Alex Thorne 18:27 So for those of us on an on a computer, you can right click on somebody who doesn't have a video, and it'll hide everybody who doesn't have video running. So that'll take it down to just Maggie, Ryan and I once we get started. Maggie Cogan 18:53 You can also set it to Speaker view if you want. So whoever's talking is the only one showing. Alex Thorne 19:01 Yeah, I forget about speaker because always run to two zoom screens. So I'd be only on one and speaker on the other. Maggie Cogan 19:11 That is too fancy for us low tech beeps. Tyler 19:15 It's probably best if you're not like speaking or answering questions to go on mute. So that way we don't get a bunch of latency. Alex Thorne 19:26 100% Maggie Cogan 19:27 Mm hmm. We are going to ask that everyone mute themselves if you don't meet yourself, I will mute you. Because we are recording and I will be trying to do transcripts later tonight or tomorrow morning early. It makes it a lot easier if I don't have background noise that I have to cut out of the answers. We're basically going I've cut all the questions that everybody put in into two days so we'll do half of them tonight. We'll do half of them Saturday night. Once we get to the end of the questions that we have for tonight, and then we'll open it up to anybody who might have other questions. And I'll just ask that you put it in the chat that you have one. And once we get to that point, I will call on you and unmute you, and you can ask your question. I dont know how many more we want to wait for 2,4,6,8,10,12, 14,15. So that's pretty much everyone who said they're coming in, we're missing like one or two. William, why do you have two connecting? Yeah. Also reminder, everyone, if you have not filled out the form on the Facebook page for the members, please do so if you wish to vote, we are doing a an emailer vote. It's completely blind. I won't even know who wins until the thing closes. Tom 21:11 I've got a question about that. Um, when I joined, I used Andrea's email. Yeah. And of course, she's using her own email now. Because she a member as well. I went ahead and get my work email, is that gonna mess you up, or that's fine. Maggie Cogan 21:27 That's why we're asking everybody to fill it out. Because we had a couple people who did use the same email address for them and their spouse and their significant other. So this way, we have one for each of you to vote on. Chad 21:38 As long as your name is on the main roster, then you were included, and I updated your email address. Tom 21:44 Perfect, thank you, I'm going back to mute now. Maggie Cogan 21:51 If you don't know what email you used, go ahead and fill the form out again, and put in an email that you know is valid, because we will just write over whatever we had originally, um, we pretty much have everything up to date, as far as we're aware. So everyone is in there, it's just missing pieces here and there, whether or not it's the email address was either copied wrong or misspelled in the last form two years ago. Or, we had like duplicate emails for couples. So we're just trying to get all that straight, so that we can just export the list and put it into the voting buddy. And you'll get an email, it's gonna say it's from the finest, it'll say the finest isn't, is inviting you to vote, basically, is what the subject says. You just click the link, select, submit. And that's, that's it. Um, and once I've posted once I've sent the email, or once you guys have received the email, there'll be a start date, and end date with including times. So it'll be very specific about how long you have to do so. And we will give you guys a full week. So we will start on Monday. And it will end on the last day of the month. Yeah, so remember,fill out the form if you haven't, if you are not on mute, please mute. Alex Thorne 23:33 And Rudy, will you stop the video? Maggie Cogan 23:39 Yeah, so we're gonna try to keep this. So it's just the three of us are on video and speaking until we open this up to questions later. I think we've got most people in here. So as other people get in, I will just mute mute them. message in the chat. Like I said, we're going to go through about half the questions that were provided. Tonight. The other half will be Saturday night. Once we're done these questions, we will open it up to people in the room. So we're gonna go ahead and get this started. Did we want to do rock paper scissors? Do we want to try and go flip a coin? Okay. So first off, we'll just have you our candidates, go ahead and introduce themselves a little bit, and then we'll get into the questions. Take it away Ryan. Ryan 24:31 Well, hello, everyone. I'm Ryan Brown. If you don't know me, I've been in the finest since 2013. I've been formerly the CO of Central defense covering Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. And I'm currently the CO of the new Texas garrison. 28th roughriders. I've been involved in all sorts of things when it comes to finance charity fundraising. I've especially helped out in cases of things where we've developed the coins, new patches, posters and stuff especially for garrison fundraising. And it's been a pretty good time, I've got to meet a lot of people. Obviously, my favorite place to go is Dragon Con a lot, because the finest is there. So it's where I found it. And it's kind of a home for me. And that's kind of the rundown. I'll pass it over to Alex. Alex Thorne 25:18 Okay, so I'm Alex Thorne. I am the current CO of the finest I joined in 2015. I was the web officer, then I was Joe Colton's xo, for three years, during her first and part of our first term and our second term. And then I've been CO for about a year and a half. I love the finest, I love what we do. That's why I'm running again, because I really enjoy this, I really enjoy everybody in the finest. And I've done, man, I've been involved in almost every Charity Campaign, except for the very first girls of the finest. So it's been a lot of fun. And I really do enjoy this. So that's why I'm running again. And that's who I am. Maggie Cogan 25:58 Alright, so we'll get into the questions. First one is from William J. I think the club could benefit to strengthen its social media output, be it new groups, shots, group shoots, videos, or other smart similar things? What are the candidates thoughts or plans on that? Go ahead and start with Ryan again. Ryan 26:18 I think I'll I'll say the obvious thing that I've really appreciated, and I think everyone kind of shares the same sentiment about Johnny Carson and all the great work he's done on our social media platforms, especially on Facebook and Twitter, it's great to see that kind of level of interaction and creativity on the level the finest, I think a big way that we can improve ourselves is helping him out a little bit with things, getting new photos to him. And kind of like you said, getting new shots and bids. And that kind of stuff. Where the finest CO can really benefit for that is basically facilitating it for people, I think we have a lot of people who might have photos, but maybe they don't think it's good enough. Or maybe they doubt their ability to you know, get the photos taken of themselves. Like if they don't have a fancy camera or something like that. A few of our members, especially on the forum, have done some really good guides about how you can do good photos for yourself. I think highlighting those, showing them to people that you know, this is something you can do, maybe not on your own. But you know, if you have a family member who can operate a camera, or even the cell phone, you can get a lot of stuff done. Where we can make it even easier for people as if we give them an avenue to get directly on the page if they like. And that could be something as simple as a Dropbox, a place where they can put in a bunch of photos gets passed on to Johnny. And then he can you know make use of that as a resource. In terms of other social media presence and places that would be new to us. I would talk about things like Instagram, as the CDF CO, I was actually running an Instagram page for us. I know a few other Garrison's have done the same thing too. And especially now that Instagram is very connected with Facebook, I can only imagine the leap to jump there's pretty simple, it's a good avenue to get to get more views, especially in the cosplay community, which is very active on Instagram, and the fact we can reach more people, I think that's going to be a benefit to us in the long run. And not only getting ourselves more out there, but getting more people into the finest. Maggie Cogan 28:06 Okay. Alex Thorne 28:11 So I mean, hard to argue with that. Right. 100% agree with what William said. And the question entirely. My thoughts on it are a little more towards the garrison level, because I've seen the success that the Garrison's themselves have had by hosting individual group photoshoots. So I think really encouraging and promoting that at a garrison level is a benefit is a benefit to us. That's not that we can't. That's not saying that we can't support it as a club, and we should. So things that I think we could do to support it as a club in total. I think a photo or a video contest would be kind of cool, where members go and vote on different people photos, it would get us like it get people involved, right. It's a way to get people involved. So you know, like Pauly's awesome red ninja photos that he takes every time Pauly takes a photo. They're amazing. So shout out to you, Pauly. But stuff like that just kind of a little friendly competition. I don't know what the prize would be or something but have the members vote pick a couple of favorites. Real easy to help generate content because then we have all the photos right there in a thread and it's just super easy to go from there. Um, so beyond that. The other thing that I think that would be really good for group photos and social promoting, promoting our social media in general is an idea that we've started and we've kind of halfway developed but haven't carried to completion, which is detachments. I love detachments. They're like one of my favorite things that we we don't really get to utilize right now yet. So for those that aren't aware detachments are the idea of a detachment and we have one its the Iron Grenadiers are a social media presence and a group of people that are tied together around a sub theme, like Iron Grenadiers, and all the costumes on the page are specific they're Iron Grenadiers costumes. The guys work together to build those costumes. They help build the field manuals. We'll get into that later, because I like detachments. But like we did it, the tiger hawks did a an Iron Grenadier photoshoot this summer. That was part in part kind of conceptualized because of the Iron Grenadier Castle Guard detachment. And that's kind of what rolled the whole ball down the down the wheel. So we've thought about detachments in a couple of different times. And we've just got the one right now, there's been a few others that we've talked about. So I think that's a big way that we could improve our social media presence by giving us more avenues. Beyond just expanding our platforms, and generate additional content content is always the big one. And I know Johnny and I have constant conversations about content because it's, and you see it, even you know, I've read helped run PR for a couple times. And you see it because you see, we see the same couple of photos, same Fem trooper photos, the same bareness Monday photos, you know, and anytime we get a new one, we use it because it's just like right off the bat. So we don't, we don't have that much coming in. So anything we can do to generate content is going to help us there. Maggie Cogan 31:17 Alright, Question two is from Pauly due to COVID-19 restrictions in many parts of the globe? What are some ideas on how to find us can engage not only with each other, but with other with our audience to maintain relevance, continue to promote, gain membership retain the Current roster? Alex, you wanna start this one? Alex Thorne 31:37 I'd be happy to. So, Pauly likes to ask really in depth questions. So I'm going to try to like break this into a couple of chunks, and try to keep them together. So if I get off track, I'll try to try to run it back. But, um, I think I want to first pick at the membership site side of things. So how do we and I'm going to lump that into gain membership and retain the Current roster? Because I think those are the two. Those are the two big ones that kind of tied together. Right. So from a member standpoint, once you're a member, I think something that we've done that's been really successful recently is the virtual happy hours. I think they've been a big hit, I want to see them continue. I think Mike, Mike is going to do a great job keeping them going. Um, so I think that's a big one. The other thing is I want to, I want to look at alternative platforms to help facilitate connections. So how do we get members connected to non members? How do we get members connected to prospective members, one of the things that we've done that hasn't gotten a lot of use is the forums, the new forums, I know, everybody doesn't like the forums, its okay. But we can look at alternate things. discords been suggested a couple of times, anything we can do to encourage and promote communication between people, so that they can generate a connection, so that they get involved so that they stay involved? Um, maybe even kind of like encouraging a mentorship thing? You know, I know some Garrison's do that. Locally, like our garrison, the tiger hawks, when we have somebody who is a prospective member who's looking to join, we're bringing them onto the page and you know, we like help them get started and that kind of stuff. So that's a great way a great way to help out there. The other thing is, for members and non members is stuff that gets them interested so detachments places to generate connections, merchandise, we don't, we went a little low on mech this last couple years, or back, we're getting it going again, and everybody loves merch, from garrison side all the way through the club. I think that's a big one. And then of course, I personally love the trading parts. That's it, that's a huge thing for me. So I like those a lot. So then how do we so the other portion of this question was maintaining relevance at promoting to our audience, so ways that we do that. We have a group, we have a good relationships with a lot of different event runners in the Joe community and a lot of different members in the Joe community. So promoting fostering those, encouraging those relationships, especially in this weird time where there's not really events and some people are doing virtual stuff. Encouraging that helps us get out there. The other thing that we can do is that's been discussed a couple times that I I'm a little wishy washy on but