Maggie Cogan 6:46 That's fine. We're gonna we're gonna ask everyone to turn off their camera and their mics. Um, while we do basically. Okay, so we're gonna do, the guys are gonna do a little intro of themselves. Again, we're going to go through the pre written questions that we have. During that time. We'll have you guys turn. Keep your cameras off. mics off. Just listen for now. And then once we are done with the pre written questions, we will open it up to the floor for anyone who has any extra questions. And then also at the end, we would like to take a picture with everyone. Which is why we ask people to bring helmets or buckets or whatever. So I stole one a Tyler's. I think I've got a good bunch of people here. If you didn't know if you didn't see, Chad did leave open the form if you haven't filled it out yet to get your email updated for voting. So we'll try to get those basically will probably have done tomorrow so that I can get that list of emails. Tomorrow morning. Chad basically, once I get the transcripts posted, give it like a couple hours and then send me the list. Chad 8:10 Yeah, I can do that. I figured out how to maybe like around 11 o'clock or get some people to kind of fill it up and right. So don't then I'll just close it out and then shoot all the all the emails off of it. Maggie Cogan 8:19 Okay, perfect. Chad 8:22 Everybody's been validated up to date. So if we get any last minute entries, that would just be like 5-10 minutes to do that. Just double check. Make sure it's no duplicates. Perfect. Okay. Maggie Cogan 8:57 All right, I guess. get things started. Um, we started with Ryan on Thursday. So Alex, why don't you go ahead and do a quick intro of yourself for tonight. And then we'll we will get started. Alex Thorne 9:13 Okay, sounds good. So I'm Alex Thorne. I'm the current CO of the finest. I joined in 2015 started as wit from when I joined to the web officer and then I was Joe Colin's XO for three years for both of part of her first term in her second term. And then I've been the CO for about a year and a half now. So I've just a little bit wild and and why am I running? Because I love the finest. I love what we do. And I really just like being involved in a lot of fun. Ryan 9:51 Good evening. I'm Ryan. I originally joined the finest in 2013. I started out in central defense living in Indiana. I became the xo invention. Got to see Oh, when Shawn show shuts down, I became the CO of the Texas garrison this year after I moved down to Texas and got things started back up down here again. So that's been a big part of my year this year is getting that going. The reason that I want to be CO is that I've seen a few things kind of fall to the side in recent years, some things that have kind of not been touched and really need to get worked on. And I think that we could use a new change in leadership to kind of focus that a little bit and get those things knocked out. It's a lot of stuff that's going to take everyone but I think with a little bit of extra leadership direction, we can get it done and make the finest, even more exciting in the years to come. Maggie Cogan 10:40 Alright, so looks like tonight is a very Dan N, heavy question night. First one is, would it be possible to have the CO address the finest in a monthly report to let everyone know how things are going? Perhaps compiled from reports from the COs? Doesn't have to be Waa and Peace, but a one page situation report would be rad? Alex, go ahead and start. Alex Thorne 11:07 So absolutely. And this is something that I've tried to do a few times we've we've done this on command staff, I've kind of generated, you know, asked Garrison's, what's going on. And I've shared some of that with the members when it's been appropriate. It's just been hard to stick with. And that's kind of like, you know, was kind of the whole point of what we talked about on the last q&a about communication was that we our communication has gotten better, but it's lacking in frequency and consistency. And that's part of the problem. And yeah, doing something bi weekly, or bi monthly, absolutely. should, should shouldn't be done. Not a complicated thing to do, and just needs to get done, it needs to get stuck with. Ryan 12:00 In terms of answering the question, I think that says pretty much everything, it's really important as an organization to keep your people in the loop. And to get that going again, you know, it's not gonna be a case of you know, do this once a month or do it once every other week or something like that, it's going to be about finding what kind of fits for the leadership style and the personnel, you know, and what people want to see with what's going on. You know, obviously, you've lost a lot of events this year. So in times like that, it's tough, because you don't want to put in filler and things like that, that doesn't mean anything to anyone. But at the same time, even just reaching out and connecting with folks still has a big deal to keep people involved. I think in terms of communication, both in terms of you know, from the CO down to the membership, we should also take a look at garrison COs touching it with their people as well really get the entirety of leadership involved. Because even if, say the CO can do it one month, if the garrison COs are taking care of things, or if the mlo or xo reaches out, that's just another way that people can see different faces and hopefully keep people interested in what's going