That actually sounds like a very reasonable argument for accepting Sean as the currently elected leader of the guild. However, it only works if there’s a specific time when we can expect to see the next election. So, at the very least, I think we need to establish the term length right now.
“A chief executive officer (CEO) is the highest-ranking corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of total management of an organization.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceo
Your wikipedia link goes on to clarify that it not only considers a dictator a head of power for a state (not a bureaucracy), as well as explains that in modern usage it “describes a leader who holds and/or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power.”
Anyways, historically doesn’t mean much. Three hundred years ago, you could have made the same claim about democracy.
And I agree with Poetigress. As for term length, I think asking Duroc for his opinion on that may just be the best way to handle it. He has more experience with the working of the guild than any of us, and can at least give us some reasonable time brackets to vote on. Does that seem reasonable?
Then please explain to me what is broken. The guild hasn’t changed. The membership criteria hasn’t changed. What it stands for hasn’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is someone different is running it and he is injecting some new ideas.
Sure. I’d be curious what Duroc thinks about term lengths. I think that SFWA does one year term lengths. (Though, I haven’t checked.) Six months would probably be too short. Two years might be too long. And a year and a half might get confusing with the elections moving back and forth between opposite times of year. So, I’d probably default to one year if I was picking.
I really don’t see the point of this to be honest. There is a different between someone stepping forward, and someone stepping forward that actually wants to do something. That IS something I experienced during my time running the guild. Someone can step forward all they like and be president, but if they don’t actually take it seriously or do something after the fact, it’s really pointless. So what happens if someone is elected for a year, and abandons it a few weeks or months in. And yes, things like that did happen. So do we suddenly run elections again? The way I see it, Sean stepped forward and has done something. That to me, is good enough.
I guess this discussion couldn’t have waited a slightly less awkward and uncomfortable time period. Now it’s just getting people angry with each other and arguing semantics. But hey, since we’re having it now…
I guess my only concern would be the lack of interest in the position. It’s one data point, sure, but right now the trend is that elections are basically unnecessary because the guild is still pretty small-time and mostly full of inactive members. So I can see a symbolic reason for having elections, I guess, to make some effort at being a marginally more professional organization… but in that case we’d still essentially be resorting to doing what Duroc did and just saying “Okay” to the next person who steps forward each time, or just officially renewing the term if the current leader wants to stay in the position. And what we absolute don’t want is candidates coming forward just so that there’s a competition; that’s both a waste of time and a danger that someone who honestly doesn’t have the time or inclination to run things ends up winning.
So is there some practical reason for this, or is it purely philosophical at this point? Because if it’s the latter I see no reason to be shunting this topic to the forefront of the discussion right now when we have more exciting and useful things to be working on, like the anthology. Putting out a professional publication is also a step toward making a more professional organization, and it also has the benefit of producing something concrete and useful. Whereas it’s easily arguable right now that having elected officials may not actually be a concrete or useful thing. So I guess I’m wondering what exactly the practical benefit of this election thing is going to be at this stage, and why we simply must decide on this right now.
Also might help for people to take a short break and cool down before any such decisions are made, huh?
I think that behaving professionally as an organization is a very important goal. If we aren’t striving for that, then I’m not sure what we are.
I second this thought wholeheartedly.
I still think we should think about what our mission is first, and then figure out what type of governance structure we need. We can evolve into having elected officials.
The purpose of the FWG is addressed on the webpage FAQ (http://www.furrywritersguild.com/faq). And, yes, we need to evolve into having elected officials. That’s what this conversation is working on. It sounds like right now, the only really important position to deal with is president.
I go to bed after a long day of work and an explosion happens. Very interesting.
My few points:
I completely agree with the idea of an election. This is a community and the community should decide who its leaders are. The question was posted of why should the anthology take precedent over an election right now. The reason is because the guild isn’t doing anything. Period. The majority of the members either aren’t active or don’t really care what’s going on with the guild and that’s a huge problem. The first step shouldn’t be squabbling about who is the one who gets to say yes to a final decision; it’s to what the hell is guild is doing and what kind of future we have.
