r/sca • u/JediAmanda Atlantia • 5d ago
Event Info Dissemination Needs Guidelines
I've noticed that a lot of SCA events will post major notices, schedules and feasts via facebook but neglect to add those things to their website. I've even checked discord for info when I need to know when Court is, or if there's a schedule for combat. Then I find out from friends that the information has been exclusively posted to Facebook and nowhere else.
It's been incredibly frustrating, I've been trying to stop using Facebook. Are there any SOPS stating all info must be on the website? Facebook isn't a great platform to begin with and my hope was that the event websites would be the 100% true source of information.
If there isn't any SOPs for making sure all information is accessible across website and social media platforms, there probably should be and I'm not sure where to write in to ask for this change.
Edit: **I mean kingdom law
Second Edit: Well it turns out I got made fun of in a barony for requesting important information be posted to the website and not just Facebook -.-
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u/warpedwigwam 4d ago
As a webminister I’ve found the biggest issue to keeping info on the website is the herd of cats involved in running an event.
You get the event steward wanting everything on the website. But then you get the marshal in charge putting the fighting schedule on Facebook and forgetting to send a copy to me.
Usually at some point the algorithm shows me the fighting schedule and I copy info for website. But otherwise I may not have noticed the schedule. Similar with A&S schedule and so on.
The only officer who is adamant that everything is on the website and correct is our exchequer for registration/gate.
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u/JediAmanda 4d ago
It does sound like a kingdom law would help. Once people have some sort of reprocussion for not following procedure, it would theoretically fall into place
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u/Azure_Compass 5d ago
It is likely already a requirement in your kingdom. Gettimg our volunteers to do it is another matter. It's becoming more important to use the event websites as FB continues to deteriorate.
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u/Slow-Complaint-3273 5d ago
I hate how FB dependent the SCA has become. And they wonder why we’re not attracting new members.
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u/isabelladangelo 5d ago edited 3d ago
Originally, the guidelines were that everything was to be posted on the Barony/Shire/Kingdom website. That stopped, unfortunately, during COVID for unknown reasons (I wasn't a webminster at the time and wasn't paying attention). You would think, with the scandals and just general hate for META, the SCA as a whole would get a clue and stop being so reliant upon it.
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u/TurnoverPractical 5d ago
Average fb user is early 50s, average -crat age is.... Average SCA member age...
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u/malphonso 4d ago
Could be worse, when I joined it was Yahoo Groups dependent.
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u/Slow-Complaint-3273 4d ago
I remember Groups. But at least they pushed posts to your mailbox so you got updates.
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u/jrosekonungrinn 2d ago
I never figured out how to get off the Yahoo groups after Yahoo & Hotmail were basically dead, so like 15 years ago or whatever I had to just mark them as spam/blocked in my Gmail. I wonder when they actually stopped being used.
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u/Buezee 5d ago
I've been an event steward and run activities at many different events. I'm my experience, there is a break down in how people think they are supposed to communicate and the process for getting things in the website.
The first thing I do as an event steward is tell people who to contact to get info on the site. When they don't do this, I nag people for information until they do. Sometimes individual activity coordinators will just post on facebook and never notify any every staff about the activities. Other times people just don't write descriptions until the very last minute.
The next major problem I've run into, who has access to update the website, how long does that take, and does that person with access have time to make updates? There's breakdowns at every step of this process. In my Kingdom we need a deputy webminister warrent to update the website. I've seen people submit these well in advance and these warrents take months to be approved. In the mean time that leaves anyone with access prior the ability to update it (at the Baronial level, this may be one person). It can take a few day to a few weeks to get someone else to make updates for you. It's just rough. And our kingdoms events pages aren't easily modified and don't allow for all types of content (maps, excel style schedules). Though there have been improvements over the years.
Essentially people be doing there best out here but honestly this should be solved with software investments at the Society level.
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u/jrosekonungrinn 2d ago
I can't remember the last time I went to an event's local website. Maybe if I was searching for something specific about it. I rely on the East Kingdom Events Calendar page. Do other kingdoms keep the same sort of page? All our major events still seem to get listed there.