on in the finest. Maggie Cogan 12:59 Okay. Is there a way we could democratize the merchandising I'm not saying to detract from the responsibilities of Quartermaster, but maybe open it up to a bit of suggestions. Granted, not every suggestion is going to be amazing. But the shotgun approach usually hits the target at least some. Ryan, you start this one. Ryan 13:23 in terms of democratizing, you know, merchandise and things like that. I, I would say that, you know, it's been a pretty good job of that, you know, there were a bunch of polls over the year, where the question was asked, you know, what do people want to see, and what came back with things like t shirts and patches, and you know, those have gotten out. So that's a big kudos on that part. The kind of way that I think that you might get a little bit more out of merchandise, and at least in terms of volume, is we could do more runs of things. The trouble that I think is happening is that it's a lot of work for you know, a few people or even one person sometimes. And that can be really tough, especially when it's something like t shirts where everyone wants one. And then suddenly, that becomes dozens and dozens of packages to handle. Just this year with Texas garrison, I've helped make coin a patch, dog tags, a sticker and things like that. So I've got a little bit more experience now about mailing out lots of packages, and it is a lot of work. But one of the things that we might be able to take advantage of is kind of how merchandise has changed over the years. If you take a look at things like print on demand services, for instance, we could very easily set up something with like the T shirts, we put in our logo, and any member when they join could put in and get one right away, we wouldn't have to just have limited runs of these very popular items that everyone is going to want to want. And by doing that, that opens up the way for other things, less popular items like say lanyards or pins, things that maybe do need to be kind of a limited edition run based on their production and how much they cost. So that's just kind of one way we can mix it up and hopefully get more options and variety into the merchandise cycle. I think we've done a lot of good things with opening that up now and hopefully going forward. We're going to see merchandise more often. But we can definitely update with how we do Do merchandise to get that a little bit more efficient. And the last thing I would kind of say about it is that it's very important that when people make suggestions for merchandise that we give them a fair shake. If someone says, you know, I've got a really cool idea for something and they show you a picture, or they tell you a little bit what they're thinking about, we help you design something, if nothing ever comes to that, that can be a big blow to that person, because it makes them feel like maybe their idea wasn't that good. Or maybe people just didn't like it. Or maybe there's something personal against them. We definitely got to follow up with people when they make those kinds of suggestions and say, Hey, we love this idea. But we can't do it right. Now. Here's why. And then a good leader will go on and follow on and say, here's what we need to do to make it happen in try to figure out how to get that to go. Alex Thorne 15:47 So I may have approached this question in the wrong direction, because I took it from like a dot design perspective, probably because that's where where my brain goes at first. So I was thinking about, like, how can we I'm not again, I'm not essentially sure what what Dan was playing, or was was meaning at here. But I took it as you know, spreading out the designs across, you know, how do we consider what a member wants. So like, the shirt that I'm wearing was designed in the logo was designed through a logo contest that was opened up to members, this charity coin that is not going to show up because it's too bright in here was designed by Tom and he brought the design to me and we took it and ran it through. We've done that. And it's been successful when we when we can do it. And it's a great way to get members involved. And it's something I'd like to keep us keep seeing us do. And from the other side of it. So I'll hit both sides. Yeah, I think it's very important that we're open to ideas on March what what does the membership want? And how do we generate that content? And how do we support that content? You know, the finest the, I've keep talking about this finest branding manual that I want us to have, because that is a tool that we can have that we can point somebody to and say, okay, you have a great idea. Here's how you execute your idea so that when you take it and run it up the chain to see us, we can just roll with it right off the bat. Mind you, the brandy manual is not done yet. It's something that's in progress. But it's something that I'd love to see us get done, because it helps us get this accomplished. The other thing is, like Ryan said, we've done a lot of repairs on a lot of really neat stuff that the Garrison's have done. I know Task Force 27. I know eighth Ohio are all doing some really awesome designs that have come out of their own and bringing in, you know, they're creating merchandise, that's finest brand is to a degree that they created. And it's fantastic. And so I want to make sure that we continue to support that kind of thing as well. Because that's important. As we progress and