You have been talking about how organizing is good, and I agree that organization is fantastic, but I don't think that you necessarily stated anywhere as to how to get things organized other than by just having 1 individual in charge of it.
One individual in charge doesn't work actually. You do generally want a single or limited group of individuals who can make the final call (e.g. our regiment argued for 2 days about where to get dinner at SDCC until someone finally called it. The same goes for gatering organization times. Unless someone actually says "This is the time and place" people keep trying to find the perfect meeting time which never comes up. Someone needs to make some hard calls and pick a time that, while excluding a few, benefits the group overall rather than nothing happening. See also what's Art is doing for the 405th. Not everyone will be happy, but hopefully the group as a whole will be happier than they were before)
But, as regiments grow it gets harder and harder to manage as many people. I was able to somewhat be the go-to person during 2009 and 2010. By the time I came back from a deployment in 2012, the group had grown much larger, and additionally I moved away from the LA area (where most events were) to the San Francisco Bay Area. I ended up relying on various volunteers from the LA group to take charge, and at this point @
Spacemeat is the de facto "Battalion CO" for the southern California 405th folks. Likewise, in order to help ensure that people in Oregon and WA were able to take advantage of our growing relationship with 343i, especially considering many of them attend PAX, we decided to include "Hood's Hellions", a Portland, OR Halo group, into our fold. For all intents and purposes, the Hellions handle their own affairs with little to no involvement to me. My primary job is to ensure any requests or events 343i contacts me about in that area are met. EXample then-community manager Jessica Shea contacted me about getting our members VIP seating for the Halo global championships. Less than 24 hour turnaround. As I had a roster of contact info for all 405th members in attendance, including out of state visitors (again, we include people not specifically "Paciic Regiment" in our activities) , I was able to quickly pass the word around to everyone and the majority of our members were able to show up, providing a great experience not only for themselves but for the Halo fans in attendance.
But I'm going off topic. In actuality, 405th Pacific is split up into 3 groups. The overarching Regiment, the Los Angeles Bn, and the Oregon Bn (Hellions). LA and Hellions handle a lot of smaller local events on their own, and I now pretty much serve as either a primary point of contact, forwarding opportunities as necessary, and step in for larger events that tend to attract out of state 405th folks, such as San Diego Comic Con. Also, if there are any members that have shown an interest in taking charge an also tend to show up at major events, I try and make a point of helping them establish contacts so that in my absence they are able to continue forward..
I would personally appreciate it if you would share with Art and us, and let us know what the forum needs to do and what features need to be added in order to best organize conventions, meet ups, and most importantly, the occurrences in which someone asks us (the 405th) to attend. Your knowledge could be very beneficial to new leaders of the new regiments that will eventually be added.
I have actually spoken to Art extensively about the regiment system. However, as he stated before this is actually something that was not an initial priority for him, and really has only been pushed to the front due to community interest. (those of you who think he swooped in just to create a "costume club" take note.
I've already jumped the shark on him quite a bit.
Unless he wants me to, I want to refrain from starting any specific threads about how to handle regiments until he has a draft of the division charter ready, as that will drive a lot of how we approach things. For now, I'd prefer to limit myself to addressing member concerns rather than making public proposals.
How do we allow "Officials" to come in and contact us?
I know that registering an account on a forum just to post that I'm looking to make a film is kind've tedious and annoying.
Easiest way? E-mail. Everyone already has an e-mail, but the 405th does not. If busy event coordinators and community managers could just e-mail something (e.g.
Deployments@405th.com, etc.) say what they want, and entrust us to come back to them with what we can bring to the table, it would make it a lot easier for them. The more work we do for them, the more they'll be willing to work with us. e.g. Waypoint doesn't have time to hunt down 405th costumes to share, but if we regularly collect them up ourselves and send them photos we have the right to publish (hence why most submitted photos are taken by myself or Adam) then sharing 405th work is as easy as hitting Upload, vs them trying to hunt down everything on their own.
For a film project example: A film company is wondering about Halo armor. They're directed to the 405th and told to contact us to make it happen. Once the film company tells me what they need in an e-mail, I translate that to a post stating what we need and by what deadline in our FB group (which we were using then. Hopefully now we would post it in our forums). No Halo 4 chief suits are available, so I coordinate with everyone to get one made in 2 weeks. Some 405th members fabricate parts and mail them to me. Some sell me helmet casts at discounted price. Another film production agrees to loan all their marine suits. A propmaker sends over their unique Halo 4 BR, then the only one in existence. Others simply help design foam templates that save me time.
