Council of Elrond

I am with Eric & Karsten here,

so Aye the charter is the 1st MUST

Thorsten the Traveller wrote: It would be good to assign for each project a CoE member as first responsible, to lead/coordinate and report on it. (others still very welcome to join in of course). Chairman, job for you.

i did so in this thread:
http://www.councilofelrond.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=2
though not complete yet.

Thorsten the Traveller wrote: nb. I would make a separate section somewhere for errata proposals/ inventory of "things the community wants fixed"

good idea, but i think first we should be sure about HOW we want to handle all of this.
lets set up some structure in the COE errata&rules board first, that start the whole thing in public places.

Hello gents,

right in general all must know I am in favor of errata, but we most find a WAY to do it the community finds sensible

so I guess we need some brainstorming

Nation Councils would be nice, but in reality not the way to go as they are beyond dormant, maybe we can later get 3-6 council active than we had a good base to do the feedback the way Ben wanted to

maybe a general post saying hey wake up everyone we REDOING Errata for the better of all and an email via Wolfgang's intensive Lure-email-list would be the broadest approach (maybe this will even wake up the dormant fans)

Honestly CoE voting shows we have 25 active guys and around 100 or so some times active players (GCCG wise and national turn ups)

Nicolai

I agree that a general email is the way to wake people up, but I'd still present them with a "we're going to do this unless you make your voice heard" plan rather than the weaker "we want lots of discussion before we do anything" plan.

We should establish a road first, my proposal would be to have clearly defined rounds of input from the community.

1 a brainstorm phase, in which issues can be raised. From these issues the CoE will pick the most important ones and deal with them the way it seems fit.
2 a poll fase in which we can count ballots, yea or nay on the proposal.

This should keep imput and consent to a max. while discussion within proportions.

The issue with referenda is that they don't work when it's only for consultation, so we should decide upfront whether such polls are conclusive or not. For all this we need a new charter anyway, which should definitely be voted upon by the community. But meanwhile we can have fase 1 going I guess. We can be fairly generous with the time frame for each fase, 2-3 months should surely be enough to get the word out and the fire started.

I don't know if a new charter is needed. The lack of activity in the past could be due to a wrong approach to the issues. I like Eric's proposal of appointing one CoE member in charge of each issue, who will regularly report to the other members on the status of the project and receive feedback (and the definitive approval once the job is complete). That would definitively raise the CoE's productivity IMO.

The charter only speaks about required majorities, CoE's composition and ways of election of its members. All the rest is basically custom, i.e. unwritten rules of conduct. The CoE lacks such customs because there's not a great record of past activity, then there's not a great consolidated tradition.

Bandobras Took wrote:I agree that a general email is the way to wake people up, but I'd still present them with a "we're going to do this unless you make your voice heard" plan rather than the weaker "we want lots of discussion before we do anything" plan.

I agree. Support from the community is good, and recommendable, but no campaign of communication, even the most intensive, will provide a mass participation. The turnout to the last CoE's election is a proof. The only precaution I recommend is to carefully choose which initiatives have to be taken, in order to make sure we're not acting against the wishes of the community.

The general email would be also good as an information tool, to tell the people "As we announced in the email of the day MM/DD/YYYY, we've done this". Showing that the CoE is productively working will increase the community's interest.

Even if we strictly speaking wouldn't need a charter that backs up the CoE in taking bigger decisions on change in the game, we should still set up one, as a sign to the community that we take wide support serious and that we are working for them and not for our own ideas.
If any CoE decission on change in the game will have an impact, it needs wide support.

Moreover, we'd want to approach this in a more formal way, so we can avoid CoE membership being a very political office and next elections being all about undoing any changes we might have made, cause that really is a road to splitting up the community. So a formal way with wide imput/support is best.

Thorsten the Traveller wrote:Moreover, we'd want to approach this in a more formal way, so we can avoid CoE membership being a very political office and next elections being all about undoing any changes we might have made, cause that really is a road to splitting up the community. So a formal way with wide imput/support is best.

Definitely

Great points, everyone.

Although of course they will need their own specific threads, ,any of these topics can be grouped under the heading PROMOTING THE GAME, such as:

- worlds (long expected party)
- COE treasury
- COE promotion items and prize stuff
- - release of virtual card series
- reprinting real cards
- ARDA

I will try to start a thread on this, as it is probably the topic I am most interested in. I will have to steal ideas from my "Saving the Game" letter--good stuff in there that I've forgotten about!

--frodo

The discussions are getting a bit dispersed over many topics and many sections.

So we need a new setup for this board section I guess, with at least:
- a section where we can interact with non-CoE members about ideas for change and/or comment on them (The Winds of Change)
- a section in which each active national council (as a CoE franchise) can post things meant for their playgroup (National Councils)

the first section might need subsections for rules/errata, and one for other initiatives/ideas.

This could fall under the project CoE website revision, whoever will be projectleader of that, and he must design this new setup and communicate it with Steffen I guess.