as we as we go forward. Maggie Cogan 18:03 Um, what are your thoughts on perhaps tightening up the moderating and the main group, we're here to have fun, but sometimes things are posted that are wildly off topic. I've heard people say that, that this turns them off to reading posts in the main group. Alex, you start this one. Alex Thorne 18:21 So I've got mixed feelings on this because I want the members page to be four members, which means that the content that's posted should be content that the members want to share. But that being said, Yes, we get content that is just kind of spammy sometimes. And we've dealt with it when it's happened. I know there have been a couple of cases where I've reached out to somebody or I've asked a garrison CO to reach out to somebody and ask them to Hey, can you tell so and so that we need to like kind of cut down on this, you know, they could keep posting, but maybe not post four things in one day, that kind of thing. So one of the thoughts that I have about this is maybe we need to try to come up with maybe Facebook is not the place for everything, which is something we've talked about before. Maybe we need to encourage people to make connections and alternative places like the forums, which I know a lot of people don't like or something similar that members want to use. You know, it's going to be about kind of feeling out what the what the avenue for connection is from the members and supporting whatever that is. Be at the forums discourse. discord, something different, or just even on Facebook, but I'm a little like hesitant to say, yeah, we need to lock down and try to moderate the members page stronger, because I'm afraid that by doing so will cut down on participation will cut down on people wanting to be involved. But that doesn't mean that you know, spammy content. We don't have to have to allow that either. There's a fine line. Ryan 20:04 I think a big part of the finest is that we definitely share a common interest in a lot of different things. And I never want someone to think to themselves, you know, wow, the finalists might really appreciate seeing this. But you know, I don't want to get in trouble for posting it. So, to me that would say, you know, I don't want to, you know, make it a thing that, you know, has to be specifically about GI Joe or specifically about costuming, because I think that just goes a little bit too far. And I say that, but at the same time, I understand the question being asked, and I understand that people are getting a lot of things they don't want to look at, you know, makes them not want to look at the page, what I think might be an alternative solution. And something that we could work toward, is understanding that this could be a symptom of the fact that we just don't get as many posts about costuming on the group member page as much as we used to. Maybe that's because some people aren't as active or just don't post as much, would you to take away those posts, then the off topic ones, you know, rise in percentage relative to them. So to me, it's kind of a question of, well, what can we do to get more posts that are on topic so that those things aren't as noticeable? Or maybe they're not as large a part of what goes on there? I know, for me in recent times, you know, sometimes I've looked at the page, and sometimes it just feels like a lot of Happy Birthday posts. And it's certainly a common thing. And there's lots of members, but it makes you kind of wonder, you know, why can't we have more build posts? Why can't we have more cool photo shoots or something like that, it just comes down to what members are able to do and what they can post. So as a leadership perspective, you know, that's where things like the last question come in, where we talk to the members often and give them updates on things where we talk about projects, and try and fish for ideas and things like that, basically creating our own content that's on topic and keeps people engaged and makes them want to post there. In terms of, you know, shifting to a forum, I would agree that you know, a forum would solve a lot of these problems, because you could have an off topic place, and people can just totally ignore that if they don't want to deal with it. The problem is, is that I think we don't really have a forum culture. It's just kind of the way that our membership has been over the last few years. And, you know, Alex has put in a ton of work on the forum, especially helped out by people like Maggie and Kyle, to really get that going. But we're not really seeing the engagement from the members in that area. In fact, sometimes it feels like, you know, the website is the forum, I should say is more for the non members, which when you think about not having member engagement, there's a little bit worse, it's people who want to get in who want to start interacting and making friends and stuff like that. And if we're not there, that's not really happening. So I definitely think that we need to make sure that our membership understands, you know, why this place is important. I think we had a vote in the past where people said, Yeah, I would really appreciate having a forum. But I don't know if all those people have turned out for it. And it's just kind of those things that might need to be a case of communicating that, you know, this is something really important to potential future members. But also it might be healthier for the entire group in terms of