Please note how many people are involved who don't actually own a suit of armor.
Then I then take time off of my own schedule and dedicate two weeks to rush build a suit, as our other members are all preoccupied (this was around Halloween I believe). I drive the suit down to LA for delivery and spend two days on set ensuring that the project goes smoothly, basically working as a costume technician. (full disclosure: the film company ended up paying me $400 to cover construction expenses and travel costs).
And that's the amount of work it took to make the crouch-dancing gif that graces my signature.
That's the amount of work it takes to get one suit to a film. Imagine how ridiculous it would have been to ask a film company, unfamiliar with the 405th community, to individually contact the dozen or so members that made this happen. Nevermind having the knowledge of which 405th members had already created Halo 4 costumes or that there was a Halo fan film with a plethora of costumes for loan. It's a lot of extra work for them, so if we want them to contact us about events, we need to make it easier.
Now instead of doing all that organization, they just e-mail one organizer, and that organizer can say "we can do that" or "we can't, sorry", taking on the responsibility.
A bit rambly, but hopefully that makes sense.
So, do we provide contact information for those who are trying to work on a filming project and then proceed to have the person who is the designated contact share that with the rest of us?
Correct. Many of these projects require a lot of moving parts, and ultimately someone needs to take responsibility for whether the 405th succeeds, and looks like the go-to-source for Halo costumes, or fails and looks like a disorganized mess.
This also means that more people can be involved. If someones job is more or less to network, they spend a lot of time getting to know everyone. I literally chase down Halo costumers at conventions. I no **** will end conversations midway and run across traffic to flag down a random ODST and ask them if they're part of the 405th, exchange contact info, and direct them to the site. If people show an interest in participating in events outside of the forums, I make it my business to contact them (as some of you have already been pestered by my e-mails) and try and keep tabs of everyone who wants to get involved. Ex: If there's any film events in Cali, WandererTJ will definitely be getting tagged in a post asking if he's interested in flying out to participate. The Bn COs do the same. They know everyone in their respective region, meaning even if I don't know someone, they will, hopefully giving everyone a chance to participate.
It's far more efficient than hoping everyone reads a forum post. Because while some people check the forums every day, not all of us do.
That's why the club aspect would help. Theoretically the 405th event coordinator gets a request. They make sure a clear forum post is written up outlining all the info needed for members to participate. Then they also push it to the regimental COs who make sure everyone in their region gets word of the event. For larger areas, such as Pacific, the Bn COs would make sure their groups also hear about it. Now instead of the requestor getting just whoever happens to be online at that time, they get the word out to everyone, with little headache. The 405th is handling finding out who's interested in participating, making sure word gets out, avoiding redundancies, etc. and the requestor can go back to tackling other issues.
Again, rambly, but hopefuly make sense.
And not to be the negative nancy, what's to say that there is money involved and they are only interested in having 1 individual for the film? While I would hope that the individual would share the opportunity with the rest of us, what's to say that they never make it known and take the opportunity for themselves?
These are excellent questions, and things that a more formalized and standardized system will help alleviate.
Money and figuring out how to best distribute one person jobs amongst the division will need reworking, and I leave it to Art to figure that out when the time comes. The 405th Pacific had its own ways of handling it that mostly took advantage of the fact that we were small enough to discuss the equitable way to solve these issues. Easy when you're around 100 members, harder when you're in the thousands.
The same goes for dealing with people who might exploit the system. Again, what works on a small scale regiment will need tweaking to form a division standard. For the Pacific, I'm lucky enough that I've formed a good reputation, that everyone trusted me to be in charge. We've never had any official selection process at the Pacific, it was basically someone kept continually volunteering to organize stuff, and eventually everyone looked to them.
Again, this is something that we'd need to develop, and it's being developed slowly right now, but it takes far more thought than I want to put in to this supposed-to-be-quick reply which is already novel length (I sitll have to finish my SDCC costumes...)
I did not have the intentions to say anything that was out of line, and for this, I must apologize.
