Category: Membership

Back and in plain sight.

When this post:

Leads to this response:

I think that tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Sure, let’s ignore the work I’ve done for STARFLEET over the years:

  • Getting them a contract with a STAR TREK licensee (which they blew).
  • Putting out the Communique.
  • Building the largest chapter in the organization.
  • Working with others to send out over 2,000 STAR TREK books to troops serving overseas.
  • Hosting a big pile of chapter websites and volunteering to help anyone that asked at every step along the way.
  • Promoted STARFLEET at all of my convention guest appearances.

Yes, I had the unbelievable audacity to run for office in this organization. Twice. I lost both times. People didn’t like my ideas, and that’s okay. I kept trying to sell them, no one wanted them. I eventually asked a few of my friends about it, and we built a STAR TREK fan club that’s twice the size of STARFLEET — And STARFLEET leadership is convinced that what I really want to do is run for Commander, STARFLEET again.

That’s… that’s just so STARFLEET.

Of course, they didn’t say this sort of thing to me. They said it where they thought I couldn’t see it. They were wrong. Just like the people that started anonymous attack sites during the election — I know exactly who you are. At least one of you had the decency to apologize.

Anyway, that’s STARFLEET leadership. If they don’t like the guy asking the questions, they’d rather make fun of him than ask better questions. They’d rather erase his work and pretend it never happened. This is your heads-up — It could happen to you.

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A Data-Driven STARFLEET

First, a blanket thank-you to everyone who has reached out to me or commented on issues I’ve written about for this goofy blog. It’s encouraging to see people disconnect from the regularly scheduled noise and talk about policy and strategy for STARFLEET.

One of the things that I’ve noticed in some of these discussions is a tendency to push for drastic measures. It’s big stuff that would probably require changing the by-laws, our financial structure, the way entire departments are organized… big stuff at the international level, for the most part.

Here’s the first part of that problem: Those ideas usually aren’t data-driven. In other words, they’re usually the result of looking at a given situation and then wanting to change that result using personal experience or intuition. That isn’t a great way to solve problems, but the folks recommending these ideas are not stupid. They’re merely uninformed.

Here’s the second part: Most of us are uninformed.

If we want to focus on creating solutions as opposed to recommending drastic measures, we need more data. The bad news is that we’re not seeing very much of it right now. The good news is that it’s probably easy to get.

For example, if you think that STARFLEET should revisit the chapter minimums, you should know how many chapters are currently under-strength. If you want to talk about making changes to the Academy, you should know the percentage of current STARFLEET members that have passed a class at the academy. If you think the Academy should focus more on Star Trek rather than having a huge catalog, you should find out how popular the non-Trek courses are in comparison.

Just as a point of reference, three or four people have taken the SFA course about sea cucumbers according to the guy currently running it. That’s three or four more than I would have guessed. My estimate was zero, so my assumption was off by 300 to 400%. Glad I asked!

Having more data will probably help you to refine your idea into smaller pieces and make it easier to implement. Having more data may challenge your initial assumptions and convince you to take your idea off of the table entirely — You can use the time you’ve saved and the information you have to invent a better idea!

More importantly, having more data will help create better policy because you don’t have to take someone’s word for it. Is the Academy popular? The data will tell you. Is it gaining popularity? Historical data will tell you.

We should challenge everything we’re doing to make sure we’re doing it the best way we can, and those challenges should be data-driven. Will people interpret this data in different ways? Absolutely. People can debate about why the numbers are what the numbers are, but we’re still better off when these debates are informed by real information, not assumptions.

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Engagement: The Monopoly Theory

In an earlier essay, I talked about STARFLEET’s problem with the illusion of prestige, and how it can attract sad people like moths to a flame. Short version: Hurt people hurt people. But there have to be more pieces to that puzzle, right? We can’t really have that many members lashing out because they’re upset with something going on in their own lives. Surely not everyone scrapping on an E-mail list has those kinds of problems. It’s just not statistically likely.

