Lamin's RSFC Proposal

This document describes my proposals for the future of the RS, were I to be elected as the RSFC.

Who Am I

RS Background

I'm Lamin Zykara, and I joined the RS in March 2000. I've been around and done a lot of things in my time, so I suggest you check out my wiki page. Some of my bona fides:

• Renegade Fleet Second Officer
• Minister of External Affairs
• Chief of Staff
  • Major projects included the Celestial Fury competition, coordinating a web chat with Aaron Allston, and working with IO to add the current promotion system (where a citation is included) and medals system (which tracks the reason for the medal being awarded).
• High Command Alderman
• Minister of Justice

Other Leadership Experience

Outside of the RS, my big activity has been with Civil Air Patrol, which is a non-profit military auxiliary in the USA. I've commanded a squadron (akin to being the Executive Director of a local non-profit chapter) of about 40 people, run some large activities (national level activities with 200-300 participants and large budgets), and contributed to our national policies.

Professionally, I have a master's degree in public health and a master's degree in bioethics, and I serve as a clinical data manager and research information support professional for a major university. In my role there, I'm usually a lead clinical data manager for major multi-site clinical research projects and FDA-regulated clinical trials.

A Discussion of the RS

Having been in the RS since 2000, I've observed that the RS has essentially always had three major pillars (the three Cs):

• Community
• Content
• Competition

When the RS was first formed, we provided essential services to a much different Internet. We provided a united community for Star Wars gamers, we gave Star Wars gamers new content for their games (X-Wing, TIE Fighter, XvT, and so on), and we gave a framework for competition. The RS and other clubs provided a structure for competitions, both internally and externally. The Minos Cluster Battles, Outer Rim Wars, and Celestial Fury gave gamers a way to play Rebellion vs. Empire, while the internal competitions let squads jockey for bragging rights.

Fast-foward to today, and the scene has very much changed. Competition and clan features are built into a lot of games, removing the need for as much of the outside "organized competitions". Digital delivery gives us built-in social networks alongside our gaming (like Steam), which carves away at our community aspects. And while we can still produce new content, a lot of the games that use that content are now more than 10 years old, with very small markets.

A recurring question that we've faced over the past few years in the RS has been whether we are a gaming club that has a Star Wars focus, or a Star Wars club with a gaming focus. As the games that the RS was founded on - the space flight sims - have aged, and fewer and fewer new Star Wars games have fit into our paradigm, we've drifted somewhat aimlessly. For awhile, we focused hard on the fictional side of the club, and that bore great fruits, but ultimately was difficult to sustain. When The Old Republic came out, we hoped that might foster a revitalization of interest, but ultimately the game was simply not that great. All along, we've felt concerned that we're not active, and that we're falling apart.

I am going to suggest two things here. Firstly, I think we discuss "activity" within our old paradigm. We are stuck in the mindset of the old RS, the one where we did ITODs, competed internally and externally, built new flight sim missions, and so on. The RS in 2014 may need to shed some of our 1999 ideas of what being active means in order to work in today's world. Our old business of competing - the leaderboards, the monthly missions, the ORWs - just isn't relevant in 2014 the way it was in 2000.

Secondly, if I take an inventory of what the RS has today, I come up with this: an awesome community. Ultimately, I know that I hang around the RS because I have awesome, lifelong friends that I met through this club. Those people keep me engaged and make me want to build the RS into something better. Talking to those people - on email, on chat, in game - motivates me and gives me energy. We've got a core community that's awesome and worth nurturing and growing.

So, of our three Cs, if we have the community - at least at the core - and if competition isn't as big as it used to be, what does that leave us? Content. What brings in traffic and new members? Cool content. What gives people a shared feeling of purpose? Making and contributing to cool content. The RS needs to be producing content for others. We can see the success of this in what Cody has done with our social media presence, and our writing and fiction work has always been solid. We have the great community and we have a lot of creativity, so now we need to focus it on content production. On an organizational level, we need to have content we produce, nurture the creativity of members and give them ways to produce more content and to share it with the world.

Cody has the channels ready for us. It's almost February 2014, which gives us a little under two years before the next Star Wars movie comes out. If we can put the content out through the channels, those two years will build us into something incredible.

My Plan

Obviously, it's impossible to detail every single thing that I would do if I am elected the Fleet Commander. With that said, this is a broad overview of some of the things I'd do if elected the next Fleet Commander, broken into a few general sections.

Identity

As I said above, the RS is a community first and foremost. We've been a Star Wars gaming club for our whole existence, but ultimately, we're more Star Wars club than gaming club. A person might buy X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter or X-Wing Alliance and play them at home, but it takes a certain level of Star Wars fanaticism to go out, join a club, and do all the other things that membership in the RS entails. Time has taken away our games to a large extent, but I don't think it's taken away our identity as a Star Wars group.