what we discuss and how we connect with each other with things that aren't exactly GI Joe or costuming. Okay, Maggie Cogan 22:51 next question is from Mikey. With everything that's going on in today's world, would you make it possible for individual members to take up their own projects to raise money for charity and promote the brand in the name of the finest? For example, the selling crafts, patches, doing photo shoots, and not excluding non potential members? auctions like the eighth OCS does, etc. and Ryan, you will start this way. Ryan 23:23 I would answer unequivocally that I'm all about it. Even from the earliest time when I was in the finest, you know, I tried to do that myself and actually ran into a little bit trouble. So no one's learned this lesson better than I have. There needs to be engagement with the individual member and the finest especially when it comes to use of the logo and things like that, making sure we're representing ourselves in the proper way. But I think the real crux of the problem is it's making sort of a combined effort at things and there's nothing against, you know, doing something on the individual level. But if there's a way that we can make it a finest initiative, that's a way that we could make it even bigger result, I think the important thing that we can do is really encourage and facilitate our members to do these things. And then on the other hand, offer them a way to do it even bigger. I know personally, when I was doing small things like my different patches and dog tags, you know, I really want to take that off on the finest level. And to me, it just kind of the progression of things, you start small you build big. And even if that seems a little bit intimidating, I can tell you with the right people in the right help, we can do a lot of different things and get them done. And that might also be another way to kind of take the load off the merch officer from having to do absolutely every little thing. In terms of specifically the patches that you know, Mike does. You know, I think they're amazing. I think they do a really good job in terms of both getting donations from the table and making more people realize that you know, GI Joe costuming is something that they can get into and be really accurate about the other kind of side thing and just kind of like the back thought those we definitely need to be careful when it comes to things like IP and stuff like that. If a member does something you know that technically might get someone in trouble. The finest has to, you know, be very clear that, you know, this is something that we can't really do with us because we don't want to bring that hammer down on us. And I can't tell someone you know, to do what to do with their life, but I can warn them that, hey, if you get a cease and desist letter, you might need to stop. It's just one of those things that you need to be careful of. It's definitely a good idea, though, to get more projects. And I think Alex will completely agree with that. Alex Thorne 25:26 So my first note is 100%. Yes. So Ryan, you're right. I entirely agree with basically everything that you just said. Yeah, and as a club, and as a CO, I want to provide tools and resources to help with this. And the other thing, the only thing, the only stick sticking point that I want to make sure that we're clear on is we need a way to measure what's being raised, so that we can manage what's being raised. Because if it's not being measured, it's not being managed. That's pretty and we're not we don't have a really clear, it's, you know, one of those things that the charter is not clear on that there's not really clear documentation on that we've kind of just been our charity strategies kind of been evolving as we've been evolving and we haven't taken the time to really nail it down and put it into some kind of formalized document. But absolutely, individuals raising money Garrison's raising money, patches, pins, designs of their own auctions, photoshoots selling prints, anything and everything. Absolutely, absolutely support it. I hope that we can get a branding manual that will help with kind of like that kind of thing, because it'll tell you hey, you want to make up you want to make a print here, pop uh. Pop uh finest logo here, put your garrison logo there, print them up. Here's a vendor that you can use. Yeah, I want to I love this idea. I love to see us continue and support it. No matter what happens. Maggie Cogan 27:04 Let's see. Next question is from Tom. What is your stance on the topic of multiple Garrison's per state? Ie splitting larger states or territories into additional squads or Garrison's? Alex restarting this one. Okay. Alex Thorne 27:23 Yes. But that's that's how I'm going to start this. Yes, I think it can be appropriate to split larger Garrison's into smaller Garrison's, potentially even inside of the same state. But it's situational. And any decision on splitting a garrison needs to be made with the consideration of the garrison CO, and the members that are in that garrison and input from them. I don't think that it's right for command staff to or a CO to say, Hey, you guys are too big. We're going to split you up and split up friendships and people that work together and everything else. So I yes, but it depends on the case and the situation. And we need to look at it together, talk through it, make sure it's appropriate, make sure that it's what the members want. Because at