A lot of people are simply bored.

That doesn’t really sound like a STARFLEET problem.

Hear me, people of Earth: It is absolutely a STARFLEET problem.

We’ve talked about chapter support and why chapters aren’t getting it. One of the myriad problems with not having great chapter support is that eventually people will start looking toward the center. The less emphasis STARFLEET puts on chapters, the more emphasis it places on itself.

I’m going to say that again. I’ll even center it. And make it bold. It’s that important.

The less emphasis STARFLEET puts on chapters, the more emphasis it places on itself.

These members have been sold a product, and part of it is that they’ve joined the world’s largest Star Trek fan club. They’ll start to wonder why everything in STARFLEET is so glacial, why nothing seems to happen. They’ll start to think that hey, we’re in the largest Star Trek fan club, there should certainly be more communication from STARFLEET. There should be something going on. We should be hearing more from the Admiralty Board. We’re the world’s largest Star Trek fan club and no one is talking. What are they hiding?

Two important points:

  1. 5,000 members isn’t even close to the largest Star Trek fan club in the world, but I can understand why you bought into the hype. It hasn’t been true for a long time.
  2. The most active STARFLEET project provides you with an incredible opportunity to do homework.

I loved the episode of Star Trek when the Enterprise crew nailed the Algebra final.

Folks get frustrated and they get annoyed and they get bored. They’ll argue. I understand that some people have issues, but I prefer to think of my fellow STARFLEET members as good people. I’m optimistic. Yes. Some of them are weird. But even the weird ones tend to be genuinely kind people. I have seen evidence for this many, many times. STARFLEET members tend to be good people. But they get bored, and boredom fosters a desire for entertainment.

Historically, STARFLEET tries to have it both ways. It doesn’t embrace new programs at the international level that are interesting and engaging, but it doesn’t want to put a lot of effort into new projects to support chapters, either.

STARFLEET needs to look at every argument on a mailing list or every fight on the Facebook page as a failure. They need to pay attention, adjust the universal translator and see these arguments not as a personality dispute but as an opportunity for positive change. Write it down on a piece of paper.

September 14th. We’ve spent three days watching an argument unfold. Could we have prevented this by engaging these members with something cool a month ago?

I don’t really have a name for this, but I’m going to call it the Monopoly Theory. Monopoly is well-known for destroying friendships. But maybe the real problem is that people got so bored that rather than do something fun together, they decided to play Monopoly.

Some people will get so bored that they’ll play STARFLEET.

No one wins.

 

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The PDCA Cycle

The laser. Touch-tone telephones. Cellular telephones. Communications satellites. Radio astronomy. The first binary digital computer. The transistor. The C programming language. The UNIX operating system, which serves not only as the core of the laptop I’m using to write this blog post, but also the webserver where this blog is being hosted.  All of these inventions came from Bell Laboratories. There have been eight Nobel prizes awarded to work performed at Bell Labs.

Remember W. Edwards Deming from the Ferengi Management essay? His mentor was a guy named Walter Shewhart, who was instrumental at Bell Labs from 1925 until he retired in 1956. Here’s what his boss had to say:

“Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded and followed it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control.”

Deming called it the ‘Shewhart Cycle.’ Today we know it as PDCA, and it looks like this.

PLAN: Establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output (the target or goals). By establishing output expectations, the completeness and accuracy of the specification is also a part of the targeted improvement. When possible, start on a small scale to test possible effects.

DO: Implement the plan, execute the process, make the product. Collect data for analysis in the following CHECK and ACT steps.

CHECK: Study the actual results and compare them to the expected results and document the differences. Look for differences in implementation from the PLAN and look for the appropriateness and completeness of the PLAN to enable the execution that’s happening next.

