Re: Structure
Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2018 8:25 am
I don’t think that the selection document should become a distraction here. When you cut out the surrounding fluff and examine what it actually dictates, I don’t actually agree that it is an undemocratic relic we should disregard. If you’ll forgive my slight re-ordering in the below summary, the document effectively says:
1. The England captain must have played in a Eurobowl. We select our captain by the end of the year before a EB, and if we have more than one candidate for the post, we select via a blind vote (simple majority). To have a vote on stuff*, you must be English and have played in one NAF tournament in the prior 12 months
2. The captain selects the team subjectively from available candidates based on gaming skill, contribution and participation. It is announced in June
3. It is recommended that available candidates have played plenty, have attended 5 NAF tournaments in the year prior to selection and have made an effort to travel in Europe
I don’t think I’ve left any actual rules out there? I appreciate I've been pretty heavy with the editing of the surrounding text. The bits I’ve highlighted in bold were voted on by the community in 2017. The underlined bits came in during my captaincy (so 2013/4) or later. The bits that have never changed have never really been contentious; when you give the community a vacuum and ask ‘how would you pick Team England’, you are bound to get a variety of responses. However, if it actually came to it, I would defend point two as the best system quite vociferously. It’s certainly never been contentious in the way that the start of point one has been.
So, while the document was indeed written in 1847 by a slack handful of interested parties, it is not unlike Trigger’s mop. It’s not like the actual functional bits have never been challenged, updated or otherwise democratically decided upon.
I am not interested in defending the status quo for the sake of defending it, or because it’s generally quite nice to me. Indeed, I was pro-change in 3/3 of the votes we held last year. That said, just ripping up the last decade or so of democratic process and binning off some very recent votes because we have moved home and there is a bit of a vacuum at present seems somewhat perverse. At the very least, re-writing the document and changing any of the stuff very recently voted upon would seem anti-democratic and pretty insulting to those that voted?
Anyway – that put to one side, back to the topic at hand. The means by which we challenge or add to (the document only deals with EB selection, really) this stuff was the thrust of my OP, rather than what this stuff actually is. While I disagree with Geoff's post in some areas, I think he’s fairly summarised the three options available to us in terms of setting an ongoing structure for TE matters. Do we decide things in future via community vote on the forum, via an elected (?) committee or does the captain just sort things out, ad hoc? Add in timescales (frequency and timing of decisions) and voting specifics and you get to where we need to be.
I think this likely needs some wider input before we sort it out. It’s a narrow thread at present. I’m not saying ‘brilliant, let’s tread water and never do anything’, but I do think it’s worth seeing if we can’t hook in some more views before we think about an actual decision. Two or three loud people and then a vote isn't a comfortable way of leading into setting a framework. I do think it's important to do this stuff the right way around if we can. Yes, some of us are super keen on widening the pool of potential captains, myself included, but that's the sort of thing we can rip into with a bit more confidence and sense when a suitable structure is in place.
*I actually think this decision was 'play one NAF tournament in the previous 12 months to have a vote on anything TE related' and it was transposed into the document into the 'voting for a captain' bit alone. Probably not super-important for the vote over the way, but strictly speaking it should be in play. /dull procedural shizzle
1. The England captain must have played in a Eurobowl. We select our captain by the end of the year before a EB, and if we have more than one candidate for the post, we select via a blind vote (simple majority). To have a vote on stuff*, you must be English and have played in one NAF tournament in the prior 12 months
2. The captain selects the team subjectively from available candidates based on gaming skill, contribution and participation. It is announced in June
3. It is recommended that available candidates have played plenty, have attended 5 NAF tournaments in the year prior to selection and have made an effort to travel in Europe
I don’t think I’ve left any actual rules out there? I appreciate I've been pretty heavy with the editing of the surrounding text. The bits I’ve highlighted in bold were voted on by the community in 2017. The underlined bits came in during my captaincy (so 2013/4) or later. The bits that have never changed have never really been contentious; when you give the community a vacuum and ask ‘how would you pick Team England’, you are bound to get a variety of responses. However, if it actually came to it, I would defend point two as the best system quite vociferously. It’s certainly never been contentious in the way that the start of point one has been.
So, while the document was indeed written in 1847 by a slack handful of interested parties, it is not unlike Trigger’s mop. It’s not like the actual functional bits have never been challenged, updated or otherwise democratically decided upon.
I am not interested in defending the status quo for the sake of defending it, or because it’s generally quite nice to me. Indeed, I was pro-change in 3/3 of the votes we held last year. That said, just ripping up the last decade or so of democratic process and binning off some very recent votes because we have moved home and there is a bit of a vacuum at present seems somewhat perverse. At the very least, re-writing the document and changing any of the stuff very recently voted upon would seem anti-democratic and pretty insulting to those that voted?
Anyway – that put to one side, back to the topic at hand. The means by which we challenge or add to (the document only deals with EB selection, really) this stuff was the thrust of my OP, rather than what this stuff actually is. While I disagree with Geoff's post in some areas, I think he’s fairly summarised the three options available to us in terms of setting an ongoing structure for TE matters. Do we decide things in future via community vote on the forum, via an elected (?) committee or does the captain just sort things out, ad hoc? Add in timescales (frequency and timing of decisions) and voting specifics and you get to where we need to be.
I think this likely needs some wider input before we sort it out. It’s a narrow thread at present. I’m not saying ‘brilliant, let’s tread water and never do anything’, but I do think it’s worth seeing if we can’t hook in some more views before we think about an actual decision. Two or three loud people and then a vote isn't a comfortable way of leading into setting a framework. I do think it's important to do this stuff the right way around if we can. Yes, some of us are super keen on widening the pool of potential captains, myself included, but that's the sort of thing we can rip into with a bit more confidence and sense when a suitable structure is in place.
*I actually think this decision was 'play one NAF tournament in the previous 12 months to have a vote on anything TE related' and it was transposed into the document into the 'voting for a captain' bit alone. Probably not super-important for the vote over the way, but strictly speaking it should be in play. /dull procedural shizzle