Hi all,
The RFR Board of Trustees met in late July, and I have some updates to share with the community as a result of that meeting. First, you can find public minutes from the past two years (since the Board voted to release public minutes) in this google folder. Minutes from our March 2024 meeting have been added to that folder, and the summer 2024 minutes will be added soon once they are finalized.
As you’ve hopefully already seen, we are conducting a follow-up survey about the covid policy. Thanks again for all of your thoughtful feedback about how the policy worked in the spring. An update about the fall policy will be posted very soon.
Next, we wanted to let the community know about some conversations the Board has been having since the end of Port Katherine last year. While recognizing that the factors that led to Port Katherine’s end were complex, and many of them were unique to that game, we nevertheless felt it was important to determine if there was anything we could learn as an organization from how Port Katherine ended. Some volunteers from the Board had a series of conversations with a few former Port Katherine staffers about lessons learned from the end of the game, and based on those conversations, the Board is working on a series of updates and new documents:
- Updated organizational values: Based both on feedback from our conversations and on the fact that the values have not been updated in 10 years, we made some changes to the values. You can see the updated values on our website, and a document with both the 2013 and 2024 values here.
- RFR organizational summary for staff centers: The Board is in the process of writing a one page “What is Red Feather Roleplaying?” summary document aimed at staff in order to make more transparent what organizational support resources are available to staff, especially new staff. A version of this summary will probably also be posted to our website for general information purposes once it is written.
- Staff satisfaction/burnout survey: The Board will start conducting twice-annual voluntary surveys of staff of all our campaign games to get a better gauge on the health of our games and level of burnout of the staff. Results will be shared with game directors unless specified otherwise by the staff member.
- Guidance and information for new game proposals: We are drafting more explicit guidance for people who are interested in proposing new games for sponsorship by RFR. We hope this will be useful for anyone who wants to propose one shots or campaign games under our umbrella, but also be some helpful points for anyone anywhere to think about when they are starting a new larp.
- Expanded game director check-ins: We have developed an expanded list of questions for game directors to answer during their check-ins at Board meetings.
- Encouraging kinder community norms for PELs: It’s important to us to respect and value the work that game staff put into running each and every event. As we tried to reflect in the updated organizational values (linked above), LARPs are a collaborative form of entertainment created jointly by staff and players, not a service that staff provides for players. As such, we’d like to work towards creating a stronger culture of kindness and respect for each other, especially in the feedback players provide to staff through their PELs. The RFR Code of Conduct applies to PELs, and while different games can set different norms about exactly what kind of feedback they want to solicit from their players, we encourage everyone to remember that at the end of the day, we are all playing in the woods together for fun.
Please feel free to reach out to me or any other member of the Board if you have questions about any of this. I look forward to gaming with you soon!
Sincerely,
Sarah