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The following announcement was posted on the SCA website today:
The Grand Council was formed in 1994; a time before email and social media. There was a need then for a committee that made sure that the membership had a way to communicate with the directors on issues of importance to the SCA. Twenty years later, members have access to the Internet and with it direct lines of communication to the directors and Corporate officers. We know we still have problems receiving input from, and transmitting information to, the membership; but we don’t think an intermediary body provides us with the solution to these problems today.
So with thanks for the long and faithful service of the Grand Council, we have decided to disband the committee and work on new methods and approaches for increasing our responsiveness to the members of the SCA.
Society President John Fulton, Director Richard Sherman, and Director Andrew Coleman have been directed to investigate the creation of a new vehicle to facilitate communication between the membership and the directors that recognizes and utilizes the changes in technology, demographics and culture that have changed the way the Society conducts business in the 22 years since creation of the Grand Council.
Board of Directors, SCA Inc.
I detest deliberate inaccuracy. Email had been around for a long long time when the Grand Council was originally established. To some extent, it was (as I recall) hosted by usenet (a text oriented collection of discussion groups which still exists). Further, direct lines of communication existed 20 years ago. The problem was with the BoD ignoring the membership, denying rightful access to corporation records (the BoD lost a court case over that one), some very unfortunate moves about restructuring the corporation (some of which are now thankfully abandoned), the Bod also appears to have lied about the “financial crises” of the early 1990s, &c. In 1990, it was very easy to contact the corporate office. I know this for a fact, because I did it, and they sent me a copy of the Organizational Handbook without even charging me for it. In fact, I contacted the corporate office and chatted up Rene Signatori about a number of things about then including tracking down the editor of Complete Anachronist on a couple of occasions. I also made a proposal to the BoD in the early 90s, and quite by accident happened to be at the meeting where it appeared on the agenda and was quickly buried without the BoD ever getting back to me. Yes, I was quite willing to volunteer my time and dubious talents to make the proposal work.
The Grand Council was not without its own flaws. Sometimes I called it the “whiners committee”. One thing that you quickly learn if you pay attention to Grand Council discussions is that a lot of people in the Society get really upset when they learn that other parts of the Society don’t work the same way that their local group works. Some people even stamp their feet and loudly pout when they learn that some places have legal requirements that the Society operate differently than it does in California. There is also rather a lot of persistent misinformation about what the corporation does and does not provide the Society and the membership. Also, twenty years ago, a lot of people got grumpy about receiving inadequate benefits from the membership fees. Now we receive pretty much nothing from them.