Next I’d like to contest the fact that I was called a dictator. A dictator is someone that doesn’t consult anyone but himself when making decisions. Have I done that? No. With everything that I’ve introduced so far I have posted ideas in the forums and have asked expressly for everyone’s ideas and opinions. I have integrated those ideas and opinions with my own to create a more desired output. If I was a dictator, I would have just started projects, chosen how I personally wanted them done, and run them that way. There wouldn’t have been a collaborative ideas thread. There would have just been announcements saying that it was going to happen. Period.
I also don’t agree with the term CEO, though it’s quite a bit less of a hurtful term than ‘dictator’ is. As professional as people want this to be, it’s not a business and it never will be. We are not selling products to people; we are coming together as a group to make products. We are developing writers to create new products. We are promoting the products these writers already have. THAT is what I get from the FWG purpose statement on the FAQ page.
(On a side note, this shows me that I need to update the part of the page talking about submitting stories to include a link with the anthology.)
I do agree that the guild, as it stands right now, is a little broken. It’s broken because of the lack of support it’s getting. It’s broken because people are refusing to help fix it, which brings me to the main point I’d like to make. There’s one thing that we should look at doing before we start having elections with people who are running for the sole sake of running, not because they actually want the job.
We should start by looking at the members and who the hell actually wants to be here. If there are people in the guild that don’t want to be in the guild or don’t really care about being in the guild, they should get out. I’m not talking directly about the people who aren’t active on the forums; the forums aren’t the only part of the guild. I’m talking about the people who haven’t given a damn about being in the guild since they’ve been inducted. The guild isn’t just a list of cool people. It’s a community. If you don’t want to be part of the community then why are you in it?
Once we establish who actually wants to be here, then we can work on working with the people we have and really turning this into something good.
At its core, the FWG is a non-profit organizational community looking to promote the love of writing and the people who love to do it. This can be done in a variety of ways, whether that’s endorsing stories written by guild members, starting new projects in which people can participate, and by developing new writers to want to become guild members. Anyone who takes this guild as anything else is sadly mistaken.
Now for some personal notes.
While I received a nice assortment of thank-yous and all of that when it was first announced that I’d be taking over the guild, since then it’s been a plethora of nitpicking, animosity, and downright ungratefulness coming my way. I knew when I took this position that job would be one that had people criticizing my every word and frankly its nothing different than my day jobs. Anyone that wants to can go ahead and make negative comments about me; I really don’t care. I’m doing my best and am comfortable in knowing that these people who seem to be trying to push me out are really just saying they wanted the guild to die. I feel bad for these people.
On the contrary, I’ve had a small few who have really gone out of their way in helping me. I know a few who were talking about the new FWG in panels and in passing at Rainfurrest, who have been re-tweeting and re-posting things I’ve said left and right trying to draw people in, and who have been adamant in offering constructive criticism whenever possible. I thank these people.
My fiance reads some of these threads. He sits over my shoulder and asks why the hell I’m bothering with this. What possible outcome is worth all of this crap?
My answer to him is always the same. I believe in this community and I believe in the writers in it. I believe that the things we can do to help new writers and to help improve the image of the furry fandom as a whole outweigh my personal feelings.
I should lock this thread because this had gotten far out of hand, and on any other forum I would. However, because the issue is the fact that some are struggling with the issues of leadership I will keep this open to hear more thoughts on the matter. I will close this thread down if things continue to be out of hand, so keep the debate civil.
To end things, I’d like to thank the people in this thread who have supported me and the guild, even if Friday can’t spell the name ‘Sean’ correctly. =)
There will never be a time when this is a fun issue to address. There will never be a time that’s good. But it is an extremely important issue to address.
