Re: Re[2]: info 1

[Mark Schuldenfrei <schuldy@abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>]

Poster: Mark Schuldenfrei <schuldy@abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>

Greetings from Tibor.

Lyanna wrote:
  The Kingdom requirement of membership for fighting seems to me to be a CYA 
  attitude for our highly litigious modern society.

In private mail to someone, I summarized the early Corporate history of the
pay to play and pay to fight process.  I'll quote it below.  I didn't check
some of the chronological notes I have: there could be errors, and I hope that
people will correct them.

---Begin excerpted text.
The Society had two types of waivers: one for membership, and one for
fighting.  The Board required that Kingdom MOLs maintain waiver sheets for
combatants, renewable each few years.

One or two Kingdoms failed to take this job seriously, and rather than chide
them the Board chose to revisit the entire process.

It was decided that, at the same time, it would be much easier to have a
single uniform waiver system and language, rather than two of them.  This
notion became further refined into having the membership office handle the
storage.  It was decided (without further thought) that the simple way to
handle this would be to require membership.  At least one Kingdom, and several
sets of people, came up with other, better notions: but the Board refused to
consider them calling it a made decision.

Then came wave after wave of language changes, new policies, required
membership being repealed, more new language, and the discovery that if we
were to cover practices, we would have to offer local storage of waivers.
(This is actually a Corporate requirement that predates the new G&PD language.
Non-members that attend practices must execute waivers, as well as everyone
who attend events where fighting takes place.)

So, I believe your thesis was invalid: waivers provoked pay-to-fight, and the
waiver policy of the last year or so also required local waiver storage.
---End excerpted text.

Lyanna also wrote, about required memberships:
  I can't think of many clubs that don't have one.

By law, and practice, we are not a club.  We are a charity whose avowed
purpose is to support medieval re-enactment.  Maybe it wasn't a very wise
choice, all those years ago.  But that is what we are.

Agreed: clubs have different rules.  We aren't a club.

	Tibor
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