Darmen wrote:First off, thanks to Lisander for posting the results and to everyone who voted as well.
With regards to the organization of the NSRB: I'm absolutely against the board being expanded in any manner. In my opinion, all board members should have clear and concise roles, and I'm not convinced of what a Club VP's or League 9's VP's roles would necessarily be. In addition, no other governing body in NSSports organizes its club tournaments as far as I'm aware, and I'm content to leave the running of the RUCT and IRLCC to their current curators without NSRB involvement. It just seems like adding additional positions, even if they're not executive positions, is adding unnecessary bureaucracy. I'm all for making sure that the wider rugby community is able to give its opinions on various matters, but I don't think that requires handing out official positions to people.
I see your point, but there's no extra bureaucracy involved when it comes to the club competitions. De facto, the people that do them are already doing all that they're supposed to do. It took us a while to even get someone to run IRLCC again, or any league competition for that matter. You can be against recognizing them, but my suggestion was in opposition of them just being 'That's the guy who runs the thing'. Sometimes it's nice to give official recognition to someone who's willing to step up.
Darmen wrote:Part of me would like to eliminate the 7's VP after this governance cycle, and just run with the Union and League VP's to help simplify things, but I understand that there might not be a great deal of support for that at this time, so I'm perfectly content to simply take a look at the governing document and make some changes there to help clarify the roles of the VP's. Part of the problem I have with how the governing document is currently set up is that the President of the NSRB is the one who opens the signups, unless they appoint one of the other VP's to do that. As League VP, I had been planning on opening signups tonight myself, but now have to wait for Elejamie to do so or to give me (or Apox even) the go ahead. Perhaps I'm just being impatient, but is been close to
19 months since the last RLWC, and I'd been really hoping to avoid any further delays in getting things going once again. Perhaps giving each of the section VP's the ability to open signups without having to wait for approval from the NSRB President, while still maintaining the expectation that the various section VP's maintain communication over start dates and the like to avoid inter-code competition might be a change we could make? Maybe I'm just overreacting?
Maybe just a bit? You've been here through most of it, so you know that participation waxes and wanes in rugby. It's not on the steady NS Sport level of some of the other popular sports. Hence, everything slows down when attention is diverted to the WC cycle, Olympics, hockey, cricket, gridiron, etc. or RL. Sign ups take longer to get enough, or at least to an even number we can work with. Plus, as always, people have outside lives. Bringing us to our next point. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Removing 7s VP just because you don't want too much bureaucracy (and other NS Sports don't have it), is chopping one of the legs out from under you. It removes one of your backups from helping when things get tight in RL for the other VPs. So you should put yourself in that possible position because the other popular sports don't have it?
Seems silly to me when the reasoning to streamline doesn't match up to the practical reality of the job. I know from experience because while in my first stint as a NSRB VP, I had to take over as president after Green Jello dropped out of NS at a difficult time in both our lives. It was extremely tough to be the one solely responsible, learn the job at the same time, manage my RL responsibilities, and do any other projects I wanted to do on NS. (Manage storefronts, run an active region, RP, etc.)
Not that you'll all have the same experience, but why make it harder? Also, the governing document may say that duties fall to certain people, but in practical reality that's not how we ran things. We communicated and whoever had the time to start something or post something did so. Reality dictates it. We would have been waiting much longer for things to happen, making you that much more impatient, due to protracted absences from some NSRB executives.
This might have been a better, more fluid topic on the Discord, but now it's out there for all to see.
Darmen wrote:Anyways, hopefully my thoughts about NSRB governance make sense to you all, of course feel free to ask any questions to clarify things if needed. I said on Discord that I would also be posting some ideas I had about changes we could make to the Sevens Series, but I'll hold off on posting those until Sunday when I have a few hours to sit down and write out my ideas in full detail.
You mean other than myself and Lisander being the only steady 7s hosts? If it's that 7s series is holding up your WCs, that situation has pretty much resolved itself in our failure to retain a steady stable of 7s tournament hosts.