I am sorry if I have offended anyone, especially Trooper. I really do appreciate the time you have spent and taken in trying to make connections for Halo cosplayers, whether it be for the 405th Pacific Regiment, or the 405th as a whole.
I hope that you would still consider sharing opportunities with the rest of us even though I've been an a-hole.
I do appreciate the apology. One of the ways I've tried to keep any sort of corruption from the leadership of the 405th Pacific is to make it a relatively thankless task. There are no perks. In the Marines, they have a practice where the highest ranking individuals eat last, and the lower ranks eat first. After all, they're doing all the work, so they deserve it.
Bad leaders I find never follow this rule. Good leaders tend to. I know the idea of an "elitist club" has gotten tossed around a lot, but the 405th Pacific was formed for the same reason the 405th was: To hang out with other Halo costumers and help new ones succeed. The members are always first and foremost, and when I mean members I mean everyone, costume or no costume. Hell, even people who are just tagging along to carry bags are part of our 405th family. When we sit down to eat dinner at Denny's no one wears armor and everyone is equal. (Except @
Traghatti who insisted on showing off his flexibility in his foam suit *fistshake*) I'm just here to try an make sure everyone has a fun, positive, and memorable experience.
Should we consider having a top level forum specifically for events under the Regiments section? You know, keep it separate from the specific regiment forums, as one place to find all the events or opportunities. That way we don't have to look through each of the Regiments one by one to try and find their events. Maybe start each event thread with a title like: "[Pacific] Comic-Con 2014, MM, DD-DD" or something like that, idk. Just something to consider
While I COMPLETELY understand why with certain projects, you only want to be able to address certain people with certain builds. If you want to make a Halo 4 specific video, you don't want Halo Reach spartans in the middle of it (though maybe specific exceptions could apply (I mean, Jun is still alive)).
Already doing that in the "conventions & prop parties" subforum! =) We originally posted our SDCC organizing thread in our regiment forum, but that one's still locked to most users as it's still being developed, and I realized this meant that general forum members couldn't participate, which is silly because inviting people to gatherings is the best way to meet new people.
I think a central "Events" subforum with a standardized suggested format (listing POC, locations, times, what the even coordinator needs, etc.) is a great idea and essential to ensuring everyone, not just regiment members, can participate. Regiments should be here to supplement, not supplant, the division.
I also understand that it should be our goal to want to be asked to come back once the day is over, and that we should not try to overstep our bounds or cause those that generated contacts and opportunities for us to need to have to take the time to have to mend a relationship because an individual was out of line.
We are all nerds here, so I'm sure that some of us might lack some social standards or abilities, I mean no offense by this, but it is something that simply needs to be recognized.
But given if we had something to refer to in terms of behavior, something we should know to withhold, I think it would be a good start.
I would rather be left out of something because I didn't have the proper attire rather than being left out because someone else F*d up.
While we could share full psychological self-evaluations of ourselves, which might have some good merit to it, it would sound a bit strange to ask that of the members...
Hmm... Idk, I'm just trying to think of what to do if a 405th member is or seems out of line at an event. I certainly don't want to ruin relationships and I don't want to have anyone angry at me at the end of the day. I mean, we all say dumb things some times. I'd rather be taken aside and hit with a switch than I would want to lose my opportunity to participate again.
Then there is the question, if the situation is REALLY bad, does the Regiment handle it or does it go above the Regiment to more on the forum side of things where the admins deal with it?
Maybe these are not the things that should be talked about TODAY, but they will need to be at a certain point.
Agreed. This is something that will need to be driven at the division level as the Pacific is once again not able to provide the best example.
For us, it's part of the reason we required all members to be 'vetted' by a current member prior to being invited to high exposure events. Because we really did not have any way of redress if something went wrong, so we erred on the side of caution. I couldn't exactly revoke one's 405th membership because well, we don't have 405th membership. So in the past we've basically had to just cut them off from the membership 'benenfits' which was basically invitations to special events. They were still welcome to 405th member events and gatherings, but certain members who had previously badgered 343i about getting free swag would not be invited to future events until we had an opportunity to talk to them again.
I personally would like to see something that was a little more lax now that we're becoming more 'official'. I definitely want an official way to make up for missteps, some sort of warning system, because like you said, we all make mistakes. But it'd require a lot more thought and I've already written war and peace here, and not one word about logo design.
