Should Ansteorra have a WWW Page?

[Leslie Miller]

> Should there be an Ansteorra page?  What should be on it?

Argh!  I tried to stay out of this, but, alas.... 

Much stuff snipped and rearranged:

> Contact info for the officers; I'm told I've endangered these
> people by posting that. 

I agree that posting addresses and telephone numbers 
should be pre-approved.  That's common courtesy, and it just makes sense.  
Same is true for any information/maps leading to private homes or 
residences.  Individual privacy must be respected.  My guess is that many 
(maybe even most) kingdom/local officers won't have a problem with it 
anyway.  If they do, then honor their wishes by not posting them on the 
web.  No big deal.

> Schedule of events; another reason to not
> join the SCA, says the Kingdom Chronicler.

First of all, if getting people to join the SCA (pay their dues) is such 
a high priority, then we all should have made a really big stink in 
*support* of pay to play, and in *support* of the three dollar 
non-member surcharge, when these things were the hot/going issues.  
These things were far more likely to "encourage" people to actually 
join the SCA than denying them easy-access event information.  
Since pay-to-play and the three dollar surcharge fell through, it 
seems to me like the "official" stance of the SCA (that we all have 
to live with whether we like it or not) is that we accomodate, to 
great extremes, people who do not/cannot afford to pay their memberships.  

Perhaps more to the point, I think that providing easy-access event 
information may just as easily encourage people to actually *come* to 
our events, participate in them, discover that they really like them, 
and *then* join the society.  But perhaps I'm just naive in believing 
that, short of pay-to-play, encouraging active participation is the best 
way to increase actual membership... 

> The loudest voices presently on this list have argued against
> listing contact information for officers and key people, rules for
> playing the game, or information about events, due to fear for the
> officers' and their families' safety, from fear that people will
> learn the rules without buying them, and out of concern that someone
> might arrive at an event expecting the wrong thing, or with intent
> to do harm, respectively.

Fear, fear, fear, fear....  Is it just me, or does this all sound a 
bit paranoid?  Perhaps we should just turn the SCA into a secret 
society, complete with secret handshakes to get in the door!  I 
realize that this is not what anyone is really suggesting, but that is 
the extreme conclusion that one draws from this.  It really seems to 
me that the best way to keep people from misinterpreting what 
the SCA is all about is to *get as much information as possible out 
there to the general public*, yes even the weirdos on the net.  The 
more people know about our rules and regulations, the more people 
understand who and what we are, the more open we are about where we 
meet, when we meet, how we meet... the *less* likely we are to be 
accused of being a secretive cult-like organization.  

I rather thought that's why the hospitaler's office was encouraging 
groups to do demos and community activities.  Let's let people know who 
we are! The web page is almost like an on-going, never ending demo, and 
quite frankly, I think that taking it off the web would be taking a 
monumental step in the *wrong* direction.  If there are groups that 
may have special concerns because of issues going on in their location, 
that should definitely be considered, and their wishes respected. IE, 
this group doesn't want an event announcement posted, that's great.  
*We should always excercise prudence and common sense.*  But I still 
maintain: it's when you start trying to hide things that people become 
suspicious and the rumors and misinformation starts flying.

As for the concern about unwanted people showing up at our events:  
First of all, if people are intent upon doing the SCA harm, they will 
do it regardless of any info posted on the web.  Unless your group 
has already turned into a secret society, the information will 
be out there for anybody actively looking for it.  (I say this, but 
could be pursuaded otherwise, because I'm speaking primarily from 
personal experience here in Mooneschadowe). Secondly, 
I think the likelihood of people seeing an event announcement and 
randomly showing up is fairly slim.  We had great concerns about this 
in regards to Coronation, since the event was "announced" 
in the Castle newsletter which was sent to hundreds of different 
non-SCA groups throughout OK, MO, AK, and KS.  We didn't have many, 
if any, unexpected mundanes show up just out of curiousity.  
Apparently, most people concluded (rightfully) that it was an SCA 
event, and if they weren't part of the SCA, they weren't really 
welcome.  I think that it's fair to assume that most people seeing 
event announcements on the web would conclude similarly.

And as a final encore, I will state that we've already had three 
new people show up to our local meetings because they found information 
about us on the web.  For a shire continually fighting the battle to 
maintain membership, that speaks more eloquently to me of the benefits of 
web information than anything else.

Gunhilda
miller at pp.okstate.edu










> Accepting these arguments, as I see it, means taking down the
> Ansteorra page at www.uta.edu/student_orgs/sca/ansteorra.  Is that
> what should happen?