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u/CujoSR 5d ago
I’m the former Facebook Events deputy for Caid and did the job for nearly a decade, so I’ll be the first to admit that Facebook SUUUUCKS! That said, every alternative has some glaring issues.
For an event to be official, it has to be posted on the Kingdom Calendar and in the Newsletter. That’s it. Any other updates are considered minor unless the time, date, or location changes.
The big issue, as some have already mentioned, is that only certain officers can access the official websites. That makes advertising an event extremely tough, especially when updates come fast and often. Our Baronial Anniversary is this weekend, and yesterday we learned about major construction on a key route to the site. Updating the event page on the Calendar means first reaching one or two specific people who have access and know how to make the change. Even then, nobody sees the update unless they go back and check the event themselves.
Facebook let event organizers, who usually have the most up-to-date information, contact the affected groups directly and post a general message on the event page. Discord is better than the Calendar, but depending on where you post an update, it can be missed or quickly buried.
For better or worse, Facebook is where the people are, and it has the organizational tools that work best. People have asked for alternatives for years. Discord could be the answer one day, but right now the only other site I’ve seen that does this is not safe for work. IYKYK.
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u/Original_Midnight411 5d ago
This was my biggest gripe as an event steward the one time I did it in my old kingdom, and my new kingdom is worse. Luckily my local is better for discord at least but the website information is atrocious.
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u/Teh_CodFather 5d ago
Some kingdoms manage it better than others.
But it shouldn’t be easier to find event information for kingdoms other than my own…
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u/Alita-Gunnm 5d ago
I've never had a Facebook account, and most younger folks aren't making one either. Using Facebook as your comms channel is a good way to gatekeep and prevent people from finding out about your event.
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u/Sheerluck42 5d ago
Really the SCA needs to get away from facebook. With all the AI and BS floating around it's a problem waiting to happen
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u/datcatburd 5d ago
Not to mention the disaster it is as far as organizational history. We have a ton of info from the old days thanks to efforts on archiving email lists and usenet groups. For the last 10 years or so, almost all the chatter has happened in a walled garden nobody trying to figure out the whys of something later will be able to access.
For a group who studies history we seem to have failed to learn from why primary sources are still around to be studied.
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u/CeleryMobile708 5d ago
I agree with your sentiment. It's hard to find info on FB these days. If there was one official group with updates displayed chronologically, I could understand... But you often have to go digging
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u/GlitteringClick3590 5d ago
As someone who had to deactive their FB 15 years ago (it's still there, technically, but theres NO WAY I'm gonna open that can of worms!), I'm so thankful that Ansteorra has several active discords and keeps up with their website segments. A good webmaster goes a long way. Reach out to your Seneschal and officers to see if communications can be broadened in scope. Heck, I think we've got a TikTok channel!
This is something that came up fairly recently within our local group, which is on the younger side. There's a lot of crossposting from our officers, but there's still some very important, FB exclusive, stuff that ends up being a game of digital telephone.
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u/AFK_MIA 5d ago
There are likely some level of "SOPs" or at least an expectation that information get posted on websites in all kingdoms - but that doesn't mean that they're actually followed, or that the officer creating them actually has that authority.
For the most part, governance of kingdoms is split between the various great offices - and each of these offices write policy for their respective deputies - but this means that a Webministry policy that "Groups must enter information about their events on the website" only applies to group webministers - which, it's an optional office, so not all groups even have one. Such a rule doesn't apply to group seneschals, exchequers, A&S ministers - or any members of the populace who are serving as event stewards or staff - so nobody with event information is bound by a rule that tells them what to do with it.
Even if those officers wanted to post things on the website, one of the major challenges to modern web technology is that setting up granular permissions is very challenging. There aren't good ways to, for example, only let a group update their own events without giving them the keys to the kingdom (only kind of figuratively) - which isn't really allowed by the society webministry rules - and is also bad from a security standpoint. Since web budgets are essentially $0 in many kingdoms, we can't really afford to pay for software to fix this - and there isn't much leadership from the society level on this issue. Building that technological infrastructure is itself a fairly major challenge. Several kingdoms have made some substantial progress towards this - but many haven't. Even so, solving the technical challenge is only half the issue - all of the officers have to actually use it - and no single officer can require all of the relevant people to do so (nor can they actually force them to even if it's "required"). My kingdom has a system that allows the group seneschals to appoint event steward - and for those event stewards to appoint other event staff permissions - and gives all of those people the ability to publish information about their event on the kingdom website (and simultaneously update a local or event website) in a structured way - but some groups refuse to use it beyond the minimum required to get an event on the calendar.