ACT: If the CHECK shows that the PLAN that was implemented in DO is an improvement to the prior standard, then that becomes the new standard for how the organization should ACT. If the CHECK shows that the PLAN that was implemented in DO is not an improvement, then the existing standard will remain in place. In either case, if the CHECK showed something different than expected, then there is some more research to be done, and that research will help you create a new PLAN.

This is a fundamental process for successful iterative change.

We’re Star Trek fans, so whether we realize it not this process seems very familiar to us, and it should. The PDCA/Shewhart Cycle is derived from a larger concept that’s responsible for more than just the cool technology from Bell Labs that I listed earlier. You’ve probably figured out the name of it already, but here you go:

It’s called the scientific method.

The scientific method is about 500 years old. The PDCA cycle is about sixty years old. The reason we keep using both of them is because they work.

I know that this essay has been pretty dry, but I need to show you something about a fundamental way that the PDCA cycle works in practice. It’s really important, and I promise that I’ll cover this and we’ll be done.

One of the most common complaints about STARFLEET is that we’re not really embracing the future. I know, because it’s one of my common complaints. The problem is even worse than that. In a lot of ways, we’re moving backward because we’re not iterating our processes. We’re not getting better.

A good example from my experience on the STARFLEET Communique: We tend to think in terms of getting the CQ done, not in terms of making the CQ better. We’ve been asking for articles for the CQ the same way we have for years. These processes haven’t changed. If you compare a recent CQ to a CQ from years ago, you’ll notice that it seems that our design and layout has gone backward. We have not established a standard, and then responsibly iterated to a higher standard.

Another good example is announcements: They’re simple E-mail messages in ASCII text. There’s no formatting, there’s nothing bold or italic. There are no images. No matter the content, the design and the formatting of these announcements have been the same for the past twenty years. I don’t think anyone has put a lot of effort into raising the standards and embracing a process to do so. But another common complaint is that STARFLEET doesn’t communicate enough to the membership. Sounds like a product that could really use a process and iterative cycle, doesn’t it?

It means not having to do everything all at once. We keep trying to do things the hard way, where we start from nearly-zero on everything STARFLEET does. We need to steer away from drastic change. Trying to make absolutely everything fantastic all at once is a recipe for disaster. Use the process. Make it a little better every time. Keep making it better. It’s the core of kaizen.

This process is one way to make that happen. You can use it all over the place, even at the chapter level. Chapter documents, event planning, recruiting… There are a lot of great reasons for why the philosophy of the PDCA cycle has been embraced over several different industries and disciplines.

That’s all for now. I hope I’ve given you something to think about!

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Engagement: The Stick

I have a cat. She’s named Darwin, and she’s pretty awesome.

Let me tell you something about this cat. She is absolutely spoiled. I don’t have kids. If you have kids, imagine how much more money you would have if you didn’t have kids. Okay, so take one percent of that money and imagine you’re spending it on a cat. That’s how spoiled this cat is.

She’s basically got everything. She’s got one of those ridiculous multi-level cat condos. Her litter box is a robot. She gets the best food money can buy. She gets veterinary visits regularly, whether she wants them or not (and let me clear this up for you: she does not).

So, cat toys. I’m actually here to talk about something else. But I’m starting with cat toys.

As you can probably imagine, she has cat toys. All kinds of cat toys. There are two big boxes in the living room filled with cat toys. There are cloth fish, with catnip within. There is a stuffed frog that makes frog noises. There’s a stuffed bird that makes bird noises. There are a bunch of different kinds of balls. Tennis balls, super balls, whatever.

She likes these toys! But the one she likes best is called stick.

If you were to guess that it involves a stick, you would be correct. It’s a long plastic stick. On one side, there’s a handle. On the other is a piece of string, and at the end of the piece of string is a bunch of crinkly plastic tentacles.

Darwin loves stick.

There’s a big difference between the rest of her toys and stick. I have to operate the stick. Whip it around, let her chase the crinkly bits until she catches them. Wait until she gives it up. Start all over again. If it were up to Darwin, she’d have me give up my career, friendships and the need to eat food so I could play stick full-time. It would probably be more than full-time. I think she would enforce mandatory overtime.