it's interesting is several folks have discussed what about doing like a virtual finest convention, or even just the finest convention, if not virtual, you know, get get everybody together kind of a replacement for Joe fest or Joe con or, you know, even like Yorktown kind of thing. So, also this goes hand hand in hand with with William social media question. Any kind of involvement, encouragement retaining promotion to an audience is our primary platform and social media. So we got to we got to hit that one hard. Let's see. Let me look at my points boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yep, that's it. Ryan 35:24 Especially in light of, you know, just the big changes that COVID-19 has done to a lot of people, I think it really puts into perspective, how much of the finest really comes from interactions at conventions and get togethers and things like that. That's really where a lot of the friendships are formed, it's not not really possible to understate, you know, how much has been lost. I think just even in this last year, from those kind of things, both in terms of people's mental health, and how much they enjoy the finest. The big thing that we can do right now is to get more people involved with our projects, when it comes to things like our fundraising, when it comes to putting together new field manuals, when it comes to getting new organizations like detachments together, it's reaching out to people and getting them into a process where they can be connected to more things. I think the biggest thing that we've suffered in the last few years is that more and more, it seems like a lot of work is being done by the same few people. And the more that happens, the more chances are lost to get new people involved in the process. So I think that reaching out and getting people access to these things is going to be the best way to get them bought into the process. I think it goes without saying that. If you're a new member, you know, and you don't know anyone, and let's say you don't even have a garrison, it's really hard to make those connections. It's tough to reach out, you know, to post something, and you'll ask a direct question to someone you don't know. So being open with these things, and giving opportunity for people to speak up and volunteer is really a way for them to introduce themselves to the group and get them integrated into the finance culture. The challenging aspect of that, of course, is that everyone's gonna react a little bit differently to, you know, introductions and things like that. And not everyone is initially confident right away. But if we show them that this is something that we do regularly, if we engage our members, if we contact them, you know, ask simple things like, you know, what projects are you up to? I think that's a very simple way to get people talking. And once people start talking, that's when the friendships form. The other kind of big part about, you know, how do we remain relevance? And how do we get popularity, I think we're an amazing time for it. With a new toy line coming out with the movie, you know, getting delayed to 2021, we have another opportunity to do something with that. This is a chance to reach new audience. I think one of the things that surprised me when I got in was just how much of an outlier, you know, people like me and Alex are, you know, we're fairly young compared to everyone. If you look at some of our membership, you know, high 40s, in mid 40s, low 40s. You know, people in 30s are kind of rare. It's one of those things that you think about, where's the finest going to be in 10-15 years, when you know, people start slowing down not costuming as much, I'm sure the collection aspect will be there, I'm sure the friendships on Facebook will still be there. But if you're not out, you know, doing the same things at conventions like we are now, that might be something we lose in the future if we don't start looking at the membership now. So that's something to think about, you know, how we can reach new markets, I think that ties in very great with what he was saying, with attachments, getting more people involved in that way, and kind of getting a bigger social media presence, because maybe someone's familiar with something like, you know, the various different variations of snake eyes, rather than GI Joe as a whole. It's an opportunity to look at, and if we can get more field manuals that offer, you know, new things, and essentially simple and low cost things that people can get into a little bit easier. That's a great way to give access to the finest and what's fairly been difficult in the past. The other kind of thing I would say about that is that GI Joe is one of those things that's been around for a long time and has lots of different iterations. I think that a big focus of ours has kind of been the real American hero line and things like that, you know, because that's what we generally grew up with and enjoyed. But there is a market out there for the 12 inches and things like that there is some people who have asked me, you know, do you guys do older costumes, too. And, you know, that was one of those things. It's like, of course, we'd love that is just something that's not obvious, though, because we don't necessarily highlight enough for bringing it out. So by expanding our focus by showing people that there's lots of ways you can join in by making it easier to join with different ideas, I think that's gonna be the best way to keep us relevant and expand that growth. Maggie Cogan 39:10 All right. Thank you guys. All right. Next one is from one of our newer members, Brian Costello, what improvements would you make in the club? That would make us choose you as the new CO? Ryan, I'm trying to start this one. Ryan 39:30 Generally speaking, I would focus on three main areas. The first one is communication and transparency. It's very easy to say the last couple of years have been challenging and a lot of different ways of getting word out about things. It's frustrating sometimes to see a project get talked about lots of people get excited. It gets brought up to CES, a discussion starts and then just kind of fades away, and then nothing happens. And when you're in the fine as long enough, you've seen the trends of this that it happens quite a bit. You know, how many times have we talked about doing racing shirts or something like that? How many times have we talked about doing a new run of lanyards or pins. And everyone seems to think it's a good idea, but nothing ever kind of comes of it. Occasionally people will suggest an idea. And they feel like they get shut down right away. And that's kind of unfortunate, but it's kind of the nature of the communication we have on Facebook, what I think can improve that. And what I think will make a lot of this come to fruition is being a little bit more direct with communication in terms of doing things like zoom meetings, if we can go face to face communication is a lot better than than just words on the screen. I think that was something suggested in the past, but it never came to kind of fruition or didn't pan out. But it's something I think that's worth trying, especially after this year, and all that we've kind of learned about the importance of it. The other side of that, and talking about transparency, if the membership knows what CS is talking about, they can hold us accountable to it. If they can say, you know, you were talking about this a month ago today thing happened. But if they don't know we talked about it, how can they bring it up? It's one of those things, I've kind of always bothered me that a lot of discussions tend to stay in CS and never go anywhere until we're ready for something. But oftentimes, we're never ready for it. So I think what the CO can do for that is to kind of make those discussions a bit more pointed, to bring them to an end when things kind of fade out or to say, hey, let's focus on this specific issue of it. Because we're kind of spreading out here in a lot of different directions, which it's very easy to do on a Facebook like platform. So keeping those things a little bit clear, make a huge amount of help for us and getting things done. And at the same time, if members see what we're doing, and they see what we're not doing, they can make their own suggestions, the kind of recent thing that got me and you know, it's a tough thing. With the mention of not doing a charity fundraiser for this year. I didn't know that was a thing until the QA question got brought up. And that's unfortunate, because if it had been known, we might have been able to do something else a little bit earlier. It's just the way it worked out. But it's just another example of something that could have helped if we were a little bit more clear. And if more members knew what we were talking about and what our problems were, I think sometimes we're hesitant to reveal that there's trouble with stuff because we don't wanna let people down. But if you do that enough times, eventually just kind of collapses in on itself. The second big thing I would focus on as the CO is taken care of businesses is kind of set on the side for a few years. There were a few things we talked about a couple years ago, that have still kind of sat on the shelf stuff like updating the field manuals for things that have gone out of date, and are now very expensive or hard to acquire stuff like updating the charter to reflect, you know, where we are at as a club. For instance, there's a requirement in the charter that says that to be an active member means that you have access to the merchandise, but we don't really track activity. So is that really a thing that we need to worry about now? There's another thing that says you have to have a forum account. But as we know, not everyone does. And that's been a great challenge to get people active on that. These are little things that while they might not seem too much to people have been in the finance for about 10 years, if you're a new member who pops open that charter and you see requirements that are there, that's something that's in your head that you have to do. And now that's an extra thing to get in. If we're not going to force them to do that anyway, why make them think that in the first place, it's one of those things that I don't necessarily think we need to take them out. But maybe we need to have a good discussion, say, you know, what do we really want to have our club be? It's a big passion of mine, because I hate seeing things that are out of date, and that I know are wrong, and that I have no way to communicate to people who might be reading that. It's just like the website back when before Alex got it all updated and brought up to spec, you know, showing old information and stuff like that the calendar didn't work. So people didn't know we had things that were going on, it's the same thing. We got to take care of that stuff that's been sitting around. The last big point that I would focus on, especially in the kind of important legal sense is kind of the financial stuff. I've had a lot of concerns in the past about the way we do finances. There's problems in terms of the fact that we're not really a 501 C, you know, we're a nonprofit, you know, by the grace of what we do. But we don't necessarily have like the legal background or the liability protection when it comes to things like handling money. This is a big deal in a lot of places. some specific examples, there were a couple Garrison's that I've interacted with the past that wanted to do charity raffles, which, you know, sounds like a great idea sounds very easy. But depending on where you live, that can actually be very illegal. The trouble with this is that it's very easy to say, well, who's going to enforce that law on you know, someone doing something good. It's something we have to consider because of the finest name is attached to it. That could look very bad on us. It only takes one mistake to ruin a reputation, especially when it comes to charity fundraising. And if we don't know what the laws are for not protecting our members, if we're not making sure that that's happening just right. There could be problems that come from in the future. I think one of the bigger things that was suggested in the past was, you know, forming a taskforce to kind of take a look at all these different things and rules that might apply. And I really think it's worth pursuing. It's just one of those things that it would really be terrible if it got thrown in our face that we were doing something illegal, and that would just be devastating for what we do. We're really lucky to have the charity that we do. And we're really lucky to have the resources to kind of help K9s out and they give us an umbrella protection for a lot of things. But we can do it a little bit better. some specific examples on how we might change things up would be how we handle money. Right now the system has kind of been in flux with some changes in recent times. It's still kind of settling out. There was a little bit of a problem last year that I hope things are better. have been resolved on. But the trouble with that is that it kind of makes you wonder about Is there a better way to do things and what we've been doing? And to me, I recently learned that there's a page on the the canines for warriors thing, which lets you like donate money in the Finest name directly to canines. So when I see something like that, I say to myself, well, wouldn't that be easier if we just dropped it in ourselves, like after a show or something like that. So it automatically goes to K9s, and we don't hold on to it for eight or nine months? To me, that would resolve a lot of liability problems. Obviously, things like the Indiegogo if you have to pay for like merchandise and stuff like that, that has to go through us. But that other stuff, you know, isn't there a room for us to do things a little bit better there. And if we get the money to him a little bit sooner, I think that's a net positive. It's one example. But it's one thing I think that's worth discussing. And sometimes when you get to doing things in your finances a certain way for a long enough period of time, it's very hard to break away from that. So that's one area, I'd like to see us improve as well. So the summarize the three big things, communication, especially when it comes to transparency, and letting people see things I want to talk about taking care of old business has been sitting around and just hasn't been touched for years. And I want to make sure that we are doing the right thing financially to protect not only ourselves, but each one of our members. Right. Maggie Cogan 46:13 Alex? Alex Thorne 46:13 Okay,I got a few more than Ryan. But in a surprising twist of events, at least two over two or three of our points are the same, or virtually the same. So we see a lot of the same stuff, I think. So first