Posted by Fleet Captain Geoff Joosten (Gamemaster Director) in Proposal: Automate Fleet Commanders Out of Existence

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Proposal: Automate Fleet Commanders Out of Existence
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

On the note of report automation, could we get that for the QDepts too? Lord knows I hate having to compile the report in word and submit it when the FComms have a slick tool.

A QDir has actually made requests to automate several aspects of their report (I bet we can guess which one!). It is possible because the things that they report on involve data that is already captured by the system, and thus could be aggregated in a somewhat straightforward way. If you have information like that, then yeah, I don’t see why I not.

It would probably have to wait until after I replace the GM Archive, which I assume you’d prefer to have done first. ;)

Back to your proposal: It seems very Swiftian if I am being honest, to the point that I am not entirely sure if you are being serious or not. Prima facie, I agree with your logic. If the answer to the question of what they should be doing is file monthly reports, conflict resolution, and keeping tabs of command level AWOLs then yes automate it. For that matter eventually we wouldn’t need most of the departments as PDept just does placements based on codifiable rules, GMDept is mostly just a licensing and archival body, EDept are glorified librarians. SOX is just a specialized FComm. Thanks to the wonders of technology we could reduce it to the Pres, Veep, and one or two aids and TECH.

Since several other people also seem to be confused as to whether or not this is a kind of satire, I will attempt to clarify: The proposal is exactly as serious as the idea that the FComm is someone who should (or does) just push paper every month. If that’s what people really want the FComm to be, I’m more than happy to actually do the work to realize that particular vision in this particular way.

I think people like you, Daniel, and Krys read it as a brilliant satire because you guys don’t take the idea of FComm-as-a-paper-pusher seriously; that model sounds to you as comically inadequate and missing a lot of implicit (or for that matter, explicit) expectations of what a Fleet Commander is, so this proposal reads like a reductio ad absurdum that I’ve created to make everyone who thinks that way seem silly. I haven’t talked to Matt Bernadin about this idea yet, but I bet he finds this intriguing and not-silly. I haven’t talked to Steven Sigle or Kate about the idea either, but I bet they wouldn’t like the proposal, because although their posts on this subject kind of maybe sound like they think FComms should just push paper, I think their actual vision involves a human component as being important and necessary; it’s just might look different from what Dan thinks is important and necessary (and I think if that’s the case, it would be productive to nail down exactly what that is, because it might be something we’re not doing enough of). Your entire (excellent) post about how the role is empowered is also relevant here.

So, it’s an extreme proposal, because it literally does take a particular vision FComm to its logical extreme. Whether this is extremely absurd or extremely awesome is what I’m interested in finding out.

On a deeper more serious level , and one that doesn’t employ the slippery slope fallacy, I disagree with it. It is a good way for people to get involved and is a visible role, heck I have used being FComm as leadership experience on a resume before. Maybe I am just an older member, reminiscing on the good old days, but what is wrong with just having the president holding the FComms accountable for their actions and installing people who can actually do their job? I can work with ignorant. Ignorant just means some coaching is needed to help them grow. I can’t abide lazy.

Geoff

What’s wrong with that as an idea in abstract? Nothing. Sounds great to me.

How often do we get this, in actual reality? I think less often that we’d like, to the point where I don’t think we can be always content to say “the problem is that Person X did a bad job at (whatever caused the problem), and the solution is to replace them with Person Y and all people whose inherent characteristics are similar to Person Y’s.” It’s very easy to say that, and it might even be true if we run into this sort of situation only once in a long while.

I became a CO in what we now call “Black Fleet” in 2011, and even back then the joke among certain Fleet 6 COs was that the ships in that fleet were in good shape in spite of their FComms instead of because of them, because the FComm was almost always absent. That hasn’t been the case for the entire 8 years I’ve been the CO of Europa, but I would say it’s been true for most of them.

– Joe