When she wants to play stick, she sits in the middle of the living room with her paws tucked in and meows. Most of the time.

Sometimes she doesn’t meow, and I don’t realize what she wants until I walk through the living room and get a look that seems to say that she’s very disappointed that I have not anticipated her needs.

But this is about STARFLEET and engagement.

People are not cats. But sometimes they have interests and we don’t know about them because they’re not talking to us about them. They’re not meowing. They’re sitting in the living room waiting patiently. And STARFLEET may be giving them a lot of toys. They may enjoy those toys. But maybe they’d love to play the equivalent of stick. We may not know how to play stick.

It is also entirely possible that we have no idea what a stick is, because it’s something that we’ve never really considered.

And it is also entirely possible that many, many cats would love to play stick.

Part of the reason it’s important to break things down into small pieces and implement new things quickly is so that we can put something in front of STARFLEET members and find out if it’s their stick. It might not be their stick, and that’s totally fine. We’ll move on to the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing.

Try something. If it doesn’t work, let it fail. Learn why it failed. Try something else, and maybe it’ll do better because you learned something new last time. Maybe it won’t. Keep trying. Resist the urge to create a department or a fancy position in the name of something you’re trying — If no one wants it, it’s a tremendous waste of precious resources. Keep learning.

I would write more about this but I’m hearing noises from the living room. I might be a while.

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The One That Gets Me In Trouble

Life is terribly unfair.

It’s true. People have problems. Sometimes those problems are physical, sometimes those problems are developmental — Sometimes they’re emotional. Some people have a very difficult time relating to their families, other folks have a rough time communicating with others. Some people have a very hard time of making a living in their chosen field. Sometimes people feel that the life they have isn’t the one they wanted, or even the one for which they’ve been trained. A lot of people have spent their lives working very hard and finding their dreams just out of reach every time.

This is incredibly common. There are entire branches of science devoted to helping people with these kinds of problems. I am not qualified to diagnose or treat these problems.

All I know is that it can make some people very sad. It can make them deeply unhappy.

…and sometimes, these people take it out on us.

You don’t have to look very far to find the illusion of prestige in STARFLEET. It’s everywhere. We have pretend ranks from a pretend military that leads a pretend armada to the edges of our galaxy and beyond. We’re modeled on ideas from a TV show in a genre that some people call competence porn.

If you’re having a very hard time with your family, if you’re in a bad relationship, if you work a terrible job for almost no money, if you’ve been out of work for what seems like an eternity? I bet STARFLEET looks completely amazing.

Finally. They’ve found a place where people will recognize their ability. A place where people will respect them. A place where they can get away from the world and just be themselves. And if people don’t respect them, they’ll make it so. They’ll chase awards and commendations. They’ll do whatever it takes to get promoted, which usually isn’t that much.

They will tell people that they’ve been serving in STARFLEET when all they’ve really been doing all this time is paying for a membership.

This actually happens.

We’ve seen it. We could cite a lot of examples. We know that this is happening.

Realistically, many of us have found success in our personal and professional lives. Most of us that have found a measure of success realize that while we’ve worked very hard, we were also incredibly lucky.

The easiest thing to do when we see attention-seeking behavior is to just dismiss it and look away. But we can’t. We were taught better than that by Star Trek. We need to embrace the people and embrace the problem.

We need to understand that the illusion of prestige can be problematic. I’m not saying that we need to systematically remove all the pieces that contribute to it, but we really need to dial it back.

When we move away from Star Trek, we become inexorably drawn into being a club that is simply about itself. This is when the illusion of prestige is at its most potent, at its most dangerous level. It’s when debate becomes argument. It’s when argument becomes a fight.

It’s when factions become family.