off, right off the bat, can we continue working on improving communications? It's not where it needs to be. I don't have any hesitations about saying that. It needs to be better. It's not. We need to work on it. Transparency, yeah, we're getting there, we're better than we were. We're still not where I want to be. We're working on it. Point number two. We're a costume club. So we should encourage you to have fun. It's a hobby, and it's easy to lose sight that this is a hobby. So that's, that's always been a big one of mine. Because if it's not fun, why are we doing it? There are a bunch of different quality of life things that we need to implement clarification on the approval process, how it works, what CS looks like, what CS looks at how long it takes, from A to B on that. It's just an example. But from A to B on that is something that I've wanted us to do. Because if it's very clear what our approval process kind of like Ryan said, it's very clear what our approval process is, and where it starts and where it ends. It makes it a lot easier to lower that gate for folks to get in. Evolving our charity strategy to better reflect how Garrison's create donations and what our charity looks. Our charity strategy looks like right now. It's evolved a lot and kind of it's been in flux and evolving so long. And so quickly, in some cases, where we went from, the only way we raise money was through a big Indiegogo campaign to all the sudden cdff and the Garrison's are just gangbusters just raising money like crazy. Which props to Ryan on that one, because that was under his tenure. You know, it's something that we've needed to address, and it's not been appropriately documented, appropriately configured in a policy. And, you know, and that also includes, like the big Charity Campaign, like, maybe the big Charity Campaign, maybe the Indiegogo thing, maybe that kind of strategy is not worth the time that's that we spend on it. Which is hard to like, it's hard to quantify the amount of time for folks that are not involved in that that aspect, but it's it's a lot those Indiegogo campaigns, they take a ton of time from A to B all the way through the end. And it's really easy to like look at it and go, Oh, that looks pretty simple, right? So maybe maybe there's a more effective strategy, especially with how Garrison's have been raising money at conventions. And the last point that I have is exactly what Ryan said, a charter revision, we need one badly. Our charter is from 2008. It does not have half of the stuff that we need in it. It doesn't talk about a ton of stuff. It has a bunch of outdated information. It does not accurately reflect us as an organization. And it is our primary guiding document. And so for it to be like that, and us to be that out of date. It kind of looks bad, and it kind of, you know, leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Especially when somebody goes and reads it and goes, Oh, well, I got to do all this. Like, this is what I'm supposed to do when this is supposed to be our guiding document. So yeah, for those of you that didn't know we do have a charter and it does exist, and it is published, but it's out of date. So, yeah, that's, uh, I think those are my big, big five. So real quick, run them down, improving communications, encouraging fun, quality of life stuff, which this this covers everything from the approval process to, like Ryan said, those field manuals that are out of date that have been sitting on a to do list for a couple of years, you know, evolving our charity strategy. So that's, you know, again, a point that Ryan and I share, and then charter revision, let's get that sucker up to date, let's get it kept up to date, make it a living document that reflects what our members actually deal with, and what we are as an organization. Maggie Cogan 50:44 Alright, um, I have one from Roger Wagner, kind of similar to one of the other ones. And what plans if any, do you have to engage receive more involvement from those members or future members who feel abandoned or hesitant to join up in areas where there are no other members? So those poor people who are, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, who there's not even one other person in their state? How do we, how do we get them? Alex let's start with you on this one? Alex Thorne 51:15 Okay. So yeah, this is similar to two and a little bit to Williams question a little bit, some of the stuff that we talked about there applies. So again, it's about encouraging connections, it's about in rewarding innovation and initiative by our members, and providing tools around encouraging those connections around encouraging that engagement. Stuff like a branding manual, how do we, how does it how's the logo used? What is our logo? What is our logo, say? Like? What are the exact words, what's our color scheme, those things that help that you can hand to somebody and say, here, you want to make a piece of merch, here's a here's help. This is this is what you need to do. It cuts down on that level of Oh, well, I didn't know that we were supposed to use a particular lettering or that I wasn't supposed to skew the logo. And it helps reduce that tension there between people. You know, but it's also this is a big, this is a this is this question is such a big thing, because it's not just a command staff responsibility, and a CO responsibility. This is something where we need the members help, we need the help of any active member to or any garrison CO, to help encourage those people that are there around to be involved. And I know, it's like we're talking about the little folks where they have ones in two states, but even a friendship online, like I've seen, you know, like the tiger hawks, we've got a couple of people like, Carlos from Chile is a great example. Carlos is a member of the Tiger hawks, we encourage Carlos and he's been a member since he was actually a founding member of the Tiger hawks, which is a cool, cool little factoid. And he's in Chile. So you know, it's like, it's about generating those bonds in those connections, so that we have those friendships, so that people stay encouraged and stay active. Or if they're hesitant about joining, that kind of helps, you know, bring them in, show them what we're doing, show them what we're about. So creating more opportunities for involvement from command staff down because that's something we need to work on. So when I joined the Finest, that's how I got to command. That's how I got on command staff, I talked to Joe and I said, Hey, I see our websites out of date, do you need help? Hey, I I can help with the the Charity Campaign, I know, I know, a little design work, hey, I can generate, I want to generate trading cards, let's let's get that done. generating those things, those ways for members to get involved is huge. And it's it's it's been lacking. It's really easy to like take your group of 11 or 12 people, and to just try to press forward on things. And sometimes you just stall and not don't make progress. And it's really easy to get out of that loop. And that's something we need to do, we got to break out of that loop. Um, formalize and promote detachments. Detachments are great because they're non geographic, they are not reliant on you being if you're in Texas, and I'm in Missouri, we can be in a detachment about vipers, and it's centered on the Vipers. And there's camaraderie that we can build there without having, you know, geographical location involved. And then finally promoting the platforms that we already have, while being open to new ones. So let's get how do we get people onto the forums? And if people don't want to use the forums, what do people want to use? Because we, you know, it doesn't matter what platform it is, nobody is ever going to be entirely happy with what we are and we know that but what what pots can we put our time into, to get the best return on our activity that we're spending On a very platform to promote those connections between members. Ryan 55:04 I think there's a lot of nuance of the question because you know, that only doesn't apply to people who don't have a garrison. But it also can be those who are kind of, in a place like say, Texas, where everyone is four or five hours away from each other, you never see them. The difference is, is that we do give them those platforms interact with each other. And I think founding the squad earlier this year. And making into the garrison was kind of a great first hand experience of that, when you take a look at things like are forming Garrison's and squad manual, the kind of common refrain that you get is, well, if you're the only person in your area, you should form a squad, and that'll help grow the people in the area. And that's a good thing to say. But I think it misses out on a big point that no one wants to do these things alone, it wouldn't have made any sense for me when I made the squad to decide what the squad name or what the patch was going to be. Because I would have ended up with something completely different with what we did that very early process, right, there is a huge team building exercise, it's a chance for people to give input. And even if you're not, you know, graphically talented or something like that, you can still offer a suggestion. And what happened with us is that we had four people, you know, saying, you know, well, the way we treat this, or what if we tried this, and in the end, I think we ended up with something that we're all very proud of, and the fact that we are part of that kind of makes it special. That's just one example of what opening up opportunities can do for people. If we have people that are, you know, isolated by themselves, the obvious answer is to get them plugged into something where they're communicating frequently, or they're at least, you know, able to participate when they feel like they have the, you know, personal courage to do so or the opportunity. It's not necessarily an easy thing to say that, you know, detachments would solve that problem, because a lot of times the most active people that we have already are in garrison. So it's just the way it is. And if you have the same people in the Garrison's in the detachment, what's kind of to stop that or to kind of dominate the discussion? I think the important nuance to that is that leadership has to kind of reach out to those people and bring them in, it's a simple thing to send a message, you know, and ask someone how they're doing or when they join up, you know, what sort of projects are you working on? What can I help you with? What is something that I can do for you to make this possible? So it definitely takes reaching out. The scariest thing for a new member is, you know, you don't want to bother people, you don't want to be the person that you know, says something or posts way too much and looks like a weirdo or something like that. It's a very real thing that people go through all the time in any group, it's just a matter of finding that kind of open hand that sounds stretched to you to give you a chance. I think the very obvious answer, besides reaching out to people and giving them opportunity for that is to make it so that we're not only you know, a group of Garrison's, we're the finest and that means members and all these little places and things like that. And that becomes the featuring them, kind of giving them a chance to show off where they're at. the kind of thing that happens, though, is that garrison members naturally have more exposure that way, because they also have a garrison page that's showing them off, one of the things that we might be able to do is specifically focus on members who don't have a garrison and give them input to kind of interact with each other. It might be a geographic decision or something like that. But at the same time, that's still a way that they can participate with other people. I think the biggest disadvantage that members who don't have a garrison have is they have no input on CS. There's no representative for them beyond, you know, the high command types, like the membership liaison officer, the CO or the XO, but that takes them you know, contacting all those people, which, when you have hundreds of people, it's just not practical on a regular basis. So I do think we could do a little bit better than divide that up. Earlier, you mentioned something like a mentor program, maybe you could have a representative for group or something like that. It's just one of those things that we could change just a little bit. And I think it'll make a huge difference in the way that people interact with the finest. The things that we've already discussed, like, you know, more projects and things like that obviously gives more opportunity. But it's really on the CO to make sure that people understand that those are their opportunities, and that they are welcome to do those things. Maggie Cogan 59:04 Alright, let's see. Next one is from Dan Noble. Is there a way we could formalize corrective actions or issues? Again, it doesn't need to be ISO 9001 2015, but maybe a simple process through which issues could be raised with the option of anonymity, and then follow through until the issue is resolved. Ryan. Ryan 59:34 When you talk about things like discipline, and rules and regulations and stuff like that, for fan groups or fun groups, it's always a difficult line because you don't want to go too hard on people. But at the same time, we have a responsibility to protect our members from things that are abusive from harassment, from people behaving in poor ways and potentially illegally. I think the thing that we have got to learn is that we're no longer a very small group of close knit friends. We have people all over the country all over the world. We have different cultures. And sometimes you don't communicate with these people, you know at all before we interact with them and a problem. And if you don't have a repertoire built with someone before that that can cause a lot of bad feelings. I think the clearest thing that we can do is kind of formalize the process to understand, you know, what is completely unacceptable, you know, what is something that is going to get you kicked out immediately. I think if we clarify that and put a standard to say that this is absolutely unacceptable, no questions asked, that's going to be the best thing for us. The charter does say that you're not going to tolerate those kind of things. But when we actually see the application of discipline, we don't really highlight that. We've had a couple members, one very recently that was accused of some things, and they ended up getting kicked out of the finest. But it wasn't really announced. Oddly, we didn't say that, hey, they did this, this is unacceptable. This is why they were kicked out. And I think if we had highlighted those points, there would have been a lot less sort of mumbling in the background