[Cynnabar] The Thrones

[Greg Less]

Hi All-

   Here's the full story/confession:

   Two weeks ago at the business meeting I proposed $2000 for new thrones as
an experiment. We were discussing 1) whether or not the meeting minutes were
an effective means of communicating the business of the barony to those who
can not attend the Monday night meetings and 2) whether or not the three
week discussion period was necessary for completing financial transactions.
The impetus was from some of the questions that were posed at the Fireside
Chat with the Candidates, as well as declining Monday Meeting attendance.

   The idea (which was all mine, and I take full responsibility for it) was
that we would take something relatively reasonable, such as new regalia for
the Barony, and propose an outrageous budget for it. The choice of thrones
was arbitrary. We would put this in the minutes and see if anyone noticed.
If it was noticed, I wanted to see what the response would be and how it
would be delivered (either by increased email traffic, or by higher meeting
attendance). Also, depending upon the repsonse and how long it took for
people to become engaged I figured that we could get a feel for whether the
three weeks of discussion prior to making any business decisions was still a
valid time scale.

    Fruitful discussion has taken place and I think we know now that the
group is reading and paying attention to the minutes (or at least to Sir
RanthulfR's responses to the minutes!) and that they are NOT okay with
budgeting such a huge expenditure without a much better proposal in place.
It did, however, take more than one week for this to come to a head, thus
proving (?) that the three week discussion period is slow but most likely
necessary.

    Basically, this tells me that the system that Cynnabar has had in place
from the beginning is a good one - A proposal needs to be well thought out
and thoroughly presented to the group for expenditures, the details of the
proposal need to be disseminated to the group for reflection and discussion,
and three weeks is a good time period for this discussion to be fully hashed
out.

   I apologize to any and all that feel that there was malice in these
actions. That was not the intention, I assure you. If you would like to
discuss this more, please feel free to contact me directly.

   Also, for the record, while the current thrones could use some
maintenance and TLC, they are not in dire need of replacement.


Yours,

Baron Gregoire.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cynnabar.org/pipermail/barony/attachments/20091118/031d1abd/attachment.htm