So, I'd answer the question of "Are we a Star Wars club with a gaming focus, or a gaming club with a Star Wars focus?" by saying "We're a Star Wars club, period." We're always going to do gaming, but if we want to grow into the modern age, we need to be more wedded to our Star Wars identity than our gaming identity.

Platforms and Core Activities

Gaming

Right now, we have platform coordinators (PCs) for several different games. if we approach the RS as a Star Wars club first of all, then gaming is only part of the many things we should be doing. Accordingly, I'd identify a single Gaming Coordinator who would head up all gaming activities for the RS, and who could have whatever staff they needed. This would also mean that any game would be open for RS members to play in, rather than being strictly focused on Star Wars games. If 10 RSers want to have a Civilization V tourney, let's do that! The community's interests, as expressed through the Gaming Coordinator, would drive our gaming activities.

One big paradigm change that this would present is the idea of squad competition, leaderboards, and sessions, which have been integral to the RS for many years. Again, I caution us against being too tightly wedded to judging our success based on those old measures. If we want to have a tournament in something, we should, but ultimately we should focus on the community aspects. This means a Gaming Coordinator who's in touch with the rest of the membership, and a lot of friendly, casual gaming between members. If two RS members play Minecraft together, I count that as a win because our community is interacting and having fun. I don't think of it as "Well, that's outside of our games, so it doesn't count!"

Role Playing

One part of the RS that has been trucking along successful for many years has been the ABG. This is a great example of content being produced by the RS right now. We built the game world, we build the campaigns and the rules and the system that makes it all work, and then we play in that world. I'd leave this untouched and have it simply continue to be a shining example of how the RS can produce and market content.

Fiction

As a former member of the Aurora Force, I have written my fair share of fiction (some of it decent, some of it cringe-worthy), and so fiction is near and dear to my heart. Previous FCs have shown us that fiction, when integrated in to the RS proper, does great things for the immersion and community of the club. To me, the biggest limitation of our fiction writing has been that we have kept it internal - we have simply written back and forth to each other. I'd like to see a Fiction Coordinator who worked with writers to produce content that we syndicate via a blog. So, a 52-week story series (essentially a short novella) coordinated by one officer, but collaboratively written by anyone who wanted to contribute. Of course, we can keep our other fiction writing (run-on stories via forum post or email, et cetera), but I think that well-written fiction that we can syndicate would be a real win-win-win for us. It would give Cody something great to push on our feed, it would unite people and make their writing feel important as it became part of the RS "canon", and it would draw in more writers.

Non-Fiction

This is already what Cody, in some ways, is doing with his social media work. We have a loyal subscriber base and we put out content on a regular basis (some of it original, some of it reshared); we should expand on this. In my world, we'd have a Non-Fiction Coordinator (or something similar) which would operate almost like a regular blog, making cool content. We could have writers covering the run-up to the new Star Wars movie, developments in Star Wars gaming, et cetera. Depending on Cody's opinion, I'd even see this as really being his role already, rather than as an FC "staff officer"; he's really coordinating different projects. I see this as being essential in the run-up to the next movie, as there's tons of room for analysis, rumors, speculation, and other discussions about the future of Star Wars with the new films coming up.

Incubator

Similar to our existing Miscellaneous Coordinator, I'd have an officer who headed an Incubator, where RSers with ideas could get together and work on things. This person would connect the FC to these teams of two or three RSers that have some specific interest, making sure that they get leadership and resources that we can supply while also keeping the FC and the rest of the club informed on each person's cool little project. Stuff in the Incubator could be (just ideas off the top of my head):

• Game mods
• In-house web games
• Fan-fiction movies (if people have interest)
• Music, graphics, art (perhaps the old RSI could return??)
• In-person meetups or convention attendance, cosplay / uniform design, et cetera
• Really, anything that people are interested in and want to work on

The incubator is designed to let each and every RS member be creative in a way that makes sense for them, and to connect each person with other people who might be able to help them. A lot of stuff in the incubator might never go anywhere, but that's okay. The whole point of having the incubator is having a safe place where each RSer can do something creative for the club.

Governance & Organization

I have something of a reputation for being a bylaws stickler on the HC, which I readily accept. After all, I am a Minister of Justice and had a big hand in writing the most recent version of the bylaws. My personal background as an officer in a military auxiliary, a former member of the judiciary at my university, a sitting RS Minister of Justice, and a guy with a degree in philosophy, basically guarantees that I put a lot of thought and time into writing up the documents that govern any organization I lead. As a leader, I'm often a structure and process guy, who ensures that we have a system in place to help everyone do the mission.