about why is this person gone? Well, they didn't like them that much. Or, you know, they were not their friend or something like that. That kind of stuff just destroys, you know, group morale and stuff like that. Because then suddenly, people are talking behind each other's backs and saying, Well, it's because so and so didn't like them, or they totally didn't do that it was a lie. We need to be upfront about it. I know that we want to keep things like discipline private, we want to keep it hush hush, we don't want to cause drama. But when it comes to things that are unacceptable, we need to spell it out that this is not going to be tolerated. It has to be spoken very clearly and very plainly. Some people may not like it obviously not everyone is friends with everyone. Some people are friends with only certain people, and they're always going to have those feelings like you know, I was treated unfairly. But the best thing we can do as an organization is to spell out what our fairness is. And if they violate that, no questions asked. Alex Thorne 1:01:43 So Ryan, and I again, agree on this point, we've grown we're we're a different organization than we were in 2008. We're a different organization than we were in 2013. We're different organization than we were a year ago. We need to formalize I'm going to refer to it as a conflict or conflict resolution policy, or process, but we need to formalize it, it needs to be in the charter. But I would like to point out that we have a very clear, a very clear code of conduct that is published as part of the charter. And any disciplinary action, any removal of a member has been for the code of conduct a violation of the code of conduct. And I I'm personally I'm going to speak about this just for a second. And then so I'm going to talk about it. I highly feel that disciplinary stuff. Stuff like this, drama, is best dealt with quietly and taken care of. And if anybody has that has a question about it, feel free to contact me, or the mlo or the xo, and I will be happy to discuss it in a conversation with you on a one on one. But I don't feel that there is a need to air dirty laundry on the members page for 300 people necessarily both out of respect for the person that's being disciplined and out of respect our members. I think Dan asked, posted a clarifying, more about general issues. Okay, so yeah, so conflict resolution, Dan, that's kind of where I was, where I was going with it. So let me run through what our process looks like right now how this works right now, because we have a process that's in place. It's just not formal, and it's not encapsulated in the charter. And it needs to be it should be absolutely should be published and quantified and very clearly stated that if you have a problem, you start at point A and you go and we will work it all the way through. But we do have a we do have a process. So typically, the process looks like this. a complaint is made to somebody on command staff. Be at your garrison, and Brians got a good point nonmembers a little weird, I guess they go to the mlo needs to be spelled out. Typically it comes from a garrison CO. And the garrison CO gets in touch with me, or Maggie or Candice who's our mlo. And from there, whoever receives the issue takes it to between the command CO the xo and the mlo and the relevant Garrison Commander sometimes for big stuff. Stuff is never decisions are never made in a vacuum. So command staff for somebody getting real like removed from the command or finest. That's always brought up to command staff. I know that seems like a vacuum because members are not privy to those conversations. And maybe Ryan's right, maybe we need to figure out where the level of what's appropriate and what's not for sharing that information. But from there, we take it, we investigate it, we look into it, we try to figure it out. We look at the code of conduct, we determine the appropriate action. If it is the action severe enough, it goes in front of all command staff, and there's a discussion, and then we move from there. There's been, I think there's been a grand total of two, maybe three people, Maggie's got three, that we've had to deal with in the year and a half. It doesn't happen often. And when it does happen, it's unfortunate. But I can guarantee you that in every case, there has been more than a justified reason. And I like I said, I'm, I'm happy to talk to anybody who has concerns about those reasons. Ryan 1:06:05 I'll take a moment to redress with the clarification, if possible. There was another point that was brought up about anonymous reporting that I think we've missed on the question. That was actually a conversation Alex and I had a couple of years ago, at least briefly that I brought up about a way for people to report things anonymously. And we ended up disagreeing on that time, I'm of the opinion that anonymous reporting is important, it lowers the barrier to call out things that people think are wrong, could be potentially bad for them or other people. I do think that that's a great thing to implement, because that gives people a chance to sound off without being worried that they're gonna be the person who gets singled out. No one wants to be the person who raises their hand and says, Wait a second, like this isn't right. Because that puts you kind of in the spotlight, it makes you the person that has to answer. And sometimes people just aren't comfortable with doing that. And a lot of times people end up getting cowed into silence. It's not something that is good in any sort of business, it's not good in a sort of organization. It's not good in a costume club. Because if people don't feel like they can speak up about something, it's never going to change. And they feel more and more isolated. I think giving them an avenue for that anonymous reporting would be really good. Rather than having to go through a CO or someone to get in contact with people. It's just one of those things, I can get things addressed a little bit quicker, and at the same time allow people a little bit of their privacy. It's obviously tough, because if you want to ask a follow up question and things like that, things can get a little bit difficult. But to me, it's more important that the issue be known rather than be perfectly clear. Alex Thorne 1:07:31 Um, I'm gonna take two seconds, because you're right, we missed the we missed the anonymous part of Dan's question. We totally, totally passed on. Um, so yeah, we talked about this. This was a question that came up the last the last election and we definitely, we did actually, I think Dan is the one who asked it then to not to pick on you Dan. Sorry. But I don't know i'm, i'm of I'm a mixed. I'm have mixed feelings about the anonymous thing. And I still am am of a mixed feelings because the anonymous portion of that the I just its its, kind of my personality thing. I guess I like to take a problem and run it all the way through. And so if I can't tell the person that, you know, reported it that it hasn't been it has been resolved. I have hesitations about that. To be fair, though, I've gotten to know Dan a lot better. In the last year and a half. And I have a hard time not agreeing with Ryan that we need some kind of avenue to say something if you see something not to cliche, the Homeland Security phrase. You know, that is some kind of just way to do it. Yeah, I'm still kind of mixed on that one. But there we go. Okay. Maggie Cogan 1:09:02 Let's see. Next up, we got one from Chris Roberts. How does each candidate propose completion of projects with command staff and member input? How do you plan to handle logistics and if they can deliver a product that will be sellable to different markets and what standards they will uphold while doing so? Alex, your turn. Alex Thorne 1:09:24 Okay. So this is a this is another interesting one. But I like it's it's it's it's important, right? It's, it's dealing with the the crux of a lot of our issues, which is, how do we get things done? How do we keep things done? How do we keep momentum from tanking and stalling and projects not getting completed? So, right off the bat, I want us to provide more tools. I want us to provide tools and resources to the appropriate people, to help command staff get things done. Good examples of this. Pauly and I'm going to call Pauly yet again. Sorry, boy. Pauly is working presented a logo a Joe a GI Joe, something we needed forever. So surprise guys, we're getting something that we've wanted for a long time. We're getting a finest GI Joe logo to complement the Cobra. Finest logo. It's GI Joe focused only, like strictly on the, you know, the GI Joe side. But Pauly started working on it. Pauly started working on it and presented it to Pauly actually, I think Mikey and Pauly kind of started talking about it and send it my way. And I was like, yeah, let's, let's figure out how to do that, because we've been wanting forever. So that's one of those things like it's about getting the part of getting projects done is about is about getting the resources and the tools in the hands of the right people, which in this case, I'm talking about members, how do we get members the tools and resources they need to help us get projects done? And even to a degree, what are our projects, and, you know, an accounting of that. So the second point kind of goes to that, which is something that I kind of felt like we needed a year and a half ago, and I've been struggling to find somebody to fit the role. Because it's anybody who knows what it is, is kind of hesitant to take it on because of how much it involves. Which is it's, I want us to have a we need a project manager on CS. We really do. We need somebody who is responsible, whose only responsibility on command staff is keeping track of what we're doing, where we're at, and what the goal is, and making sure that this stuff is getting communicated to members. And it's not solely, I'm not solely saying that the project manager is going to be the only person that communicates projects, to members. Because I think that that's a role that involves everybody from the merch officer to Johnny as communications officer to Chad as the web officer to Candas as the mlo to myself as x our CO, everybody has a hand and communicating with members and making sure that we're keeping folks involved. But we need one person that can hold command staff accountable. And that members can go to and look to and say okay, what's our list? Where are we at? What do we got going on? Okay, we got these five things. Where are we at? And by the same token, that somebody that on command staff can go, Hey, where are we at with the Charity Campaign? Where are we at with, you know, the the Joe finest logo, those kinds of things, the branding manual, something else we've been trying to get done? The last point that I have that I think is super critical, and this kind of talks to what it talks to what Chris is really talking about here. Where is how do we get projects done? but also how do we handle the logistics? And how do we make sure that something that a garrison if a garrison like Ryan produces stickers, right? You know, how does Ryan stuff compared to the stuff that taskforce 27 is making or the stuff that command the CDF is making or the stuff that members are coming up with and stuff that merch officer is making. And so part of that goes to the brainding manual, but part of it also is about encouraging Garrison's, to innovate, and to provide support for those innovations and those resources. So like Task Force 27, did a really awesome thing with their online store portal. And it's accessible for them because they have a they have somebody who's really fluent in web design. And it's super easy for them to create that stuff. But not every garrison's got that. Sorry, I was reading the chat. You know, so we need to encourage, you know, we need to promote and make those resources available. So if the tiger hawks want to do a store, a store page, but they don't have a web officer, how do they do it? That kind of stuff. So allowing and promoting those innovations are key are key to our success, because the successful, success of a garrison is the success of the finest. If a garrison is successful, we are successful overall. And that's a super important thing for us to remember. Right, those are my three. Ryan 1:14:36 In 2017, there was a decision made at Joe Fest, that there won't be a charity calendar campaign that year. And this didn't get communicate until a little bit later in the year. But when it was, you know, I took that as an opportunity to kind of show that, you know, something was still possible. I ended up writing a document saying that we could still pull off a smaller fundraiser using small items where we could reduce the cost of production maximize the amount of profit that went to K9s for warriors, and at the same time, you know, shows that we're still doing things, it was pretty basic it outline just kind of what you need to do to walk through at different things, it ended up that we did do a similar fundraiser to it, it ended up being the first coin fundraiser, which I think was very successful and led to a lot of good advantages in the long run. So in terms of planning, and things like that, I think we have a pretty good idea of how we go through these things. What the trouble and where we can make the improvement is, is that I see the CO as that project manager. I think one of the challenging things, and one of the best things that Alex has done is that he does a lot of stuff for us. But that can be a lot of projects, the best thing that a leader can do is lead. And that's not saying that you can't be involved in other things, but at some point, who's the person in charge? And is the person in charge is the person doing thing? Why isn't someone else helping and doing that thing? It's one of those interesting kind of discussions when it comes to management and stuff like that, you know, who is responsible, really, for things that it is the CO, I think what we can improve upon ourselves, and we've mentioned a couple of times is that we give more opportunity people to lead things in terms of the fundraiser and stuff like that. There's lots of opportunities to get more people involved, whether that's, you know, publishing a page or something like that, or coming up with new advertising strategy. There's lots of little avenues that traditionally, we've all kind of kept in a small group of people. One of the points raising the question was interacting with CS. And I think this year kind of highlighted that there wasn't enough communication going on with CS. I know a couple years ago, that was a big point. And there was a big post about then girls of the finest, you know, making that transition to more CS oriented. I don't know if we've seen enough in that area to really make a difference. To me this year was kind of focused on the same