And that’s not healthy. We need to be more aware of when it’s happening, and we need to be aware of what it does to people — especially people that are hurting. When they come to us because they’re angry or upset, we can’t let it be because we’re their commanding officer or their regional coordinator or the Commander, STARFLEET. We need it to be because we’re friends, and friends talk to each other.

There’s certainly a lot to be said for wanting to make STARFLEET a lot more about Star Trek instead of putting so much focus on the organization itself. Taking the illusion of prestige down a couple notches would be one of several very good reasons to do so.

“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.” — Fred Rogers

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Chapter Support: Ouroboros

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.

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The Choices We Make

I’ve talked to a few people about the essays on this site and I realized that more than anything else, it’s about choices. Some people agree with what I have to say, and that’s cool. Some people disagree, and that’s cool, too. Both options are completely valid. But whether you agree or disagree, here’s what matters:

It’s about the choices we make.

My point-of-view is that Star Trek is awesome. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a little kid, and I’ve remained a fan. Getting to work on Star Trek is a dream come true; While it’s nowhere near as profitable as other creative work I’ve done, it’s very important to me.

I think that STARFLEET has a responsibility to be awesome. I think it has to be great, because Star Trek is great. Television and movies are unidirectional media — It gets made and you get to watch it. It’s a passive thing. STARFLEET should be the next step, where individuals engage with each other and continue the conversation. It should where they learn from each other and build new things together. It should be where people from different backgrounds get together and explore. STARFLEET should be the interactive component that comes after Star Trek.

I don’t think STARFLEET has ever met the responsibility to be awesome. It’s helped to create a lot of long-standing friendships and inspire some really great parties and get-togethers and charity fundraising, but the same can be said of a lot of non-profits. STARFLEET should be different.

I want a STARFLEET that’s bold. I want a STARFLEET that inspires and rewards exploration. I want a STARFLEET that challenges people to think about the big stuff this planet has to offer and take action. I’m tired of seeing charity events used as a fig leaf to hide why people wear uniforms and enjoy time with their friends.

I want those uniforms to mean something.

And more than anything else, I want STARFLEET to never be good enough. I’m tired of the same stupid arguments over and over again about how to serve the members through newsletters and membership cards. Newsletters and membership cards? That’s what we argue about when we’re Star Trek fans? Ugh. Enough. Think big. Build big. Go deep.

We are Star Trek fans. We’re not weak. We’re the smart kids, and we deserve a hell of a lot better.

As mentioned in an earlier post, it seems to me that a lot of long-time members of STARFLEET look back to the days when the organization was a lot bigger, and a lot more relevant to Star Trek fans. The glory days, you know? Screw all of that. All of it. Forever. This is now, and we’re having a really hard time getting people to think about right now, and we’re supposed to be focused on the future. That show we love is about the future. We’re supposed to be all about what comes next.

Anyone can argue about regions and chapters and the membership and newsletters and finances and whatever other ordinary everyday noise that comes up. It’s easy. Everyone can create an opinion on that stuff. It’s so easy.

I’m tired of a STARFLEET that thinks that way. I’m tired of a STARFLEET that yells at the top of its lungs about how old it is or how many people are in it as opposed to the cool stuff we’re doing every day. We’re not yelling about the cool stuff we’re doing every day because we’re not doing it. We’re not enabling it. We’re not supporting it. We’re not helping to make it happen. Sometimes it happens independently and we’re lucky enough to write about it in the newsletter, but that’s simply not good enough.

STARFLEET isn’t good enough for Star Trek fans, and there’s a lot of evidence for that. The fans are expressing their fandom elsewhere and in different ways, and there’s no easy way to solve that problem. Changing the membership cost isn’t going to solve that problem. Rearranging the organization isn’t going to solve that problem. Finding new ways to present a static document isn’t going to solve that problem.

All of this stuff is an attempt to attract more people to the table by reshuffling the same deck of cards in a world where people aren’t interested in playing Cribbage anymore. It’s time to stop shuffling and learn some new games. We should have stopped shuffling fifteen years ago.

