Hi Mounties!
To build our community, I’ve had monthly meetings with our Leadership to plan monthly projects and initiatives since last fall. Recent projects like Uncharted Territory, Nepenthe, and the upcoming (January 14th!) AG Book Club have all been the product of guild Leadership working to create awesome stuff for everyone.
This past Wednesday we had our January Leadership meeting, and I brought up something that was important to me and turned out to be important to our leaders as well. We want to work harder to make sure you all know what we’re discussing, planning, and make you a bigger part of those monthly meetings so we can best serve you. Leadership isn’t a reward or special club; it’s actually a big responsibility, a lot of hard work to help me maintain and grow the community, and is ultimately in service to all of you.
So with that in mind, I want to share some facts about Leadership, and starting this month we’re going to share the monthly meeting minutes (drafted by the amazing @Viviane), so you know exactly what’s happening in our community and how you can offer suggestions and ideas!
Leadership Facts:
- We meet the first Wednesday of every month at 9 pm on a Leadership channel on Discord.
- The meetings usually last 60-90 minutes.
- We also have a Leaders Lodge category on the forum where we discuss, plan, and organize projects.
- Using those discussions I come up with an itinerary for the month’s talk.
- We start by recapping the previous month, and then we go through the itinerary, point by point, discussing options, ideas, and leaders volunteering to take on projects for the coming months.
- We sometimes briefly touch on what we’ll discuss for the next month’s meeting.
Going forward, if you have an idea or suggestion, please either pm one of your leaders, or if you’d rather not have your name attached to the message, send an email to writeus@ackerlygreen.com and @Catherine will pass along the message to us, we’ll then spend time every month going over all of your ideas and suggestions.
If you have questions or thoughts about Leadership in general or the January Minutes below, leave a comment, and we’ll be happy to open up the discussion here!
January Leadership Meeting Minutes:
(Some topics have been excised by me to keep some AG secrets and surprises intact.)
The January Leadership meeting commenced in the Leadership Discord text channel at 8:55 p.m. HST.
The published Agenda for the meeting was as follows:
- Iron Out Book Club (January)
- Bringing Community into the Leadership process
- Check-In on Fitness initiative (March)
- AG+ Discussion (April)
- The #SearchForMagiq initiative planning, (Summer 2019)
AG Book Club
- The Ackerly Green Book Club is beginning this month on the Forum, starting with the discussion of The Monarch Papers, Volume 1: Flora and Fauna. Organizer extraordinaire @Deyavi has been spearheading, taking notes, collecting questions, and starting an Instagram promo.
- Deyavi has commissioned @Sellalellen to create secret items for a random-draw giveaway for people who participate in Book Club. The first of these will need to be ready by the end of February.
- CJ wants to post a Book Club announcement on the Forum that can also be crafted into an IG post. Deyavi will hash out a rough draft by Tuesday, 1/8 for CJ to review with a short intro, a schedule of chapters, etc., and CJ/Catherine will add AGP info and Q&A dates. This intro post can then be pinned in the channel as a template for future books.
- Deyavi noted that contributions from Leadership as far as unique questions or perspectives would be useful, and invited others to DM her with ideas, particularly if you won’t be available to contribute to a particular week that you have an idea for.
- Free copies of the TMPV1 ebook are currently available from the Ackerly Green front page, as well as a free paperback copy giveaway (see AG Insta), so now is a great time to invite someone you think may want to join!
Community and Leadership Process
- In order to bring the Community as close to Leadership meetings as possible, and make sure the community members, both older Mounties and newcomers, know what initiatives are upcoming well in advance of their launch, CJ will be publishing a secrets-free edition of these meeting minutes to the Forum Cabinet. The minutes will also be posted in the upcoming bi-weekly AGP newsletter.
- CJ will begin these community minutes updates with an intro post about Leadership’s work, when the meetings take place, and an invitation for community members to share ideas with their guild leader(s).
- @Catherine will be giving Vivane access to the AGP public calendar in order to keep Leadership info and initiatives up to date and accessible to everyone.
Spring Fitness Initiative
- @Augustus_Octavian will resurrect the Forum planning thread for Fitness, which will start in and run through March; the current overall idea is to create Guild-based workouts and playlists.
- CJ suggested that the community message Augo privately with contributions to the Guild-based workout playlists, so that the final reveals are a surprise for the community and the work of creating playlists is crowdsourced.
- Augo is currently thinking of doing an overarching workout plan with twice-weekly breakout sessions with Guild Themes, for a total of 8 breakouts plus an all-group activity everyday, although no one is required to do or limited to doing their own Guild’s breakout. The workouts will try to focus on exercises that don’t require equipment, but will not be possible for all in order to get the variety we’re looking for.
- Based on a printable narrative workout site model called Darebee that he has used and recommended, Augo suggested the possibility of incorporating narratives for the themed workouts, but mentioned that it was beyond his present capabilities. Viv got excited about narratives and has been (willingly) voluntold into the group with the possibility of contributing a narrative element to the themed workouts.
#SearchForMagiq
- Search for Magiq is a multi-month, multi-platform initiative currently slated to be part of a greater narrative that will wrap Secret Society, the Saberlane/Woolie arc, and the BoB release. Reader participation and “gathering” a certain number of the last remnants of magiq will unlock lore and further narrative from AGP to lead to future stories - basically 75% leadership and community and 25% AGP-released reward. This removes some unknown-canon barriers to lore exploration and provides an individually-driven system for group reward.
- The current suggested areas of contribution/participation in the Search for Magiq include, but are not limited to: stories, IG challenges, #DoorToNeithernor, art, music, crafts. These mini initiatives will be collected into a whole concept to help uncover a central, canon, AGP mystery.
- As a tag to #SearchForMagiq, Augo asked for ways that Leadership could help nudge the progression of Secret Society. CJ suggested finding narrative solutions to continue progressing, like @OracleSage’s suggestion of scrying/astral projection. @Remus requested that we make sure to include the member who we believe was “assigned” the current location but for whatever reason can’t access it.
The meeting concluded at 10:26 p.m. HST.