[ Closed ] General Coordinator Elections 2014 - The Great Debate

Great bio, Giorgio!

First, let me wish good luck to everyone running. I do not envy our membership with the tough choice they have ahead!

After writing this, I realized it is quite long, so I've bolded the three sections so you can skip my 'history' and such if you like, and get right to my campaign promises.

About me:
My face is NOT the one at your left, though I like to think I'm as handsome as Giorgio. I'm married with kids, live in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, and am not quite 40 yet (I'll just keep saying that until I die, probably. I can't get away with the "I just turned 25! anymore" )

I started (role-playing) gaming when I was a kid when my older brother got the old Basic D&D red box for Christmas one year. I memorized the rules after reading that book several hundred times, drew large complex mazes and dungeons (many of which would make any Monty Hall campaign look stingy), and even tried my hand at making my own house rules and such. I'm a big fan of all kinds of games (tabletop, computer, console, arcade, athletic, etc). Basically if you can compete with someone for fun and/or profit, I'll probably try it/enjoy playing/watching it. I have a small library with three shelves of books, two shelves of board games, and one shelf of PC games.

My first year of college I discovered two things that would change my life forever: the CRPG Pool of Radiance, and a PC that I could actually *save* BASIC programs on (prior to this, I had entire notebooks filled with BASIC code, with gotos everywhere. I shudder to think how inefficient it was). Fast forward a few years later and I'm graduating with a CS degree, just around the time the internet started taking off.

Around that time was a game being developed that promised the holy grail of RPGers - a CRPG that was easy to generate adventures and could be played with anyone around the globe. Unfortunately, Neverwinter Nights didn't deliver so well on that promise, but it did introduce me to the fun of playing with random strangers online.

How I 'found' Phoenix:
Fast forward some more years, at a time when most of my online friends were too busy getting married or having kids or otherwise "out-growing" (perish the thought!) roleplaying games. Having just finished the Firefly series, and with an itch that needed scratching, I did a random internet search and came across AJJE, a site that 'simmed' inside the Firefly universe (among others). Joining up, I was first introduced to some person (a guy? a girl? I had no idea!) named Ash. Soon after, I was introduced to an 'introductory' sim his wife Deb was running. I was hooked almost immediately, and quickly began developing other characters because of the slow pace of the one sim I was in.

Then the Great Schism occurred. Unsure what to do, I found out what had happened, weighed the evidence presented, and decided to join in the split and the eventual founding of Phoenix.

Since then, I've served in a variety of roles for Phoenix, usually in the form of the Contender along with various other positions.

As a founding member, I've seen good, quality people come and go over the years. The people here are some of the best I've ever played with, and I really think that is what makes Phoenix unique. There is no power struggles, no chest pounding, just the love of simming and working in harmony together. I can't imagine playing on any other site. If I ever leave Phoenix, it will either because Phoenix itself is dissolving, or I've just lost the will to sim.

Where I'd like to see Phoenix go:
So, yikes, this is getting long winded. I have to agree with Giorgio, the future lies in growing our player base. We have a ton of great sims. Now we just need people to fill them. The first thing I'd likely do is form a committee for advertising. With how busy real life can get, we've seen what can happen if just one or two people are left holding the ball. In fact, I'll probably go one step beyond just one position w/ deputy and make the various positions committees or teams of people. I think the newsletter has been a good example of what can be done when several people work together to get something done, rather than relying on just a single person to do things.

Besides advertising, I'd like to start brainstorming sessions on how to increase traffic to the site. I won't pretend to have all the ideas, it's going to take everyone chipping in to make this club successful. In addition, I'd like to have a minimal, transparent administration where tasks and "todos" are available for everyone to see, and any one can take a task and run with it.

Over the years there have been several great ideas that I think we could resurrect to generate interest and activity amongst active members as well as potential newcomers, such as writing contests or mini-cons.

I think I'll leave it at that, and apologize again for the wall of text.

-Jason

What do you feel is the single biggest issue facing the club?

-Introduce yourself
Hello everyone, i'm Spart, 27 and from germany. i work as electrician.
my hobbys are: pc gaming, watching animes and reading manga (or the MLP comics), paintball when i find the time and money in my currently tight budget, playing and gluing Warhammer 40k minis and driving around on my motorcycle.

oh yeah i have no kids (thanks to my first girlfriend who teached me what a chore new bornes are) and singel

-tell us how you found Phoenix Roleplaying
haha that's a rather long story, but time is not an issue when i can post just a wall of text, is it? ^.^
so i was at 4chan /tg/ where most people talk about roleplay and boardgames
i found these thread about Planes And Mercs, about a airwarfare boardgame where the players were mercenaries to hire and do the dirtywork, the whole thing was written as afteraction reports.

someone posted a link to a board where some people tried to creat a game system that could be used to recreat those afteraction reports or just make up your own game (as you can guess at this point, its not quite phoenix)

this all happend in a 4 month time when i was unemployed, so i lurked at PnM (Planes and Mercs) and finally did the big step to make an account there and tried to get into the game.

