective and would like a new mentor. Additionally, during the application for raising to Accepted/Soldier information will be requested from the member as to if they feel their mentors were effective.

Department of Events and Conferences

Update on Euro Party
  • Registration deadline is 7/21/2022
  • Smaller event than anticipated; three cabins have been canceled because of this
  • Melisande and Ahmyra will be reaching out to European members to hopefully increase interest in future years, i.e. change time of year
Update on Anni
  • Cutoff for deposit registrations is past
  • Catering contract done!
  • Vivianna/Katherine will be looking to assign committee heads end of July/beginning of August
  • Anticipate roommate assignments after registration ends

Department of Online Events

Guilds update

Alora Sionn is super excited to start work as the new Guild Coordinator!! She will be involving the other applicants in a think-tank in order to bounce ideas off of and develop the program. This includes Adina al'Mari, Ajailyn Morrivinna, and Nadezhda al'Lanahrin.

After Alora Gaidin was chosen as the Guild Coordinator, their position as Game Master will become vacant. More Game Masters will be hired in the near future.

Department of Marketing

Governance of the WoT TV show forum; this forum will be managed/moderated the same as the Book Forums with general moderation handled by Forum Moderators and spoilers moderated by the Director of Research and Records.

Tar Valon Talks
  • The team hopes to have their first podcast by the end of the year
  • New team has been hired and they are super excited about it!
  • Admin will be added (eventually) to manage the team
Card Development Team - official name will be Tar Valon Game Team; this will be a temporary team to help create the new TarValon.Net trading card game.

Department of Research and Records

The newly created position of Editor in the department has some interest, with four people already hired and looking forward to getting to work. The direction of the department is solid.

Department of Technology

  • New Xenforo updates were released a few days ago; this is a security update, will be scheduled in the (near) future.
  • We continue to use additional server space, and will look to decrease that in the future.
  • The backup server is completely dysfunctional right now, but we at least have weekly snapshots of things to use if needed.
  • Updates to the blog and MediaWiki still need to happen.
  • Dark forum skin is still in progress.