STARFLEET should be better than it is. It should be even better than it was. The difference is in the choices we make.

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An Incredibly Lean Decade.

A quote from a conversation I had this morning with a STARFLEET member in the UK.

“Our problem is that we have feast or famine with Trek. Aside from the JJ films it’s been a lean decade for Star Trek fandom. What do you fill that time with?“

You mean aside from the three films that have been so popular that they’ve made over 1.2 billion dollars and were consistently better-received by audiences than previous Star Trek movies by a significant factor? Well, alright then.

It’s been quite a lean decade, that’s true.

It feels like we didn’t even get six Starfleet Corps of Engineers books, the three-book Destiny series, all eight Typhon Pact novels, all five books of The Fall, the three-book Prey series, five books of the Department of Temporal Investigations. Five more Lost Era books. Seven Vanguard books. Four Seekers books. Three Cold Equations books. Oh, and the anthologies, like all three Mirror Universe anthologies. And the three Myriad Universes anthologies. Or the four Starfleet Academy books for the Young Adult crowd.

Or even books like ‘How To Speak Klingon,’ featuring a very handsome audio engineer.

Or the comic books that IDW has been putting out like Star Trek, Starfleet Academy and New Visions. And the crossover titles that bring the Star Trek universe together with Green Lantern, Planet of the Apes and Doctor Who. And cool trade paperback versions of each.

Board games that we almost didn’t see in the past decade include Star Trek: Expeditions, Star Trek: Fleet Captains, Star Trek Catan, Star Trek: Attack Wing or Star Trek: Ascendancy. And video games like Star Trek: DAC, Star Trek and the incredibly popular Star Trek Online. Also mobile games like Star Trek: Timelines, Star Trek: Trexels, Star Trek: Rivals, Convoy Raider 2013, Romulan 2014 and Starfleet 2014.

See?

This is why I’m crazy.

A STARFLEET member should know about these things. A STARFLEET member in the UK should absolutely know about the incredible Rachael Stott, the artist who drew that awesome dress-uniform Spock sketch above — She’s from London, draws Star Trek comics and is so good that she’s gotten hand-painted fan letters from Peter Capaldi.

If you’re a STARFLEET member and you’re not aware of the stuff I’ve mentioned here, STARFLEET has failed you. I’m not saying you have to know everything that’s coming out or that has come out, but you should probably know more. If you think the last decade has been ‘lean,’ I honestly don’t even know where to begin. The statement is abject nonsense.

Even all the stuff listed above isn’t everything! There are all kinds of new Star Trek shirts and clothing and Eaglemoss models and Mega Blox kits and new RPG beta-tests and listing every Star Trek thing that’s come out in the past decade would probably take an entire day to write up, and I type very quickly.

Okay, so that makes me crazy. But what’s worse?

Man, look at what this ignorance has wrought. We’ve got Star Trek hooks into fiction readers, comic book fans, tabletop gamers, video game fans, mobile gaming fans, role-playing game fans… and if we’re not informed about this stuff we can’t engage on these topics.

The idea that a Star Trek fan club can’t thrive in this environment is totally crazy. It can. They do! SFI isn’t thriving. Why are STARFLEET members buying these ridiculous excuses? A lean decade? Good lord.

—

NOTE: Yes, I’ve done a lot of work for CBS on Star Trek but it’s not like they give me information about this stuff. I wish they would! I’d be happy to tell more people about it, but licensing is a strange beast with a lot of arms (and twice as many heads). The only stuff they talk to me about is stuff that I can’t talk about. I have almost zero advantage over anyone else on gathering this information. I ain’t special.

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I joined STARFLEET in 1993…

…a phrase that makes my blood freeze every time.