few people again. Now, I'm not saying that this necessarily has to be, you know, a complete overwipe of people and stuff like that, but just get more people involved in bringing in ideas. One of the simplest examples that I can give an something that's improved, the finest is that we took over a new vendor, when it came to doing patches. It was I think, suggested by Kyle, from Taskforce 27, who gave us a new lead on something or wasn't sure it's one of the two. But either way, it was something that was more cheaper than what we were using. And I think that it was a benefit in the long run that we improve that process. That wouldn't have happened. If we wouldn't take that input. I think that there's more room for things that we can improve upon. The most recent patch run, for instance, I'm pretty sure we could have got those patches done for a little bit cheaper. But we didn't really think about shopping around a little bit, at least it wasn't visible to the people in CS. And that kind of strikes me is another area that you know, it's a missed opportunity to maybe someone knows something better. The fact that you've used a company for years and years, and you have a good credit relationship with them and stuff like that is great. But things are changing the way that people make merchandise now, especially the online environment has changed drastically. And I think we also see that with tF 27, how they're doing the online merchandise and some of the different things that they've experimented with. There's different ways to run a project. And like Alex mentioned, it's about getting the right people with the right skills and the right positions. For me as a CO, I'm not a graphics designer, I am not, you know, a master advertiser, I'm not great at giving long speeches and things like that. But I'm pretty good at keeping people on schedule and asking the question, you know, what do you need help with? It's one of those things that I think I could excel at as a CO by taking lead on these things, and making sure they come to completion. There's nothing wrong with getting another person involved in the process or getting a new command staff position. But really, to me, the CO is that person. And that's what I would take with me if I was elected. Maggie Cogan 1:18:36 So this next one is kind of a pull from a whole bunch of questions to kind of covered the same thing. We've covered a little bit of it tonight. Um, communication is key and command, many members have brought up the lack of communication, whether with the Charity Campaign, or just in general? What is your plan to rectify these worries and make sure communications are made to the group? And how do you keep yourself honest and not let these communications fall to the wayside? I think we're starting with Ryan this time. Ryan 1:19:08 I think we've kind of highlighted a few times, you know, some of the questions will be brought up, you know, communication really is that time factor. And if you remember from the start, you know, the first question or second question, I kind of laid out that communication was going to be a big thing. For me, what we need to do is to just basically be more open with what we do. And that might come down to keeping more people involved in the loop that might come down to letting people get updated on what CS is up to and what we've discussed. It's one of those things that, you know, a couple years ago, we had talked about doing bi weekly updates and things like that, and that kind of fell aside very quickly. It's one of those things that was also mentioned that, you know, the zoom meetings, were pretty good for getting people to talk about things. I think some decisions, in fact, of recent stuff has been made there. But I don't think it was communicated out afterwards, at least not very quickly. These are just kind of the same things that get repeated over and over. At some point. We just need to talk to ourselves and say I'm gonna Update today. And maybe if you can't make the day you say, Hey, I'll try an update tomorrow, the best effort that the CO can give is keeping the members in the loop. And that is going to take a lot of effort. Now we have improved in a couple areas, things with adding a communication officer, I think that was a great idea. I don't know if we're utilizing them entirely, though, maybe that's a good avenue for, you know, just general updates, to have them kind of act as a secretary with the discussions, compile it into a basic little form, and then post it every once in a while. So people can see what's been talked about, you know, what's on the table. The other kind of big thing, I think the CEO is responsible in terms of communication, is making sure that people can communicate to them. Oftentimes, I've heard people mentioned that they feels scared to kind of say something because they don't want get shot down. They don't want to have an idea that's poke full holes and things like that. And that's a rough thing to overcome. You know, if you are not used to that, and you don't deal on something like project work where that is pretty commonplace, which I think me and Alex kind of deal with quite often, it's a different sort of mindset, you had to put yourself into about not understanding the difference in communication between people. Primarily, I think that communication should be direct. And it should be timely, and there should be feedback. It's the most clearest way to keep things together. What I think we've been missing a little bit is feedback. If someone mentions, you know, a cool idea for a project, there's excitement, and then nothing happens with it, and we don't tell them about it. What do they think that we think their idea was stupid, you know, do they make up the story in their own head about Oh, they didn't like me or something like that. We need to say, hey, this was a great idea. We're really excited about it. But we can't do it for this reason, or this reason. And then a good CO is going to say, but what can we do to make that happen? Those are the things that I think we're missing right now. And that's what I think is gonna be the best improvement we can do communication wise, is get that feedback in there. Alex Thorne 1:21:46 Okay, so I'm going to start from, I'm going to pause on the question first, for a second and just talk about what Ryan said about the communication officer. So for just want to understand, so everybody understands what the communication officer is and how that position was developed. The communication officer is the combination of the forum's officer and the website officer that we had prior. So it's just those two roles merged? And Ryan, maybe you're right, maybe it's a good idea to, to utilize them a little more. And Chad and I have been talking about that, about how we how we how we're more effective there. So I think that's a good point. And that's something worth taking forward, regardless of what happens. So Alright, on to the question. Overall, I want to say communication is improved. It's better than it was. But that doesn't mean it can't be better. And it's, it's still lacking. I've said that a few times tonight, and I I'll fully own that. I'm not happy with it either. Despite being a weird year, and you know, we can make excuses till the cows come home. But that's neither here nor there. I disagree from Ryan a little bit. I don't think it's feedback. I think it's frequency and consistency. Um, I think that's probably the biggest. The biggest area that needs improvement is how frequently we communicate, and how consistently communicate and how that communication is done. In a manner, it rose from the top. So I, again, I'm gonna own this one. It's, it's a failing, it needs to be addressed. We're going to work on it, we're gonna make it better. I think one of the things that would help and I've talked about this a couple times is some kind of active, active command staff to do list, what is command staff working on? You know, we live in the age of of shareable documents of, you know, 100 different ways to tell somebody what's going on. let's let's let's utilize some tools. Let's Let's come up with a solution that works. Let's talk to members, let's figure out what members want to use. In that regard. An improvement in organization overall would help. That goes both to my organization as a CO currently and as a CO moving forward, but also to command staff and adding a position that, you know, like their project manager or somebody to help keep us on track. I think that's a big portion of our thing. One comment that I do want to want to say that we've definitely improved on that I'm very proud of is our financial reporting, our transparency and finances are improved. It's not perfect. It's better than it was we didn't have anything or very little. And kind of continuing on that path. One of the things that our finance officer and I have discussed, that we want to make available to members, not just command staff is a place A dashboard where you can go and look and see where are we at? And what were the donations and where are we What's our metrics, that kind of thing, we have a kind of a beta in progress on that we're hoping to get it done. This is a big one. The next point on improving communication is a big one for me. And it's something that Ryan called out, it's a, it's a great point that he had, I don't delegate well, I know that I don't delegate well, I really like to take a project from point A, and run it all the way through to make sure it gets done. Because I feel like stuff doesn't get done, if I don't take something and run it to the finish line. But I've got help, and I need, I need to use it, and I need to use it better. I'm working on that. A good. A good example is Chad's been a great tool, Chad, has taken the members roster from about four different five different places and got us our most updated members roster that we've had in years, which is a project that has been on my to do list since I was xo. So congratulations to Chad. And, you know, it's just about asking for help sometimes. And then the final point that I do think we would all benefit from is on command staff. I don't know how to apply this to members, other than maybe happy hours or something is some kind of live, live conversations, zoom, teams, Facebook chat, messenger, whatever we want to use whatever's convenient, whatever is appropriate. You know, it's a matter of aligning schedules, but even doing something once a quarter, once a month, something with some kind of frequency where there's some consistency, or we can get that connection, get that face to face conversation. And, you know, you lose so much emotion and intonation and conversation and excitement in text chat on facebook, or those kinds of things. So that is, I do have one more point, which is, and I'm just going to address this really quickly, which is I've I hope that if anyone has a question or a comment, or anything that you feel like you can contact me, I've tried to add that to every news update that I have ever posted. I have a couple of email addresses, I've got PMS, please, please, please feel free to reach out. I am always open to ideas. I have always been open to ideas. And the idea that somebody thinks that they're going to get shut down is kind of devastating. Because I know we have folks with things I can stuff and I hate that idea that we've got that tension and that worry. So please, by all means, we will hear you out and we will have a conversation at the very least. That's it. Maggie Cogan 1:27:54 Right, and the last two are that I have here are specific questions from James. Ryan, what made you decide to run a second time for CO of the finest? Ryan 1:28:17 My motivation to run for CO is very much the same as what it was two years ago, I care a lot about the Finest and I want it to be the best that it can be a part of that I put on myself, because I feel like I can do more to help out. It's one of those things that when I was a new member, I didn't realize you know, leadership was something that I wanted to do in the Finest, I just like posting, you know, pictures and stuff like that and talking to members. But through kind of a series of you know, talking to certain points that people like and being active and being involved in a lot of things, I somehow ended up as xo cdff. And then later on when Sean decided to step down, it became apparent that I was the best person to be CO cdff. And I think the results that we pulled out from that show that, you know, I could do a lot of good things when I'm in the right position. And I kind of extend that now to the same thing with the finest CO, I think that I can do a lot of good there. I think that there's a lot of improvements that can be made. But I think that more importantly, it's being in the place that I feel I'm doing the best job I can. And having been the CO of Garrison's. And starting up a new garrison, I've got more perspective now on what it takes to not only make a existing garrison successful, but a new garrison successful. I think I have insight into a lot of different aspects of management leadership. And I think they're very valuable and can be of use on the highest level. The kind of challenging thing that I've seen, and the thing that makes me feel like, you know, this is definitely the right decision is the stuff that you know, frustrates people and it's always a bad thing when you're frustrated because you feel like he can't do anything about it. I feel like a lot of times, even if you think you know you can't do something, there is an opportunity there. And I want to make sure that everyone knows that that's true. And I want to make sure that everyone has a voice and I want them to feel like they have that chance to make that difference. Because if I can make it all the way from the ground members to the CO of finest, I think that shows exactly what can happen if you're the type of person who wants to put in that effort, who wants to see us succeed? to kind of talk a little bit on the other sort of point, the idea of being, you know, CO, like, it's a chance to really connect with more people. I think the biggest thing that I'm sure Alex has learned really well in the last couple of years is, you know, when you're that person, you know, everyone sort of gravitates to you in terms of, you know, there's a problem, how would I fix this. And I definitely see myself excelling in that sort of situation of maybe not being able to figure out myself, but you know, pulling in the right people to make those decisions. It's a big responsibility. It's a huge time commitment. But it's something that I'm willing to put in for the finest to be successful. We've talked a little bit about, you know, some of the challenges of 2020. But I think the biggest thing we need to realize is that 2021 might have its own challenges. And it might even be worse. It's one of those things