the end of the day, that's what's important for us. Ryan 28:23 I think for me, the idea of splitting up Garrison's is just kind of more of an eventuality than, you know, anything that's, you know, I guess or no kind of question eventually, we would hope that we get big enough that that would be the case pretty much everywhere. And we get more and more Garrison's and squads the idea of, you know, how do we approve that though? That might be something I differ a little bit on, Alex, on my personal opinion, is that if you have an area that, you know, really feels confident that they want to make their own squad in garrison, I think we should encourage that. The reason being is that if someone looks at each other and says, you know, want to be really cool, if we got to squat, and everyone starts shaking their head, Yeah, that'd be awesome. And then they say they're going to do it, but then someone tells them No, like, that can create a lot of bad feelings, and especially if they're already an area together, it really makes me wonder, you know, well, why is the is being said no, if you take a look at some of our Garrison's especially, we're coming from where I did with cdff. You know, we covered a lot of area, I was doing a lot of four or five hour drives, you know, get to places and things like that. And the only reason I could do it was that I was centrally located. I don't think anyone else could have been as effective CO as I was in that area, because I was able to do those drives unlike others. When Ohio decided to become its own thing, though, I think we saw a really good positive margin of gain from that. They've done a lot of really cool stuff this year. Now consider if someone had told them no. Like that could have been all out the window right there and maybe things would have been been worse for CDFF. To me. I think the big question of you know, who can say no to that? It it doesn't really make sense to me for someone else to tell certain people you can't be a squad when, like right now if I wanted to, you know, move to a new place and start a squad. It really won't matter too much. But Take, for instance, Southern Illinois from cdff. We had no members there. If a couple people joined together and said they wanted to form a squad and said, I mean, I would have been all for that. It's not really splitting up friendships, if you think about the fact that you're all still the finest, it just makes it a little bit more easy to manage certain areas, and at the same time, creates more leadership opportunities for people to step up, it would be kind of exhausting for me to be the CO of all of Texas for you know, whatever number of years I'm CO for, because it's just so huge. And I think the really sharp point, which might get people is that if you feel like, you know, you're losing members from your garrison, you should maybe think about it as an opportunity for them to kind of stand out on their own. I think one of our biggest Garrison's you know, what as CDR might have, you know, dozens of members and things like that. But if you take a look at their representation on CS, you know, they still only have one CO. So if you have more Garrison's, they have more COs more chances to represent the people, as opposed to say, you know, Texas, which has five people, does it make sense that you know, CDR is represented by one person with dozens of people in Texas is represented both one person with five, that's another kind of way to look at it, like dividing that up has a lot of opportunities there. And I think getting that happening is probably better than worse. Maggie Cogan 31:21 Thank You. Lets see, Tyler has a question, which is, what initiatives Do you have planned that you would like to see implemented in the next few years? And start with you, right? Ryan 31:36 I think the the biggest part of this question is, you know, the regcognization that COVID-19 is probably going to affect as well into 2021. And that's really going to drive a lot what happens next year, I think getting focused back on the virtual side of things, getting a virtual fundraiser for next year set up and running potentially early on would be a good thing to kind of get us on the right foot in terms of fundraising and also member engagement. as the year progresses, though, we might see the opportunity to get more in person events and things like that, depending on the vaccine, and if it gets distributed. One of the big goals that I've kind of been talking with a few people about is getting us a table at Dragon Con. I know Dragon Con is a big deal for a lot of people and a lot of people treat as vacation, but I see it as an opportunity to reach out to new people. Now this is a big challenge. Because the tables that dragon cons have specific rules, you got to keep a man for the entirety of the weekend, in when you talk about that, you know, that's a pretty big obligation to put in for. But I think we can put together a group of people who are willing to put in an hour here, hour there, maybe a morning, maybe an afternoon, and we can probably make that work a little bit for us. And I think that's a good opportunity for us to grab. Now, again, Dragon Con might not happen. And we have to take on take that as we do. But there was another suggestion made about doing a virtual Joe fest or Joe con or find this con kind of thing. And, to me, that's a great opportunity to reach out to more people, especially members and potential members