Facebook - on its face - seems like a solution to this problem. We can create groups and events and let people post whatever they need to - and "everyone" is already familiar with using it. However it comes with a lot of down-sides. The big one from the perspective of spreading event information is that almost nobody is actually shown the posts being made. In my kingdom, posts to the FB group are viewed by 40-60 people - and they tend to be mostly the *same* people (i.e. the ones that regularly interact with the FB group). The algorithm simply doesn't show everybody else in the kingdom that post - and might not even show them that information *even if they purposefully go looking for it.* This change has largely occured over the last ~2 years - but was at least somewhat present since the creation of the "algorithm" roughly 15 years ago, so it's not a new problem, but I think people aren't quite fully understanding the scope - hence the FB defenders even in this thread.
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u/BeornOTNS 5d ago
So, there are some Kingdoms that have a copy feature on their announcements. What you publish in the newsletter also is sent to the facebook page and the discord channel.
However, and, this is an issue many regions in the SCA have, we are a paper organization in a digital world.
The Kingdom Chronicler, a greater officer, is responsible for publishing the kingdom newsletter. Mostly digitally, though some hard copies are still published even to the present day. This was very important before the advent of the internet (or hell, before Thomas Guides, Rand McNally, or AAA maps) in order to get to the events and even to know what was happening (and to have phone numbers and addresses for specific people [Peerage councils, the Crown, other people of note]). But they are much less important today (though, especially at the local level, are where some great artwork and scholarship continue to be published for the betterment of the populace).
The Webwright (which may, or may not be a Greater Officer) is responsible for the implementation and upkeep of the official website(s), email systems, and often for the information published on facebook and/or dicord. Usually the social media coordinator is under this umbrella and handles the tik tok and instagram accounts (where we get a decent amount of our new traffic).
THEN, there is the two-fold aspect of the Kingdom Calendar. The keeping of the dates is done by a special office usually called, simply, Calendar. Sometimes they are a deputy to the Webwright and sometimes the Chronicler. AND, then there is the scheduling of the events part of calendar, which is under the Seneschal's office. This office is responsible for actually setting the calendar of events for the future (1-2 years in advance of possible). On occasion, the same person fulfills both roles, and sometimes they are two distinct people (or groups of people).
So, as you can see, the system was created and designed for paper, envelopes, and stamps. I know the first Kingdom Chronicler ever in the SCA. She is still as lovely a firecracker now as ever in her 90s. But her physically cranking a mimeograph machine in the 70s is a far cry from our instant information requirements now.
It would be amazing if we could, at the Societal level, figure out a way to streamline and/or combine the offices, or perhaps modify Corpora so these modern situations can be addressed. But, changing the governing documents isn't easy, nor fast.
If you, or anyone, has ideas on how best to fulfill the requirements as set forth in Corpora, while still addressing the needs of the digital space we find ourselves in (and make no mistake, the SCA as an entity might do well to distance itself from Meta going forward), please let your Kingdom Chronicler, Kingdom Seneschal, or Webwright now. Be prepared to be a part of the solution if you do (and I thank you in advance!). I had thoughts when I was a kingdom chronicler, but the solutions were not coming easily from my brain.
~B
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u/datcatburd 5d ago
I have been screaming for years now to stop sticking everything behind someone else's walled garden, and am starting to see some traction, but there's still a long way to improve.
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u/internutthead 5d ago
I appreciate your efforts to move away from Meta based platforms.
I also understand that there are years of inertia behind using Meta (and others) to disseminate information.
I am not saying you are wrong - but making it a "requirement" means way more when you are looking at this from a "we're an all volunteer organization with people who have a wide variance in technical proficiencies".