that, you know, is daunting in a way. But you know, I'm excited by that, because to me, that's problems to solve. And there's nothing I like more than finding ways to solve problems. I know that there's been challenges, I know that there's been hardships. But the fact that we as the finest have got through this year, as well, as we have, I think speaks directly to Alex's talent and ability. I don't think that he is a bad CO. I don't think that I can necessarily do better than everything at him. But there are things that I feel strongly about and things that I feel like that I can do a better job. And that makes me feel like I have to run, and that I can make that difference for us. Maggie Cogan 1:31:30 Thank you. All right, Alex, yours is? What changes are you most proud of since you started your tenure as CO of the finest? And what changes would you have liked to have seen. Alex Thorne 1:31:43 So we've kind of covered the changes that I'd like to I'd like to have done. So I'm going to start with what I'm proud of, and then we'll work from there. So right off the bat, a big one, the creation of the finance officer, even though it's not technically in the charter, we have a finance officer, her name's Sara, she's frickin fantastic. We have gone from, you know, running our finances on a spreadsheet in a bank account that is was, you know, held by a member of command staff to we have our own bank account, we have our own paypal account, we have reporting of what's going on what's coming in what's going out. We actually published a, an actual financial report last year, which is, again, an amazing achievement to me, and I love that we're doing that. Is it perfect? No, we're gonna get there. A big one that I was personally involved in. That has been a pet peeve of mine, since I joined was our forums. I love that we have new forums. I love that we have forums that are not filled with ads, and that are accessible and that don't require someone to have approval on every time that they post. And I could go on and on at length about why the old forums were bad and why I'm so glad we have new ones, please use them. A growth we have grown at in two years or a year and a half. We've grown a lot. We have new squads we've taken new squads like Ryan's all the way to a new garrison. We have two full international squad, Garrison's. Now we have Canada and the UK. Not that I'm taking credit for those, but I'm proud of the achievement. I love that we're growing. I love to see that we're continuing to expand and this franchise that we all love so much has brought people together. That is a fantastic thing. And then the last one that I'm proud of is we've had some record years of donations. And we broke $100,000 raised which could not have been done. If there's one overall theme to mind. My points tonight is it none of this is possible without the Garrison's, Garrison's do a ton of work. Garrison commanders do a ton of work. And supporting them is key to our success. And, you know, that's why we've passed $100,000. And that's where we're going to continue to work keep going. Um, stuff we didn't get to this is stuff we already talked about quality of life stuff. Those Field Manual things that are out of date. A big one, the charter revisions that just it just needs to get done. And maybe it needs to maybe it needs to be a taskforce of members to get it done. But we need to figure out how to get that done more merch. I think we all kind of realized that we had a soft year, year and a half of merch. We're hopefully back on a good foot. And I want to see us moving forward with that. But again, that comes back to the idea of how do we how do we get members more involved. Because that helps address the more merch problem. And then finally, new field manuals, we haven't had a new field manual in a while, we have a couple that are in the works that have been sitting in the back burner. And for anybody who doesn't know, Johnny has painstakingly edited and put together every field manual that we have on the on the website, which is a lot of work. And we have kind of played around with the idea of how do we get new field minerals generated in a way that does not take Johnny doing all of the work? Again, it's about that, you know, it's about that idea that we have a few key people that do a lot of things, and how do we get those people support? And how do we get members involved? So generating a new field manuals is one of those things that I really, I really hit on that first year that I really wanted to see us do, that we didn't get done that I'd like to see us see us move forward with, especially. And that's it. Maggie Cogan 1:36:03 Alright, Alex Thorne 1:36:04 before we take any more questions, can we pause for like five minutes because I hear the baby crying? Maggie Cogan 1:36:12 Okay. Okay, we're gonna take five minutes. If anyone has any other questions, just comment, me, down the bottom. And then we'll start calling on you guys once we get back from our little break. And looks like there's also a couple extra people have come in. Reminder, there is a form on the members page to fill out if you do want to vote. We do need valid email addresses to send you your Ballot. Chad 1:36:53 I bumped the post as well during the call Maggie. Maggie Cogan 1:36:56 Thank you Chad. Chad 1:36:57 You're welcome. Maggie Cogan 1:37:06 Also for the ones who came in later, we are only doing half of the pre the pre written questions tonight and we'll do the other half on Saturday. So if you have a question that you want that's why we are kind of opening the floor up. No, no, there's there will be no music. Unknown Speaker 1:38:39 It Cold Slither.You'll be joinging us soon. Maggie Cogan 1:39:19 Alright. So I didn't see anyone say anything. Does anyone have questions? Alex Thorne 1:39:24 Maggie? They just came in. Maggie Cogan 1:39:27 Did it? Alex Thorne 1:39:28 Yeah. Josh? Maggie Cogan 1:39:31 Oh, okay. You don't want to ask it yourself, Josh. So it's, uh, what was your favorite memory event that I helped at. Ryan 1:39:47 That might be a little unfair to Alex. But as Josh is former CO, I will say that, you know that there's lots of moments that stand out to me and I'm sure Alex has people in his garrison and from Dragon Con and places like that, that really stand out to them as things that have not only improved the experience the finest but improved quality of life, you know, in general, like there's so many moments that get talked about and remembered. And it's all the in jokes, it's all the lessons and nights out and you know, the the memories of things that happen. But not all of them are happy. I will say that the most prominent memory, Josh, that I remember from us, it was at Chicago pop con, it would have been about three or four years ago now. There was a gentleman who was walking by our booth, and you were in Sergeant slaughter, and he was wearing a Vietnam veteran hat. And you went to attention and you saluted him as he walked by. And, you know, I thought that was, you know, a really beautiful thing, being a veteran myself, you know, that appreciation for it, you know, really shows. But it was the reaction of the gentleman that surprised me, you know, he got offended by it. He, you know, kind of snapped a little bit, you know, he didn't like being, you know, called attention to like that. I think he specifically was mad that, you know, he was a sergeant and not an officer or something like that. And that's a common joke in the military. But I could tell even just from his tone, that he didn't mean it entirely in a joking way. And there might have been something else there. And I remember, you know, you turned to me, and he asked, you know, what was that about? And, to me, that showed a lot of, you know, personal understanding that it could have been taken in a lot of different ways. But you wanted to know what you did wrong. You didn't ask, you know, what's that guy's problem or something like that? So, but that's something that stood out to me that, you know, the first question was, you know, Did I make a mistake? And it's little things like that, that, you know, from a leadership perspective you want in an individual, it's someone that's willing to question themselves a little bit and not jump to conclusions about someone because who knows what that guy's went through in the problems that he's had in his life. The big things about helping K9s for warriors is that some of our veterans really go through hard things like that. And sometimes it's hard for them to communicate feelings, and sometimes they don't respond, you know, the way that you might expect it to because they can't. So that's just one of the memories that stand out to me. And I think one that I'm going to carry for a while. So now I'll challenge Alex. To come up with your favorite Josh moment. Alex Thorne 1:42:12 Yeah, considering I've only interacted with Josh like two times on these calls. Unfortunately. I haven't got to meet him in person yet. Yeah, so I'm sorry, Josh. I don't have one. They're there for you. Especially not after Ryan, Ryan's poignant one. Maggie Cogan 1:42:29 All right, we do have a question. From Ray. How do you guys think we can capitalize off the upcoming movie and new toy line releases to generate 'but' for the club, Alex Thorne 1:42:44 he corrected it in the next chat buzz. Maggie Cogan 1:42:47 Buzz Okay. How we gonna make but for the club, guys? Alex Thorne 1:42:57 Maggie thanks. I'm gonna have to like stop doing. I don't know. So this is an interesting one for me, because this is something that I've been kind of thinking about, um, you know, we are okay, I'm gonna close chat. Thanks, James. Much appreciated. We are we are at an interesting time in in what's going on with the brand. For sure. Because we are in this kind of, you know, revitalization. We're going to hopefully we're gonna get the brand out in front of a bunch of new people. So I love what Johnny has been doing to kind of stealthily tagging Hasbro and kind of pulling some of the toy stuff in it's been really great to see that interaction. We're kind of getting for those of you that don't watch our our posts on the public page closely. The biggest posts that Johnny gets are the toy posts and throwback Thursdays. Second to maybe like or, and then maybe bareness Monday, Fem Trooper Friday. But the the nostalgia from Throwback Thursday and the toy pros always do really, really well. We do have a field manual, a field manual, I'm going to air quote that because we've seen how quickly they've gotten done in works in the works for the Cobra trooper, the Cobra Island trooper. I'm part of the group/team. I'm not doing much on it but I help look at tactical tactical vests for like 15 hours or something. Trying to find the right one. So we're, I think bringing in the toy line into bringing the new toys into field manuals is a easy way that we can kind of piggyback on on the buzz, and the buzz the bring back and continue to promote the finest. But same thing like with a movie. I mean, we haven't had the opportunity to go to a movie premiere. Hopefully we have a movie premiere for snake guys, we haven't had the opportunity to have the finest at a movie premiere in several years. One of the ways that I found out about the finest was a picture of some finest members in front of a theater for Rise of Cobra. So that kind of thing, you know, when you when you start getting into that we're able to make those connections. And piggyback on that stuff, I think we can we can generate some buzz, and we can have some success there for sure. Ryan 1:45:48 I just noticed the next question, which is asking, you know, what can we do to strengthen our relationship with Hasbro, the actors, artists in general get more attention to arborization charity causes. And I think that actually ties a little bit in to the previous one about lies the upcoming stuff. So I just want to dress that together, and then Alex, feel free to hop in. To me, we've kind of got to a point where we've been avoiding a conversation that we need to have, which is what is our relationship with Hasbro. And I know that there's a lot of people that feel like, you know, you do things as you do until you get caught and told not to. Or there's other opinions like, Well, you know, they don't care, you know, we're doing it for a good cause and stuff like that, in the past, they've given us the thumbs up for a lot of things, at least, you know, call outs and Joe Con in I think Colorado back in the day. So we've had positive indications from them. But you know, the thing that got brought up this year with the new toy line and stuff like that is you know, are they gonna start policing their IP more and stuff like that? And what does that mean for the finest if they should someday say that, hey, you're not actually allowed to call yourself, you know, a GI Joe club or something like that. And those are things that I think we have to start thinking about, you know, especially if, you know, I'll knock a book for this one, I want the movie to be successful, I want people to like them, I want more toys, I want more things in media to be produced. But if that happens, we have to understand that there's gonna be some eyes, you know, looking in different directions, and we might very well be in it. Now with that said, I think we're in a great position to do something good. We have a lot of experience, you know, doing things for charity and stuff like that. We've got a lot of goodwill from it. And we're connected into a lot of aspects of the GI Joe community. It's really just a question of, you know, where do we draw the line on what is acceptable? what's not. One of the key areas I think that is constantly brought up, you know, is merchandising, you know, what, what likenesses, can we use? You know, is the Cobra logo, okay, or is it not? For this year, for instance? Cobra 2020 You know, there's some concern about, you know, drawing attention to a very polarizing election with a popular IP brand that could upset people. I think that some people were kind of back and forth on that, I think that the hard line was set. And the problem was, is that it wasn't agreed on and that some people kept trying to go against it. I think for us, we need to formalize you know, what isn't is not acceptable, and then reach out and actually asked the question itself to Hasbro, that's, that's the big thing to do. And there could be a lot of cause and effect out of that, but I think we need to have the discussion, you know, is that an option? If we talk about movie premiers and things like that, I have an idea about how some theaters work, because a lot of my friends have worked there. Sometimes it's just talking to a manager. And you know, saying, you know, can we show up? And they're like, yeah, cool, whatever, that's awesome. But especially now with rules in place with things like, you know, not bringing weapons for