At the last meeting, some short discussion was had about how the changing technologies of the web have created new responsibilities like the maintenance of a website, a mailing list, and perhaps a future social networking page which are not specifically dealt with in the Laws, while rending others already specified in the Laws redundant or duplicated them. This discussion was not included in the minutes because it did not occur in the context of a motion, so I wanted to mention it here for further discussion.

Webminister and the website

Other SCA groups have a formal position called Webminister which title I don't like at all and has no obvious period analog in Celtic society. The Sencha is the closest position to this, but a problem was recognized in our short discussion that while our present Sencha may indeed posses the skills to maintain our website it is not necessarily true that all members do. If we decided to make this type of responsibility fall under the Sencha's list of duties, it would then preclude many members from being able to serve the note taking functions which are required at each meeting. My thinking is that our current website is largely the work on one person (as our old one was as well), and is "nice to have" but probably shouldn't be codified in Law and we can expect that it will go away or change radically in future anyway.

Sencha / Mailing List / Yahoo

The Laws give the Sencha the responsibility of maintaining the mailing list, but this is a hold over from when the Clann did physical mailings. Currently two separate "lists" exist on the web which are "self-serve" in the sense that members choose to be on them or not without much action by the Sencha. One, the website, has already been discussed, the other is the Yahoo list. An administrator of the Yahoo list can add new, approve requests, or delete members of these as needed. The administrative role should be held by several members in case one member is unavailable or an account gets lost or locked out. Until recently Colin and Comin were owners of the Yahoo list with Faellon as moderator. This is been changed today so the current Chieftan (Brogan), the current Sencha (Faellon), and Comyn are owners of the Yahoo list. Comyn has been the main person maintaining this list at least until recently.

Facebook

The rise of facebook has raised the question as to how this service could (and whether it should) be used to further the aims of the Clann, and of course what responsibility should be assigned regarding it and to whom. Not all members of the Yahoo list or the website are necessarily using facebook and of those, not all of them may be "friends" of each other (does that matter?). Should the Clann depend on a service that they do not control to coordinate? We currently do with the Yahoo list, but the Yahoo list has a good message search function and it is possible to export the member list if you are an admin. Facebook offers a really good event invitation function though.

Brewey / Invites

The Laws give the Brewey the responsibility of invitations and event details. In the past the accepted method was to create paper-based invites and mail them out to the mailing list. More recently invites have instead been posted to the website as an event and email has been sent to the Yahoo list announcing that the information was posted. Submitting information to the website is not something all members can or are willing to do. Comyn has been fulfilling that role at least until recently.