Ah, the good old days. Back in the 90s when STARFLEET was really big and there were two STAR TREK shows on the air and the internet wasn’t really around just yet in a meaningful way. What usually follows is a description of the good old days, and while it’s nostalgic and fun, it’s important to put that into historical context. Since it’s hard to do so regarding STARFLEET (mainly because a lot of people don’t remember the walking nightmare that STARFLEET had become in the late 90s), I’ll approach it from another angle.

But for right now, think about a Star Trek fan in 1993. Think about what they need, what they want to talk about and how they’re likely to express it when it comes to their fandom. Keep thinking about that fan while I take you to an entirely different realm. A realm of heroism and wizardry, of fantasy and magic.

That’s right, another geek-friendly property that involves a bunch of friends getting together and having a good time. As it was and ever shall be. Or was. And is.

Welcome to 1993! I’m in an abandoned classroom in Solebury, PA. My friends are there — Stephen Francesconi (who got me into STARFLEET in the first place), Colin Brown and Brian Schaeffer. We stayed after school because Stephen mentioned that he wanted to run a D&D campaign. I’d never played before, but it certainly sounded like my kind of thing.

We played Dungeons and Dragons, but that’s actually not really fair to say. We were playing what was called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition. The Player’s Handbook looked like this.

We were all in the same room, sitting in chairs. We had pushed a couple of desks together to create a play-surface, and we used the copy machine at the library to make character sheets.

It wasn’t the only thing we used the copier for, either. I was an incredibly poor kid. There’s no way I would have been able to afford a Dungeons and Dragons book. I copied what I could out of books that belonged to my friends. They also had a surplus of dice, and let me use them. Whew! If it weren’t for the charity of my friends, I really wouldn’t have been able to learn to play D&D. I remain very grateful.

I understand the desire to remember way-back-when, too. Life was easier, I didn’t have bills to pay and I still had great knees. But most importantly, I miss Brian Shaeffer. He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. He passed away in 2010 after a long fight with cancer.

Let’s fast-forward about 24 years, to a couple of weeks ago.

It’s Wednesday night, and I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Neysha is in Louisiana. Mike is in Missouri. Dagny is in Los Angeles. Our Dungeon Master John is in New York. There’s still a character sheet on the table, but it’s a file open on my iPad. While there are still a tremendous number of dice at my place, there are none on my desk. We just roll dice using an application called Roll20. We can hear each other, we can see each other. It’s pretty great.

What the hell happened? You’re doing the same thing, and it’s the same thing, but it’s very different now.

That’s true. Even the game is different, technically. It’s the 5th Edition, but everyone just calls it ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ Obviously, technology has changed a lot. But it’s not enough to say that, because that isn’t the whole story.

Maybe it’s because I was dirt-poor, but it’s important to mention this. Dungeons and Dragons is effectively free. You can buy the books if you want, but you don’t have to. The Basic Rules are available for everyone — players and potential Dungeon Masters alike — absolutely free of charge 24 hours a day.

There are two important pieces here.

First, technology has made a tremendous difference in the way the game is played. That is to be expected.

The other part is this — The people that make Dungeons and Dragons have taken a look at how people play their game, and how it compares to how it used to be. They’ve been pro-active and responsive. They made a lot of very public and terrible mistakes along the way. Anyone in the hobby will be happy to tell you all about that. But they’re trying, and they’ve been incredibly successful.

I’m still thinking about that fan from 1993.

Good! Me, too. You’ve been thinking about how they do things and how they think about things. Obviously, there are a lot of awesome things going on for that fan in 1993. Things are awesome. But if you were to take a fan of the same age from 2017 and put them in the same place how would it look to them?

Very, very strange.

It would probably look like a freakin’ cult.

They would probably run far, far away.

And they have.

A lot of people that were playing Dungeons and Dragons are still playing. Likewise, a lot of Star Trek fans are still Star Trek fans. But does STARFLEET meet the needs of modern Star Trek fans? Technology makes a difference, but D&D changed to meet the needs of modern D&D fans. Can STARFLEET do the same?

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