I’d also like to take a moment to point out that I’ve never actually questioned whether Sean should be the leader right now – I would just like to see elections installed, because I believe they’re essential for our stable future. I’ve never had any doubt that Sean would win any election we held right now. I think he would deserve to. But I think we need to hold elections. Otherwise, the next time we have this fight, it will happen when we actually are fighting over who should be the leader, and that would be waaaaaaay uglier. If this is what happens when the rabble-rouser (me) is pushing for elections but not actually a change in leader, I’d hate to see what would happen if someone tried to bring this up when the leadership itself was actually under contention.
Again, this is not and never has been meant as a personal attack on anyone, even people who disagree with me. I feel this is an important issue, so I’m advocating that we deal with it now, while we all actually agree on who our leader is.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the issue of setting up a democratic system; I really do. I just feel that the community inactivity issue needs to be taken care of first. My idea of how to do that is to release the anthology. Once it becomes apparent we’re actually doing something other than being names on a list, there’s more of a chance of other members starting to care about what we are doing.
I guess as far as member activity goes, the question becomes, what can the FWG give its members (and/or furry writers at large) that they can’t get as easily or better anywhere else?
So far the main thing IMO has been the market listings on the website (and the calls for submissions here on the forum), so we don’t have to keep up with furry publisher blogs and tweets and so on to find out about relevant calls for submissions.
I don’t have any other ideas at the moment other than what’s already been in this thread, but maybe just framing the question that way will help.
(At this point, to try to keep this thread on track now that it’s gotten to 4 pages, I think it’d be best to steer any more election discussion over to the Guild Power Structure thread, and try to return this one to promo discussion/ideas.)
Looking at it from that direction, the anthology doesn’t really even qualify as something that can’t be gotten as easily elsewhere. There are a lot of anthology calls in the fandom right now. Though, I guess, if it were restricted to only include stories from guild members, then it would qualify.
This is a really interesting way of posing the question, what can the guild offer its members? I liked having the ability to vote in an award be something that we offered, but the Coyotls are kind of falling by the wayside.
Something that Broad Universe does is that it will arrange readings at sci-fi cons for its members. That way, writers who don’t have the following to get a reading of their own can participate in a reading that’s hosted by a group they’re part of. I believe they’re called “rapid fire” readings. I got to read from “Otters In Space” at on at Orycon a number of years back.
Group readings would be cool. That way the audience would probably get a mix of authors they’ve heard of and ones they maybe haven’t.
As far as general promotion, what about maybe putting together a short ebook of writing articles/blog posts/essays by members (either on furry writing-specific topics or writing in general) and distributing it for free via Smashwords? I know a lot of the members would already have things ready to reprint, like blog posts we’ve made in the past, so we probably wouldn’t have to write anything new as much as just assemble what we already have, and it wouldn’t cost anything to publish it. Throw in some short bios in the back (with links to authors’ websites), along with links to the FWG site and forum, and we all get a little extra promotion while promoting the guild to new writers.
We could also go back to basics and distribute more flyers at cons.
(And I’m still hoping the Coyotls will make a comeback, though admittedly I have nothing concrete to base that hope on.) XD
The flyer idea is a good one, and it does work as that’s how I got a lot of artists for commissions.
I think it’s worth taking a moment to note that the Furry Writers’ Guild has been doing fine for the last several years, even if the forums tend to be quiet. It provides a valuable service simply in creating a goal for new writers to strive for – getting enough sales to be able to join – and in keeping up the market listings. Just last week at Rainfurrest, I heard a discussion about guild membership requirements by writers who were trying to figure out what more they needed to do to become eligible to be members. (Also, unless I’m mistaken, the list of members has grown significantly since I joined a few years ago.) So, we already attract the attention of aspiring writers simply by behaving professionally, even when we’re not working hard to promote ourselves.
Good point.
So it seems like a pretty clear thing that people want to discuss is incentives for FWG members. I’ve been thinking about this one for the last couple of days and haven’t really gotten that far.
I do like the idea of spreading the word more at cons. Fliers are a decent idea; can’t really hurt.
I’m going to be out of state this weekend with little to no forum access, so I’ll be able to think and view anything you guys have when I get back.