[ANSTHRLD] Round Table Re-cap

[Doug Bell]

Some observations.


Be very careful with Facebook. That
company has little respect for the privacy of submitters or the SCA's
intellectual property. It is easy to run into trouble with the SCA
Social media policy with Facebook pages.
http://www.sca.org/docs/pdf/SCASocialMediaPolicy.pdf
The Society's Facebook page is under
close management. It's the other sites used by kingdom and local
groups that are of concern.

Facebook's business model is to spy on you to
gather a personal profile to deliver custom ads to you. The software
is programmed to collect as much data on you as possible and share it
in any way it can come up with. An open Facebook logon will read your
posts, read any email you look at on other sites, monitor your web
page visits, and search engine use (even on secure search sites that
are not owned by Facebook). Face recognition software is used to
analyze any images you post. This is all used to create personalized
stalker ads that follow you around the web. This is why Facebook is
regularly sued and fined by countries in the European Union for
violations of their privacy laws. Google, Gmail, Utube, and Amazon do
the same thing but that's another topic.


How to deal with it? 
Log in to these sites, conduct your
business and log out as soon as finished. 

Regularly empty cookies and
browsing history on your browser.

Given the issues, some folks refuse to use Facebook. Their concerns are understandable and should be honored.


An SCA heraldry Facebook page will
generate stalker ads for bucket shop heraldry web sites that sell
fake coats of arms and shady genealogy services.
Those are easy
enough to ignore.

The main problem is privacy. Facebook's
privacy software is rewritten about every 6 months. You can have all
your data set for private viewing but when the new software comes in
everything gets reset to public viewing. Facebook software WANTS to
share your data with as many folks as possible. It may not be a good
idea to have the private discussions of your "SCA family"
or a private heraldic consult shared with everyone from your employer
and non-SCA friends to your great aunt Matilda.

Previous consulting has used private
email or mailing lists on SCA owned web sites and servers. 

Those we
can control to some extent but social media may not be that easy to
keep under control.


We used to staple everything to keep
attached documents from getting lost. Now that all submissions are
scanned that would cause trouble. I would recommend that you number
the pages of any attached documentation to keep it in order in case
the file falls off a table and scatters (cats love to do this to
heraldry materials). Stray staples can cause similar damage to
officers and scanners as the claws of the above mentioned cats. If you want to use paper clips go for the plastic coated ones. Metal paper clips can cause similar damage as the above mentioned cats.



Sorry to see the Gazette go away but
its function is long past and outdated.


The Education Arm of the College of
Heralds is like I-45 at Corsicana, it's always under restructuring
and construction.


There are sources on name and armory
research for storage on flash drives at St. Gabriel's reports and
articles, Laurel's site at the SCA web site, online rolls of arms,
Google books, and Internet Archive (archive.org). The last two have
some obscure old and rare books for medieval research as well as items like Bardsley.

best regards
Magnus