instance. You know, that's a big deal on the 501st experience that with lightsabers, and things like that, you know, that really changed some opinions. So we have to realize that even if we have like the handshake agreements on local levels, there's still corporate stuff, above it. And if you start involving corporate stuff, it can quickly snowball. So for me, I think we need to have the discussion about specifically, what do we want to do with Hasbro? Do we want to keep as we are? Or do we want to actually make the attempt to really formalize what we do, and figure out what is actually a no for them, rather than just guessing what it might be. It's another thing to say with actors and artists that we have great relationships with a lot of them just from the conventions that I went to cdff like you got to meet so many people have great times with them. For instance, Mary McDonald Lewis at Cincinnati, Comic Con, all sorts of people that you know, it's it's all over the place, like who you meet and stuff and they recognize the finest they know us, they wear our T shirts, like they are some of our most passionate people, especially we talk to like Ron Rudat, like all these people understand who the finest is they know what we do. What I would say that we can do to improve those relationships is to be a little bit more, I guess, even with what we do. For instance, it's been a conversation topic of recently, you know, when Ron who that was made an honorary member, you know, he got a lot of cool swag out of it. In the past, though, some celebrities haven't even gotten a patch or a T shirt, they just got a handshake and a photo. Those are the kind of things that I think them as humans might recognize, too. And I bring that up, because I do have experience Michael Bell was at that same convention with Mary McDonald Lewis and he was wearing his finest T shirt when we went to do photos with them, and Mary McDonald Lewis turned to him and said, Where's my T shirt? And, you know, it's kind of the rough thing. And we talked to the CS and tried to get a hold of someone who had t shirts to see if we could get one sent out and stuff like that. But to me, that stands out, we're, it's one of those things where if you don't do things equally, you know, actors and voice actors and authors, they're all people too. And they all kind of notice those things. So going forward, I'd like us to see kind of formalizing a little bit, you know, how we interact with them. I know, for the 501st that was a big thing early on, where their members would actually reach out to authors and, you know, actors and things like that, and, you know, do their best to support them, whether it's, you know, helping out at their booths or something like that. How cool would it be if we would get to be like, you know, a background at, you know, Sergeant Slaughters table to like stand as a cobra and let people go Cobra, collect yourself like that, like it's, it's little things, but there's stuff that we can definitely do. And I definitely appreciate the chance for us to talk about what we can do to make that more real. Alex Thorne 1:51:00 Okay, a lot, a lot of lot of direction there. Based off of Ryan's conversation, we went a lot of different ways. So let me let me jump back. So strengthen our relationship with Hasbro actors, artists of GI Joe to get more attention to our organization, charity, and charity causes. So I'm gonna start with the Hasbro piece, because I am the I am probably largest proponent on command staff are one of probably one of two people, their largest promoter, a proponent of command staff of do it, ask for forgiveness, don't ask for permission, because they're going to tell us No, because they're corporate. And that's the line. So that, you know, maybe that's not the best way to be. I'm not opposed to having a conversation about whether or not we can do better there. Our concerns there, we've lost a lot of our relationships that we have with Hasbro, all of the people that were in positions that we know, that were very close to the finest are no longer with the company. So that that, you know, that adds a whole different level of anxiety into having a conversation about what is and is not appropriate. We absolutely do need to crack down, or crack downs, the wrong word we need to scrutinize and refine how we're using IP that we don't own. That's kind of trademark standard 101. You know, and it's different. We get compared to the 501st a lot, but it's different with the 501st because the 501st is a is a parent or parent is lucasfilms, lucasfilms owns the IP, the copyright everything. So we have a different relationship. And unless we've formalized that relationship with Hasbro, it's hard to say. Like Ryan said, you know where the line is. So that just to kind of kind of boil that into a button. Not that not that I that's not to say that I would not love for a relationship to have with Hasbro to be fantastic and that we run, we get, you know, tacit approval from them to do stuff, because that would be awesome. But it comes with that comes with a whole different set of challenges, and a whole different set of objectives and things that we're not even evaluating at this point. So we have to be aware of that when we start even considering to have those conversations because even starting a conversation like that can kick off something that we are not prepared for. Um, actors and artists of GI Joe. So I honestly like the actors and artists of GI Joe are fantastic. And Ryan's right, we have a disparity in we have a disparity and honorary members, it's been brought up, it's been mentioned, it's been quantified. And it's one of those items that has kind of stalemated and hasn't really moved on one direction or another. Um, the biggest portion of that is how do we fund, how do we fund something? How do we fund something as a group as a non for profit group that donate raises money for charity you know, how do we fund something so that the just the disparity between one honorary member and another honorary member is the same because like in the case of Ron Rudat like, I don't know about Ron rude about Kurt Bozigian, is the one that comes to mind. One of our garrison COs at the time made him a plaque got him a helmet made, did the vinyl and helmet like it all this really awesome work but he paid for it out of his own pocket. You know, or like Arthur where Lynn presented them with a distro helmet and the Iron Grenadier detachment first castle guard, you know, worked together, but again, that conversation was had secret. You know, most of command staff didn't even know about the first castle guard conversation occurring with Arthur, and that they were going to induct him as an honorary member in at retro con until it kind of happened. So again, it's about those, like, we have these different pools of things that are all members of the finest, that are doing kind of different things. And rather than us having a standard direction that flows down, which has its own downsides, don't get me wrong, I worry about stifling innovation, when we push everything from the top down. You know, we end up with these pockets of, Okay, well, this person got this, but this person did this, but we did this for this person. And, you know, you end up with Larry Hama, having probably, or how much probably got a dozen, find his t shirts. And, you know, some of the voice actors probably don't have any, or like Ray Park a couple years ago asked one of our members for tank to finest tank top. And we didn't have any available because we we only did the one run. We have worked to address that the funding. Part of the part of the the the delay in getting merch figured out this year was adding on that, you know, that additional little tack on I'm going to call it a merch tax to help fund you know, special projects like that, at the discretion of membership and command staff, hopefully when we get to that point, along with paying for some other stuff that we need to get dealt with. But yeah, I mean, beyond that, I mean, yes, there are relationships, there are things that we need to do. Codifying formalizing the honorary members thing. Heck, even just a conversation about who our honorary members are is sometimes an interesting conversation. Chad and I have had it a few times, we're like, Okay, so we're going back through the Facebook's, what we call this person, an honorary member at one point, but we never really inducted them or did anything formal, like what do we do? We just put them on the honorary members page. So that's something that absolutely needs to get addressed. It's part of that, you know, getting everything getting all the quality of life stuff figured out. That we just need to get done. I think I hit I think I hit most of that question. Okay, in the chat is just got going down. Maggie Cogan 1:57:26 Yeah, there's a lot of nothing in there right now. Um, I don't remember his page on the main site, which we are kind of, we've been talking about that. Alex Thorne 1:57:35 Yeah, we were working on it. Chad is working on an honors members page on the main site. We've been working to figure out who the honorary members are, which a couple of different people have perused through posts and different things. And we're just trying to get that squared away. Unknown Speaker 1:57:50 And it comes from members, Alex Thorne 1:58:01 again, it's about how do we get it's about how do we get stuff? If we even if we buy stuff on the club level? How do we get stuff down to the garrison level, or down to an event? or somebody's going to be so that it's available? So like, we're right, if Ryan had t shirts in his tote, he could have handed one to her. But how do we get Ryan the T shirts that we're purchasing on a club level, and enough sizes that we can cover our honoree members, there's some logistical things there that presents some questions that are just hard to solve. They're not unsolvable, or, but they're hard to solve, Maggie Cogan 1:58:38 especially when they're like, some a lot of the ones in the past have been spur of the moment, honorary members, right, as opposed to going through command staff for me and like I'd like to make this person Honorary Member like, Alex Thorne 1:58:49 I think somebody took a finest patch off of one of their costumes and presented to somebody as an honorary member one time so like, we have like last minute shenanigans like that all the time. Which which, which makes it hard to to formalize any kind of thing. But it's it's fun too, because you don't want to cut out that impromptu. You know, which makes a great story. Hey, so and so it took a patch off their jacket and presented it to that guy and made him an honorary member. You can always check out the handlers. Yep, Chad's got a good point. Plan accordingly, Dan, you got a great point. Again, again, so i think i think that Ryan and I will probably both agree on this and Ryan, if you don't agree with me feel, feel free to unmute and correct me. It comes down to communication between garrison COs between members of command staff between members, hey, I'm going to this event. This person is going to be there. I would like to do X, how do I do x? And even just a formalization of who that person who is the person that somebody who's a person that member wants to induct somebody as an honorary member who do they talk to? Who they start with even something like that something as simple as that is probably enough to get us get us moving. Yet Pauly will work we that was a discussion that came up collection of members items that are not size dependent nor, See I just you guys just need to come on to like a meeting and we can just brainstorm about this stuff, we can solve all the challenges in a couple of meetings. Ryan 2:00:23 Then I think the big thing that goes to show is that this is also something that we've talked for a long time about. Alex Thorne 2:00:28 Right we got some really good ideas. Ryan 2:00:30 The, the big thing for me, you know, like, we've written up a document, which kind of goes through the process of you know, what, Alex Thorne 2:00:37 Ryan, I had forgotten about that, thank you for reminding, it's a lot of stuff going on. Ryan 2:00:41 It was something that Dan, Kyle and I worked on and it a little bit, we took it to command staff who had a little bit of feedback, we changed it up to try to do it all notice what people said, and we tried to improve upon it, but the discussion kind of died out again. And I think it just kind of one of those things that we have a lot of differing opinions. And when CS gets locked up like that, it's really hard to do anything about it. It's a lot of very passionate people, you know, think that something might be a little bit better this way or that way. What I think we're missing is input from the members about you know, what they might side with, rather than letting the conversation die out. And I'm not saying that, you know, every issue needs to be a vote or something like that, for the general membership and stuff like that, but especially when it comes to stuff like the deadlocks or, or places where it's a not necessarily semantics but ideological difference. I think that's where we need to reach out a little bit more and get the feedback on. Alex Thorne 2:01:32 Yeah, I actually agree with that entirely. And I'm actually brought that up on the the conversation about the elections that have we're having, we're having a stall here, let's take it to members and see what we want to see what they want to do. So I think that is something we need to be better about implementing. You know, and you're right, it's not about its command staff is interesting. Not to dive too deep in the weeds here. But we we hear from the same to kind of pull back the curtain for a minute on like a discussion not about our discussion about honorary members, we hear from the same three, four passionate people, even though we're there. I think we're up to 22 people on command staff in the command staff group or something. So it's not even just about, you know, the problem starts smaller than how do we involve our members? problem is how do we involve the 22 people when they're on command staff? You know, and that's a question that somebody just, 25 Thank you, Dan. You know, it becomes it comes down to that. And again, Ryan and I both talked about it, I think it's about communication. I think it's about consistency and communication thing is about frequency. But at the same time, consistency. And frequency means that the revolving door of things getting posted all the time pushing push issues down the thread. So you have to like you have to weigh that, at least in my book, I have got a way. Hey, do I want to do I want to push something down thread and communicate here with a review post? Or do I want to try to like re re bump an old post and try to get this issue issue figured out? It's something that I struggle