some times later, i dunno who first showed up, if it was Silent Hunter or Osprey, but one of these two joined us at PnM and put up an Add for AW75 here at Phoenix, so i went over to check it out, i liked what i saw and my first impression of the board here was: wow these are like the professionals of online roleplaying!! everything is so organised, they have rules for just everything!

i was amazed, sadly AW75 didn't worked out so well, but hey, that happends, so Phoenix went on the Favorit list in my browser and i just check the bored when i was bored ...
... i also looked into Fighter Ops, but never get my foot in so to say ... i hope to change this someday (befor Silent says he had enough of jet fighters and stuff!)

my original intention here was to improve my written english... and still is. anyway i got side tracked, yeah thats how i found Phoenix and got active again thanks to the 3rd try of Mach Idol.

-why you have stayed with us
because Silent Hunter stayed with PnM and i wanted to improve my english skills... oh and who knows, you have and had a lot of cool stuff going (sadly most of it, isn't my cup of tea, sorry)

-and what you feel are the greatest strengths of this club
you have rule how to behave and everyone sticks to these rules.
everyone gets along with everyone (at least thats how it seems to me), i've seen on PnM what happend if people don't get along and that could be very depressing for everyone...
... and also take away a lot of opportunities.

-What do you feel is the single biggest issue facing the club
i dunno, maybe that there is no single biggest issue but so many small things to improve ? srysly i have no clue

thanks everyone for reading to my wall of text ^.~

edit:Candidates, what do you feel are the weaknesses of Phoenix Roleplaying  and how would you propose to overcome them?

that i don't know them ? and you may know them ? so if we don't talk about thing, we never know (like it should happen in every kind of good relationship)

Last edited by Spart (2014-07-16 21:07:39)

The single biggest issue of Phoenix, in my opinion, is the lack of new members. We had too many important losses recently and the new blood, although competent and essential, is numerically too low to compensate.

There is no easy solution for this (as Misty said, RL can be a real bitch sometimes) but we need to create a friendlier and dynamic environment. Our current home is slightly dated, both in terms of container (PunBB is not the most common forum platform, nor the most state-of-the-art) and of content (some pages are not updated from years).

A restyling, maybe even a bold migration to a different platform/domain, could help us. But I am aware that it would be a big step, so it would need to be discussed, voted and planned carefully. I would concentrate my efforts in this direction.

~Giorgio

After reading through the rules, roles and responsibilities, and admin policy, I can honestly say that I could not find any rule that I would consider proposing to the membership to change. That being said, the only thing I thought while reading was that it sure was wordy! I know we as text based roleplayers love writing and our words, but why so wordy?

So, if I were to propose a change it would be to reword the rules. Which in my thinking, would not only simplify them, but also make them easier to read.

But of course the disclaimer's mention of sausage rolls just has to stay the way it is!

Damn why didnt i came up with an idea like this, maybe the whole evil dictator thing has still a bad image around here in Germany...

Anyway given the short time i'm here compared to others and that i have to admit that i just klicked yes, because i thought i know how to behave in the Internet, i too wouldnt change anything about the rules.
never change a (good) running system

Maybe the LOA thing so that everyone just put it in the signature instead of running a whole thread for it.

I believe I addressed this in my opening statement, but I strongly feel (as do others, I can see) that the biggest weakness at this point is our lack of attracting new members. We already have a strong community of mature role players, as well as a plethora of different sims to appeal to just about everyone (as well as open policy to generate new sims if someone doesn't find what they need). So why aren't we attracting people?

It would be interesting to me to see some raw data on unique page views and those who have registered accounts but never posted, or just posted a few times and then left. I wish we had a mechanism to be able to poll those who left to find out why. But besides wishful thinking, it just seems like not enough people are *finding* us. And that, I think, is where a stronger advertising initiative comes into play.

In terms of what I would change, out of all of the rules we have, there are a handful I think are interesting, but I believe Phoenix is running well enough with what we have. However, to answer the question, I'll enumerate on the few I've noodled on: I've considered if the Contender position is really all that useful. Perhaps we've just had some decent administration and that's made the Contender largely unnecessary. Or, perhaps it will always be unnecessary... if the people see an issue, I'd like to believe they'll speak up without needing a "voice" in administration. I've considered some of the lengthy legalese we have around appointed officers that we could probably do away with or at least cut back on. I've considered potentially revising or removing the house rules policy, because no one particularly seems to care and it isn't enforced anyway. I also think having the TC be an appointed position, instead of an elected position, is an interesting topic that could warrant additional discussion.

-Jason

Additional thoughts..... I love Phoenix and thoroughly enjoy roleplaying with the folks here... Its fun, which is what rp should be. I'm not going to say I'm the best candidate, because that is subjective. I will say that I am a good choice, as I love our site here and only want the best for it and our membership.

Good luck to all the other candidates: Giorgio, Jason, and Spart.

Happy voting!