principalities....

[Lenny Zimmermann]

Ok, I KNOW I'm missing something here. I think we have a lot of
arguments, but no consensus on what we are discussing. Which is why I
think I utterly failed in focusing any of the points with my previous
posting where I tried to line-up the pros and cons of this discussion.

It seems to me that the assumptions are that this idea of forming
Principalities is for administrative purposes. Is this true? Well, it
sounds like this is something that has been bubbling up through the
populace and that our Crowns and Kingdom Seneschal have heard of these
mutterings in the populace and are wanting to get a feeling for what
people think. There have been no official proposals, edicts or
anything except for a request by the Crown to see what people think of
the idea. So let us first assume that the Crown (at least the current
ones) are NOT willing to force Principalities on us and that so far I
haven't heard anything about this creating LESS administrivia and I
think we can all see that MORE paperwork will be involved in
setting-up these Principalities. (I still can't see why we wouldn't
just go straight to being a Kingdom, but I'm still a "newbie" in SCA
time.)

That leaves us with Principalities by popular poll and, therefore, a
Principality as defined by the BOD, which would include Crown
Princes/ses and the like. And the assumption that the "reason" for
such action is not to reduce paperwork. In fact better to assume that
that a reason(s) has not been given for a split and we'll have to
come-up with it on our own. Is there any reason we should NOT make
these assumptions? I think if we do make these assumptions we can
focus this discussion a little better for those of us who are trying
to weigh everything out before deciding to bring our feedback to the
Crown.

As such I would like to ask everyone to please write out your
arguments in a list form. This can give us a better comparison. I
realize that any one line of an argument may be weighted far more then
some other line, but please accept us as intelligent adults who can
decide what weighting we want to give to each item. I won't repeat the
listing I made earlier since I'm not sure any different arguments have
been made yet other then adding the cost of an additional Kingdom
newsletter to the con side.

Please help a floundering-but-committed-to-be-involved newcomer out!

Honos Servio,
Lionardo Acquistapace, Bjornsborg
(mka Lenny Zimmermann, San Antonio)
zarlor at acm.org