with? Shake ups, yes. Where? Hey, we're working on that. On a couple of ways. So okay, I think, Ryan, you got anything else to add to that one? Or we've we talked about when to death? Well, there's there's two questions there. Maggie Cogan 2:03:33 Yeah, Ryan 2:03:34 I think that one in particular, we've kind of went off the tracks and got back on. So I think it worked out well, in the end. Was the the next question, I guess. Alex Thorne 2:03:43 So there's a there's one from Outback, Maggie you see that one? How do you promote? How do you both proposed communication? You both talk a lot about communication. But how will you implement it? That is the question. Ryan 2:03:56 One of the advantages I got to have when I was in college is actually not doing a minor in communication. So there's a lot of theory and what it means to communicate with people. And one of the reasons I brought up feedback earlier is that communication is a two way street. If you don't have it going both ways. It doesn't happen at all. It's not enough to take an answer a question from someone, and then not respond to it. Like that doesn't complete the communication process. For me, how do you give members that opportunity? Well, like we talked about having some way for them to anonymously ask questions, getting a post regularly with updates, which encourages people to give their feedback and to give new ideas, or at least keep them informed so that if they do have something, they know that they can bring it up. It's really just a chance of giving people their moment. And sometimes that means reaching out. It's you know, talking to the different COs, for instance and saying, hey, what projects are you up to or what's on the radar, project wise or con wise or what you're doing? It's even reaching out to the members and asking them you know how things been you. It's really about building relationships first, and the communication kind of follows through that. I definitely think that one of the things that we could very easily do is to kind of not only say that, you know, please ask any questions, but you know, ask them, you know, what are your questions? It's just one of those things that I'm not, you know, putting you on the spot to come up with something. But if you generally have a question, I want to know about it. And sometimes it takes a direct asked question for someone to answer. It's just one of those funny things about humans that you can, you know, give people all the opportunity in the world, but they still might not take it if they don't think you're receptive to it. So I think being very clear about that is a big difference that could be made. Alex Thorne 2:05:45 I think it comes down to stylistics. I mean, not to not to say that, but there are more, there's more than one way to skin a cat to use a cliche. Um, for sure. How do we propose communication? So? Or how do we implement communication? I guess? You know, we have hit on it, Ryan's, Ryan's correct. We've discussed it a few times I, maybe we're not. Maybe we're still being high level about it. Because communication is kind of a high level conversation. You know, it's easy to say, Hey, I'm going to post every week on the Facebook page on the members page, what we're going on what's going on in command staff, that's an easy thing to say. It's a much harder thing to actually commit to and actually accomplish. And if that's what we need to do, then that's what we need to do. But there are some there's some points to that. Right, like? So yeah, implementation of communication is a tough one. It's it anyway, you skin it, it's a tough one. You're trying to overcome, you know, anxiety, human nature. 100 different things. That's, I don't know, I don't have a good solution other than kind of, let's figure out how to do it together. I think that's the best approach to some of these things is, and maybe that's the key that we've been missing is how do we do this stuff together? It goes back to what Ryan said about feedback, it goes back to what Chad saying about involvement in, you know, encouraging involvement. And engagement. That's that's the word that Chad use. Yeah, it is about engagement. It's about involvement. It's about keeping folks interested. And all that stuff goes hand in hand. And we're lacking in some ways, for variety reasons. And we need to work on it. And that's a that's a that's a question. And that's a problem that everybody needs to work on. I think it's it's part it's a something we all need to work to solve together. Not an individual person. Because it's too much for one person. And we've gone we have a few more questions. So Maggie, I think you probably need to start. Maggie Cogan 2:08:10 Yeah, I'm trying to so a lot of them are kind of on the same. So I think a lot, a lot about like quarterly reports, whether it's command staff or Garrison's. That one command officers holding their own quarterly meetings. I mean, as a command staff, we don't say people can't post or have meetings. But if they want to have them, they should have them. Alex Thorne 2:08:42 Ryan, can you can I take this one first? Okay, so I think a conversation about how do we or I feel fine about members, command staff members holding their own meetings, and telling us what's going on. With something that I've we've tried to do, Dan's kind of prodded me a couple of times, and Dan will pick on you again,vhey, you should you should post on command staff and ask every garrison what's going on, which we tried a couple of times. It's about but it's about engagement, it comes back to that engagement. How do you get how do you get 22 people of which 10 people or eight people regularly comment on stuff to be involved? And if we can't do it at the command staff level, how do we do it at the members level? these are these are things that I struggle with. But yeah, by all by all means, if somebody wants to hold their own meeting, hold their own meeting. You know, we're not, we're not so ironclad there's not such a rigorous command structure that, you know, somebody on command staff is going to get upset that a conversation is occurring outside of the purview of myself or Maggie or somebody. By any means, I think I've tried to. One thing I tried to do during my tenure is be open to suggestions, be open to conversation, be open to discussion. Yeah. Ryan 2:10:19 I think the the question kind of harkens to the point, you know, it's a lot to say, you know, how do you get people engaged? But if you take a step back and say, What caused them to disengage? It's one of those things, you have to ask yourself, you know, is the current environment not conducive to that communication? Has things happened in the past that made someone feel like they weren't appreciated, and that they can't say something? It's a lot of things that I think that we really need to ask some hard questions about ourselves, you know, if, if we only have eight of 25 people active of CS? Is it wrong to say that maybe some of those people shouldn't be on CS, it's, it's a hard thing to ask. And you don't want to like make someone feel like they're ostracized. But we need to have an expectation of officers, especially in very important positions, that you got to be active. If you're not, then you know, you're still my friend, you're still in the finest, but maybe there might be good to have a deputy. Or maybe it might be good to have someone else step up for the position. It's these things that I think more and more as we get bigger, and people kind of go different directions in life, they're going to happen more often. Priorities change, just as we talked about earlier, the finest is very different than what it was two years ago, or eight years ago, people who were very active, you know, at the start are all gone. Now, people who were little bit after that have kind of pulled away in recent years, and some people are coming back and some people are going all the time. It's one of those things that, you know, the comment was made earlier to shake up CS and stuff like that. And maybe that's not necessarily fair. But I think you've done some good things recently, with mentioning about CO elections on a garrison level, I think there's been some improvement made with, you know, different officers and stuff like that, in terms of, you know, getting a new merchandise deputy or having the new officer position put in place to kind of do things but just as you add, you know, it might be the question, you know, where can we improve or? Can we make that step up for someone who might have a little more time for what's going on? This obviously isn't a job, and no one wants to treat it like a part time job. But if we only have eight or nine people voting on every membership submission, at what point do we say Do we really need to have all However, many COs and squad leaders, you know, doing this, it might be a case where we can improve that a little bit by having a specific group that's in charge of that kind of thing. And maybe giving them that little bit of responsibility is something that keys the men a little bit more that I am responsible for, this is something I care about. It's something that I have to respond to. And that gives to the human mind, the condition of this is something either I appreciate and want to do. Or it's something that honestly, you know, it's not a priority to me. It's one of those hard questions that we have to ask. And honestly, as we get bigger, and as we add more squads and Garrison's and things like that, it's when we have to have because, you know, if we ever get, you know, hopefully to, you know, 50 Garrison's or something like that, are we gonna really make 50 people vote on every costume submission, but it might be in the future, but it's definitely conversation that needs to happen sooner than later. Alex Thorne 2:13:13 Yeah, it's exactly right. It's about adapting to the situation that we're in now versus the situation we were in several years ago. It's hard to tell which ones are these are questions and which ones are these are just kind of comments, comments and banter. Not that I don't appreciate the banter, Maggie Cogan 2:13:37 Are monthly CO update videos to the members paid to viable option? Alex Thorne 2:13:48 It's about a time commitment. So that's not a time commitment that I want to make. All I'll highlight that. Sometimes, like Ryan said, This feels like a job more than more than a hobby or something fun, especially in the CO role. I think everybody can kind of get a feel for how that could could be the case. So while I want to communicate effectively, I there's also a balance about my time and my responsibilities beyond the finest. And so that's, that's where I'm gonna leave that one. Ryan 2:14:37 The only thing I think I'd really add on to that, you know, any question that starts out, you know, is it a possibility? I think the answer is yes, it's just a matter of, you know, figuring out the details that goes along with it. And to be specific, you know, communication styles are going to differ between each person. I mean, this is not something we need to set in stone and say that everyone has to do exactly this. If you know a leader changes or has a different style and stuff like that. It's good to have that flexibility. And, you know, to adapting to what's going on, I think what we need to kind of focus on is finding what works. And if we say, you know, we're going to do two week updates, but we find out, you know, there's really not a lot going on right now, especially with no cons, maybe a month will work or something like that. I think the most important thing is just keeping people updated. And just kind of being genuine about, Hey, you know, I would really like to have this done by Monday, but it's probably not going to work maybe a couple of weeks from now I can give you an update. And then following up with that, saying, you know, hey, I didn't actually get the time for that. I'm running into a little bit of trouble. What can we do to get this happening? So those are just a little different stylistic differences, I guess, between communication and you know, what different leaders like to do. So when we, you know, have these suggestions? You know, they're great, excellent. I would just mentioned, you know, just understand that, like we said earlier, there's lots of ways to do this, it's just going to be a matter of what fits the person. Alex Thorne 2:15:50 And I think, Ryan, I think you got it. I think it's about like we've said, if you wanted to sum up our our strategy, I think between the two of us of communication, things that need to be addressed. I think it's consistency, frequency and feedback. Maggie Cogan 2:16:03 I don't see any other actual questions. Do we have any more actual questions? Not from Tyler. Okay. You're all great. So reminder, the next one of these is Saturday at seven central time. We'll be doing the other half of the questions that were pre asked, like 10 days or something. If you haven't fill out the form, fill out the form. Ah, yeah. Alex Thorne 2:16:57 I think we've covered like, a quarter of the questions for next week are on Saturday. Maggie Cogan 2:17:03 But this like, yeah, you don't know who's can like only come tonight or only come Saturday. Alex Thorne 2:17:07 Absolutely. I agree. Maggie Cogan 2:17:09 Which is why I wanted to kind of split them in half. Alex Thorne 2:17:11 Thanks for everybody who came out this has been, fun, is the correct word. In this case. I've actually really enjoyed the conversation. It's nice to have, you know, sides to your different sides of things. Yep. Maggie Cogan 2:17:28 Thank you both for answering the questions. Thank you everybody else for coming and watching or asking a couple other questions making comments. We will see you all on Saturday. I will try to have the transcripts up. Probably by tomorrow afternoon. It shouldn't be that difficult. Oh yeah. Oh, Saturday bring your helmets. You guys come Saturday bring your helmets. We want to do like one big picture of everybody. Alex Thorne 2:17:58 No, yeah, we should. Maggie Cogan 2:18:00 So Saturday night after the blessed questions are done. We're gonna have everybody put on a bucket helmet whatever you want to call it and we'll do a big picture. Alex Thorne 2:18:10 So, okay, Maggie Are you gonna post Are you gonna try to post the recording somewhere or are you just going to post the transcripts? Tom 2:18:22 like an officer bucket or trooper? Whatever anything? Okay. Yep, we're cool. Maggie Cogan 2:18:30 Is there some sort of GI Joe hat? It doesn't even need to be a bucket. Alex Thorne 2:18:35 GI Joe hat... Maggie Cogan 2:18:38 Cobra , October guard. I don't care. Tom 2:18:43 What works for me Alex Thorne 2:18:44 Home Depot. Maggie Cogan 2:18:46 Sure. I did say bucket. Ryan 2:18:57 Thank you very much everyone. Alex Thorne 2:18:59 Thanks, everybody. night. Maggie Cogan 2:19:01 Night. Transcribed by https://otter.ai