as a way to engage them, maybe do some little presentations and things like that. We have a lot of really talented podcast people in the finest you know, if you talk about things like What's on Joe Mind and stuff like that, they have the ability to make content, which attracts people and it's on topic it's engaging, and at the same time could be a lot of fun for everyone, even if they're not necessarily into the costume aspect. So that's just kind of a couple things in the next year, that might be potential for us. in the longer term looking forward, like 2022, that's when we start thinking about 15th anniversary of the finest that has the opportunity for a lot of big things to happen. I know we did the T shirt for the 10 year, which is an awesome thing. And we could probably do that, again for the 15. We can also grow that a little bit. I think that we could use that as an opportunity to show our appreciation to people like Glenn King, as founder of the finest you know, make sure that they know we really appreciate and show them what this has grown into. It could be a way to showcase you know how we've changed over the years, highlighting different members, things like that. It's a lot of fun opportunity, things that we could do. But I definitely think we need to start planning for it sooner rather than later. Because that kind of stuff could get really big really quick. But in terms of other big events or keystones milestones, I want to see us doing merch regularly, I want to see us having events again in person together. But that's really going to depend on what we can do with COVID. Alex Thorne 34:12 So I tried to take a long list and distill it down to just a couple of keys. Key key ones. So I think first one right off the bat is I want to encourage us to have fun, and I want to encourage member involvement. I think those are two important things to keep us moving forward as a club, especially with the way 2020 and the way that potentially 2021 looks. And we don't know what the future holds at this point. So stuff like some stuff that we talked about on the last q&a that I jotted down notes on stuff like maybe doing some kind of photo contests, some things to just kind of help get members interested. asking for more member help with CS projects, which is a big one. Let's get detachments let's get detachments formalized and try to give an outlet for another way to for folks to connect, and then some kind of maybe some kind of virtual convention, maybe we host one, maybe we try to get together with some other con organizers and get something figured out. The second one, update the outdated charter, there's a bunch of stuff on the charter that is missing, it's out of date. And actually following the last q&a, we kind of started talking about it on command staff. So hopefully something goes and we get we get moving somewhere. Third point, work further on improving communication, this is a big one for me, because it's lacking, even though it's gotten better. It's not where it should be, you know, better frequency and consistency, looking to members to help provide guidance for what they want to see. And what we need to give them and provide ways for members to have access to data that doesn't require someone post something like charity dashboard, where they can just go and check where we're at which we have started in command staff, with our finances, and are kind of working on getting a more general public one ready to go. And then finally, I want to see us evolve our charity strategy to better reflect the club in the world that we're in today. We need to answer some questions. are big charity campaigns still worth our time? Or should we do webstores? or individual smaller runs? I want to support the efforts of Garrison's and members to raise those funds, which is something we've already talked about tonight. And then finally, is there a better way? And is there a better way to do what we're doing? What are we missing? What are we not doing? Right? What can we do better? You know, how do we progress from where we are to where we should be? That kind of thing? Maggie Cogan 36:54 All right, so the next two are singular questions from Chad. So we'll start with yours, Ryan? Um, if elected, where do you see the finest in two years? And what is your roadmap to get there? Knowing the challenges that a CO faces? How do you realistically execute those successfully while keeping morale? moral high? With forward momentum? This is your second time running for CO, but not your first time as a CO of a garrison. What successes Can you draw from that experience? And how would you incorporate those into the role you are applying for? concurrently? What do you feel you could have done better? And how will you apply those learnings? So good luck with that question? or eight? Ryan 37:40 Well, I'll start at the beginning. And you know, where do we see the finest in two years, I would like to see us growing, I'd like to see more squads, more garrison more members. But I'd like to see the activity dries a little bit higher than that, then that means I'd like to see some of the people who've kind of went away in recent years come back to us, it's definitely a case where we really do miss out when someone disappears for a while. And this ties a little bit to the end. But you know, as a CO of a garrison, you know, you see people get busy, you know, and they stopped going to conventions and things like that. And you