Can we make it better? Absolutely. If it were up to me all kingdoms would have a Society based portal where communications/fighter info/OP/and others can be disseminated/managed as opposed to every kingdom having 4-5 different systems that are managed and maintained by the best efforts of volunteers.
Then (at least) "official" communications can be managed (and archived based off of legal requirements depending on the office) and centralized.
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u/Pristine_Award9035 5d ago
Society requires events to be published in the kingdom newsletter. All kingdoms also have an online calendar of events. These are official sources, whether an event shows up in Facebook or Discord or any other platform is highly variable. Depending on your kingdom social media announcements might be official, but they may not be required by kingdom law. Except for kingdom newsletters and online event calendars, your mileage may vary.
If you mean practices, gatherings, activities that aren’t “events” then it’s going to be more dependent on kingdom and local group rules for where and when the happening must be announced to be considered official.
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u/SLiverofJade 5d ago
An Tir requires any and all information be posted on the official event page on the kingdom site, but it's not necessarily an intuitive process and the kingdom site is notorious for having problems.
I know recently there's been work done since it's rather old and gotten unwieldy with how it's grown so there seems to be less instances of the site going down.
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u/CabinetWitch23 3d ago
Discord isn't mobile friendly. I don't like Facebook either, but at least I can use it on my phone. Not everyone has a home computer, but most people have phones.
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u/HourFree8026 3d ago
i use discord on mobile all the time and find it very easy, and at least its not cluttered with ads and suggested posts. Still, info shouldn't be isolated to any given social media platform, it should be on the website... where you don't need an account or to be part of a group/server to see it.
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u/OrlaCarey 4d ago
This issue was just posted about by the field coordinator of our event on Saturday - the problem being that he tried putting the information (a link to a form) on the website but it never worked. Luckily in this case the answer is basically “the site is big enough I can place tents if they show up anyway”, but the point is that websites can be difficult to update.
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u/JediAmanda 5d ago
Like at this point, using Reddit could be a more accessible way to announce information haha. At least it might not be buried under as many ads
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u/JuliusFrontinus 5d ago
So you know where the information is available but you refuse to use that source and want everyone else to change based on your choice of platform? Just logistically the difficulty of updating a website is much more challenging then a facebook post.
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u/fwinzor 5d ago
If we want membership to stop declining and actually attract a new generation we need to stop exclusively using a social media platform that isnt used by anyone under 35 as our primary and often only form.of communication. No one is suggesting we abandon it but the death grip it has on the SCA is a major barrier to recruitment
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u/ellalir 5d ago
Yeah. I'm under 30, but only by a few years, and my primary use of Facebook is to go to specific SCA pages/groups and look for information etc there. I didn't get Facebook until 2018, because back then university students were still using messenger for a lot of communications (since then there has been a frankly baffling pivot to instagram, which doesn't escape the meta of it all but also isn't just for messaging people??) and I mostly keep going back for SCA info; current university students are certainly not much on it anymore.
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u/Roccondil-s 5d ago
Facebook has become so enshittified, they prioritize scam adverts and people/pages you don’t even follow over any groups, to the point that news and events are often days late because of the algorithmized spam.
Plainly and simply, Facebook is NOT a good platform to organize anything or to use to spread news/information in a timely and automatic manner.
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u/SLiverofJade 5d ago
Reliance on a third party to communicate our information is setting us up for failure, particularly when very few people under the age of 30 still use FB.
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u/JediAmanda 5d ago
I hardly KNEW when the information was available when I had Facebook because it would be so buried I often wouldn't see it until after an event had passed. By design!
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u/VoijaRisa 5d ago
A random SOP that someone made is not a binding document. If you really want this formalized, it should be written into kingdom law or made part of an existing required process.
That being said, Calontir has done a lot of work to develop the CALON system which is an integrated WordPress plugin that manages the kingdom calendar, OP, fighter authorizations, etc.... The calendar portion also has the ability for the event stewards to manage the schedule there, making the schedule and all other information available directly on the kingdom page/calendar. Since this is integrated with the kingdom calendar, it forces event stewards to use it since events cannot be run without appearing here.