[ANSTHRLD] Is this normal? Is there a tracer system?

Kathleen O'Brien kobrien at texas.net
Sun Jun 25 12:02:42 PDT 2006


At 03:23 PM 6/24/2006 -0500, tmcd at panix.com wrote:
>On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Faelan Caimbeul <faelancaimbeul at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just curious, why does it take Laurel six months to get submissions
>> done? We do them here in a day, and Kingdom within a month.
>
>But eighteen kingdoms?  It's roughly 300 items per month.

Nah.  300 is a light month.  They're averaging about the same as our team:
330-350 a month.  (Our max hit was 400 items in one month.) 

For folks who have heard about Heraldicon in 1979, they ruled on 984 items
at that point - a 3 and 1/2 year backlog at that time.  That's less thats 3
and 1/2 months now!

The other big change is the way LoARs are written.  Compare an LoAR from
today to one from the 1970s.  (There's one that I recall that was
particularly amusing, 10/75 I think, maybe it was 10/76.)  LoARs from that
date had rulings that were fast and dirty without lots of explanation - the
audience was a small group of kingdom heralds.  That's changed today.
Today, it is normal for submitters to read their own rulings online.  Also,
the LoARs have a wider audience of heralds and are used as
training/learning tools.  As a result of these changes, the text for LoAR
rulings is more complicated to write.  On average, I spent 100 hours a
month on my duties when I was Pelican Queen of Arms.  If I completed all of
my ruling texts for one month before the next meeting, I was overjoyed.
And two rounds of proofreading was absolutely essential to find wording
errors that could cause misunderstandings of the rulings, etc.

Hope this helps folks understand "where we stand today" on the process.
The hope is that OSCAR will do several things: (1) increase commentary, (2)
reduce electronic processing/collating since it will all happen within
OSCAR, and (3) eventually streamline the decision making and proofreading
process.

Such changes would allow the current system to support an increasing level
of submissions (we're holding steady at 330-350 per month right now, but we
usually have growth periods every now and then...)  It may also allow us to
reduce the amount of time that commentary takes at the Laurel level.  We
won't be able to judge that until OSCAR is the main source of commentary,
though.

Mari




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