Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.

If you run an active chapter or you’re a member of an active chapter, you’re going to start thinking that you’re getting screwed. You do the work, you file paperwork every month, and your chapter makes money for STARFLEET — Money for which you (as a chapter) are receiving nothing of value.

And you would not be wrong. You are getting screwed. If you think about it for longer than three seconds, you can think of much better ways to spend that money. You could buy a bunch of Star Trek books and start a lending library. You could buy a couple of board games. Almost any investment in your group will outperform the money you send STARFLEET.

STARFLEET should be spending money to generate new members and help you grow your chapter. At the very least they should be helping you recruit. Right?

Well, yes. But also no. Because STARFLEET doesn’t actually work the way it was designed. Here’s a big part of the problem.

There are way too many chapters.

When’s the last time you’ve seen a chapter go into drydock for not meeting membership minimums? I’ve only heard about it happening once. Some chapters disappear because the people running them give up. Some of them disappear because they’re getting screwed. Some of them self-destruct over personality conflicts. Some of them just fade away. But it’s almost never because they’re not meeting the requirements.

So, we have a lot of zombie chapters that don’t meet the membership requirements. They’re all over the place. They’ve been around for years.

STARFLEET cannot find the strength to say no, and that’s a huge problem. Why should STARFLEET invest money in chapters when there are so many chapters that will be a tremendous waste of those resources? Why should STARFLEET help you build a chapter when your own chapter has been under-strength for years, or even six months? You do not have the ability to lead a chapter that meets the requirements. Spending money or other resources on that kind of chapter is a waste of those resources.

But saying no means that some people are going to feel bad. You’re going to upset them. They will become angry with you. And you don’t want to make people angry. You want them to like you. You really want them to like you. So you don’t say no. You just let them do their thing because hey — what’s the harm?

And the serpent devours its own tail.

STARFLEET’s best shot at providing great chapter support is predicated on their own responsibility to make sure that chapters are meeting the requirements. If they want to make back their investment in the chapters, they need to be putting new members on strong and active chapters so that a positive cycle can begin.

I think they should definitely focus a little effort on helping people lead chapters, rather than just having chapters. That would help, and it wouldn’t take much to do — Reach out to the COs of larger chapters and ask them for their advice and compile a Big List Of Stuff That Seems To Have Worked.

But the best thing they could do right now is simply follow their own rules, reduce the size of the fleet and greatly boost the odds that a new member will find themselves on a strong and active chapter.

Then we can have a conversation about the best way to support chapters, the best way to grow chapters, and the best way to recruit for the fleet overall. That would be great. But until STARFLEET finds the strength to say no, it’s a tremendous waste of time.