say to yourself, well, we'll come back when they're ready. You don't want to put pressure on people. But at the same time, you know, the lesson I learned from that was, sometimes people feel like, you know, when they disappear for the wild, they can't come back. They feel like they've missed too much. They feel like they've disconnected from people, they might not recognize everyone anymore. It really comes down to you being the leader and being the familiar face to say, you know, you're welcome back and letting them know that, hey, there's something going on in your area. If you're interested. I know that that can be tough for some people, because you can feel like you're an annoyance, it's, it's tough to send a message to someone to say, Hey, you know, you're free to come if you want, you don't want to sound like dismissive or sad or disappointed in them. But you got to keep reaching out. And you know, giving them that hand to come back whenever they're ready. Because sometimes people might be ready, but maybe they just don't think they can to talk a little bit about some other things that I've learned, being a CO of, you know, two Garrison's. Now, it's definitely different when you start something up. And when you come into something that's been in for a while, and definitely stepping up the CO of cdff is probably more akin to becoming the CO the finest than starting up the Texas garrison, because you're walking into a place where there's already relationships, there's already things that have been established, there's traditions, there's customs, there's ways that things are done. For me, you know, coming into the finest as a CO. And entering CS for the first time, I didn't know a lot of those things. And it took a long time to really get adapted to that. Just the way that things get talked about, you know, who you talk to certain things about. It's very much a case where you can step on some toes very easily. And even if you don't mean it, you know, it can leave a very bad taste in people's mouth. That's the most important thing to avoid in it's such a hard thing to overcome once you do it. I think the lesson that I've taken from that is that new people have to be helped every step of the way sometimes and that can be as simple as having a good resource for them to reference. It could be you know, giving them You know, the open invitation to ask any question they want to ask, it's just a way to get yourself out there and tell them that, hey, I want you to be a part of this mistakes are gonna happen, we understand, I'm here to help you. So that's a big thing that I kind of took away from that. And my second time around going CS, it was a lot easier, because I already knew it was up. If you talk about, you know, what sort of ways we can do to keep moral high and momentum going, I think that comes down to a lot of what we said it's engagement, it's making people feel like this is something that they belong to, and they're a part of that they have a stake in. To me, moral goes down when people feel like they're not valued. And that's true of any organization, if you have a project, and you see that someone isn't contributing very much, it's very easy for that to snowball to them, you know, feeling like they're a burden and things like that, and eventually just pushing themselves out of it completely. It's all about giving people their chance to really shine. And I think the best thing that the CO, the finest can do, is by letting those people kind of take those roles, and maybe try something different that we haven't thought of before, especially if it's their own idea. I think the best thing, in terms of getting us to where we want to be in that place we want to be in two years, is making sure that people know that the finest is going to be a place for them in two years, just as it is now. It's very important that we make an environment that people feel safe, they feel welcome. And that they feel like they can contribute to frequently. I suppose in terms of tangibles of you know, what might be different in two years, I know that we've been discussing being a 501 C for quite a while, it's one of those things that's kind of been on the table, and it's kind of been thrown around canines for warriors is great, because they give us a very nice umbrella for what we are. And we don't necessarily need to be a 501 C to help them out. That's a very, very useful thing. And it makes things a lot easier on the organizational side. But what we've seen in recent years, I think, is that we're consistently handling thousands of dollars, sometimes 10s of thousands of dollars. And that's a significant amount of money that at some point, we're going to need to protect ourselves with liability. And that is very hard to do if you don't have that legal protection. So if we keep growing the charity side, and I definitely want that to be a big feature of my CO tenure, that's going to be something we need to think very hard about and have that discussion with our members, if that's where we want to go. So those would be my big keys where I want to go. And just to reiterate, you know, the lessons I've learned, be open to people reach out to them, keep them involved. And more importantly than anything, you know, make the finest a place that people want to be active. Maggie Cogan 42:26 Thank you, alright, yours, Alex from chat. Luckily, not as long. But he has warned me he's putting in more questions. So just a heads