(As an aside, there's a form of game called a nomic, where you play by changing the rules. I could see this being something I'd try to start with fellow RSers!)

With all that being said, in my mind the most important thing for a new FC to do is to lead, right off the bat. That means setting up measurable projects in each of the areas I talked about above and seeing them to fruition. When we revised the bylaws the most recent time, the goal was to give the FC the authority and autonomy to lead the RS as an executive. I think that I can do a lot without having to even touch the bylaws as they are right now, and so they are not going to be my first focus. There are certainly things that I might want changed, and I think a lot of folks can agree that it's time for a revision or possibly even a total rewrite. But that can be done thoughtfully, over time, after other activities are underway.

Infrastructure

In keeping with the idea of the RS making new content and being a community, I've already been talking with other leaders about how our website works presently and how we'd like it to work. As a new FC, one of my key focuses will be on branding and outward appearance. If we are going to shift focus and produce content, we need to ensure that our primary method of public communication is updated and suited to what we're transmitting. To that end, these are some of the strategic questions I'd engage with my staff (RSXO and RSIO) regarding the website:

• Create a blogging system of some kind / update the news system to deliver content in standards-compatible ways. If we publish content that we want to share via social media, we should do it well.
• Examine what we want the site to look like, both publicly and privately. Pare down and clear out a lot of the old material (keeping it for historical record, of course). Obviously, this is a huge task itself, but at the bottom line it involves working with the IO and other club leaders on streamlining the website.
• Keep the roster database and the features that we need the most, but expand it to include more of a social network and more of a project management system. In specific:
  • With competitive gaming of the old sort (XvT missions, et cetera) being less important to the modern RS, a lot of the old features of the roster DB may not be as useful for us now. Rather than letting the DB drive our organization, we need to have what our needs are drive the development. My vision is:
    • Your RS profile remain largely similar in terms of recognizing promotions, medals, and other achievements. It's your profile, it shows the awesome things you've done.
    • Keep the chain of command in place, in that each person has a squadron CO who handles their general promotions and awards and checks in with them to make sure they're doing okay.
    • Add in project management features to support allowing creativity to occur at the lowest level. This means letting members request new projects and having each project have the tools to manage it. For instance, let's say that you want to create the Left Handed Washing Glove Project. You put in the request, the Miscellaneous / Incubator Coordinator approves it, and now you're the Project Director. You can edit the project, invite other people to join it, give them project titles, and so on. You get a wiki or a simple internal website, a place to share files, maybe some kind of project or ticket tracking.
    • This is more of a thought that occurred while I was writing this up, but as we update the RS we probably want to revamp how the medals system works, with all the old medals going into some kind of historical system.
• Investigate what the best use of our time, treasure, and effort is in terms of web hosting, et cetera. The RS is supported by the generosity of several members and we have an obligation to make sure we use their money well. We need to make sure we have:
  • Enough server to do everything we want to do.
  • No more server than we need to do what we want to do.
  • Build what we need, but not necessarily everything we need.
    • On this, I want to say that we have some of the coolest, best programmers I've ever known. But I live in fear of the fact that if they all left at once, we could be in serious trouble with our website. I want to make sure that our IO and his team work on the things that only we can make. If we need a blog platform, and Wordpress will work, maybe we roll Wordpress. I'll generally defer to the IO and their team on these things, but I want to make sure we're asking the questions.

Time Frame

I know that Cody asked each of us for a vague idea of where the RS is in 5 years. Rather than pulling something out of a crystal ball, I'll instead talk about my own personal timeline. If I become the RSFC, I would be operating on roughly a two-year time period. My goal would be to run the organization until I could sit in a movie theater, preferably in full RS Service Dress Uniform, and watch Star Wars VII. I think that period - just shy of two years - would give me the time I need to get the RS moving in the right direction, find at least one and possibly two potential successors to me, and build a lasting legacy.

In two years, where do I think we'll be? My vision is for us to be a go-to source for Star Wars news, analysis, and rumors, with a thriving fiction story running, a healthy RPG section, and a group of dedicated gamers who love playing together. That's where I absolutely think we'll be in two years. If the incubator really takes off, maybe we'll be hosting a huge web game, or showing "Republic Shield: The Movie", or showing up to take on the 501st at conventions across the globe! But at a minimum, we'll be a healthy community, united around loving Star Wars, and proud to say that we're RS members.

Conclusion

I know this is a lot to read, but I hope that each of you now knows me a little better, and understands where I'd like to take the RS. I'm facing some stiff competition for the slot of RSFC, but I think that I have a lot to offer the RS, and hope that you'll agree. I'm more than happy to address any questions, and I can't wait to see what the future holds for us.