STF

Proposal: Automate Fleet Commanders Out of Existence

Posted July 31, 2019, 8:14 a.m. by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) (Joe P)

Problem: There is a debate ongoing about what Fleet Commanders ought to be doing and who should be a Fleet Commander. Although very few people have actually commented, it seems as though the debate is between people who think the Fleet Commander should be doing lots of things that are not necessarily being done now but were intended to be done by the authors of FCOMM (whether or not those intentions are clear from the text), and people who think that the Fleet Commander should really just be doing the reports every month, otherwise letting COs do pretty much whatever they want and not really doing much beyond affirming those decisions.

Additionally, this club has a problem in that there is work to be done to keep it going, but too few people are willing or able to do it. The club is organized in such a way that assumes that skilled manpower is always available to perform all necessary administrative tasks, yet that has been not the case for a while now. The decline in interest in the Star Trek franchise has also led to a decline in people being interested in being members of this club, which in turn has lead to a decline in people volunteering to keep this club going. That, and there is a pervasive attitude among relatively new members that their experience in the club should be solely about their own personal fun. This belief is perfectly fine from the point of view of an individual but really not very helpful for replenishing the pool of volunteers as people who have served in roles a long time look for newer people to replace them. Plus, this attitude creates a sense of entitlement towards never feeling any negative thing ever in the club, which is bad for roles like Fleet Commander where difficult conversations are eventually necessary to resolve the conflicts that inevitably happen.

The result is, regardless of what is actually desired, we’re slouching towards the model where the Fleet Commander just pushes paper once a month and doesn’t do much else. I submit to you all, that this is waste of human potential. This club needs men and women who are interested in creating a future, and we cannot afford to waste them doing tedious things that can be done by machines.

Proposal: If the Fleet Commander position exists solely to report AWOL status to the President, and to publish monthly reports, then there is no need to have human beings do these tasks and they can be automated away entirely.

We already aggregate reports from COs, XOs, and GMs, as part of creating the Fleet Report. Right now that requires human intervention from the Fleet Commander to publish. Instead of this, it is possible to have the software publish the report to Command automatically at a scheduled time.

We already have mechanisms to determine if command level personnel are AWOL, notably among them the status column / Master Roster. It is possible to have the status column checked on a periodic basis (e.g. daily) by the site software and send out emails to anyone required in the event that command level staff are AWOL.

From a purely technical point of view, these features would require the addition of some form of task scheduling to Exodus. Depending on the approach we would take for that (some solutions are easy to implement, but less flexible, others are very flexible but very complicated), that might require two to four weeks of work. After that, the actual tasks themselves would only take a day to implement.

If this is acceptable, and really captures our entire understanding of what Fleet Commanders do, then we could eliminate all Fleet Commanders and Assistant Fleet Commanders. This would free up 10 people who could then find other ways to help the club out. All of the conflicts and other problems that they deal with could just be handled by the President directly, since that’s how a lot of these things go anyway these days.

Discussion: The benefit of this is that we would not be wasting people doing things they don’t seem to want to do. The downside of this is that we would be eliminating one of the traditional avenues for people to help out around here.

Plus, it would have the added negative effect of removing many checks on the President’s power; decisions that require agreement between two people would essentially become unilateral decisions by the President. A cynic may argue that that’s how they all are anyway, but at least under the current system the President has to fire their FComm if they don’t agree on something but want to do it anyway, which is a helpful signal to the rest of the club that something foolish is in progress.

This would require effort from TECH to implement, however the effort from TECH would be small compared to the wasted effort of people acting endlessly like automatons year after year when they didn’t have to.

If you’ve actually read this far, I will admit that I am not actually convinced that this is a good idea in an ideal world; I think it’s only a good idea if we’re stuck with FComms that do the minimum of pushing paper around. I want to have a world in which we have men and women who act like men and women instead of robots, but that might not be the world we live in.

Joe


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