up. Um looking back at your 2018 platform versus what was delivered through 2020. What do you feel was your Coathanger achievement concurrently? What objectives fell short? What barriers kept you from accomplishing those goals? If reelected? How do you overcome those hurdles? Alex Thorne 42:53 Okay, so for clarification, I asked Chad, what a coat hanger achievement was because I wasn't sure. So I'm going to start with what he defined a coat hanger achievement as so that we're all on the same page. And then we'll go for there. So Chad, if I'm understanding what he said, he defined a coat hanger achievement as and I need to stop reading chat. He defined a code hearing or achievement as what is kind of your legacy. What's one of the things one of the biggest things that you're most proud of that if you were to walk out of the door, hang your coat up and leave would be something that you would point to and say I did that, and I'm proud of that. So for me, I think the biggest thing that comes to mind is the creation of the financial officer position. And in the improvement in every aspect of our finances, from how we're handling money, the transparency, the reporting the access to the data. I'm really happy that I can look at that and say, we're not doing things the way we were in 2015 we're not doing things the way we were in 2018. And we're getting better. And Ryan's right I the 501 c thing comes up often. It's one of the things that Sara and I who's our finance officer have talked about, and we've looked at the potentials of and it's definitely something that's on the roadmap, hopefully for some point in the future. So what are my shortfalls? What what objectives didn't I get done that I wanted to get done? And what what kept me from getting there? charter revisions are the obvious one that's been something that's been on my list since I was XO something that just didn't get there for whatever the reason improving communication was a big point in the last election was something Ryan and I both talked about a lot. It got better but it's not there yet. there's still room to grow there still room to make that a lot better. So why didn't this stuff get done? Um, a big one is poor time management, project management from my side. I'll own that. I tend to lead by jumping in and getting my hands dirty, which means I take on too much stuff at once. And I don't delegate Well, it's really easy for me to put my head down and to pick four or five things to work on and just try to knock them out 1234. But when you do that, it's really easy to get burnout. And sometimes it's hard to see that you're burnout and that you're sitting in a loop of cycle of stuff, just not getting done, not getting done not getting done while you're sitting in it. So that's one of those things that I need to be better about. That's, that's definitely, that's definitely a problem. It's definitely something that I recognize it's something that I recognize now looking on the outside of it, but it's hard to see when you're sitting there. So delegation is one way to solve that. And it's one of those skills that I'm still working on developing, but it's already starting to get a little better. We've got a couple of people who have, who have I really, really stepped up and asked to help. And I've kind of said, Here, this is your run with it. I'm out. You know, we've done it, we're doing it for the election. We're doing it for the members roster, we've done it a couple places, is it? Is it a strong point of mine yet? No, it's not. Recognizing that it's not a strong point is something that's important to solving it. So one of the things that I need is I need somebody to help me with that. And something I talked about in the last q&a is the creation of a project manager role, somebody to help keep me accountable to help us get our projects and our tasks done. To help me stay organized, to help us stay organized as a command staff to help us stay organized as an organization and communicate. And in general, just get stuff moved from A to B. That's that's a big one. And most of my shortfalls can be addressed by having somebody to help me and recognizing that I need to ask for help more often. And I think I answered all parts of the question. Let's see. achievement, shortfall barriers and overcoming. Yep. Okay. Maggie Cogan 47:09 All right. So we do have some looks like a couple questions in the chat. First one is from captBlitzdawg, we have no idea what that is, I'm sorry, outside of the finest what leadership experience do you have? And how does it apply to an online community? Ryan you wanna start this one? Ryan 47:33 In terms of my leadership, experience, things that I've had in my life I was in the military, I kind of came up through the enlisted ranks to be in a position both in terms of managing people for things like maintenance of nuclear reactors, and also on the military side of like taking care of things and possessions, that sort of stuff, in ways that that applies to an online community, it's actually kind of the opposite perspective, where you have to understand that you're not in person with someone, you don't actually have real authority over anyone, you have to be able to guide them in a way that kind of puts them in the right direction without you know, being a force on their life. And that comes down to really understanding you know, their perspective, the finest is something that we do for fun. And if you're going to be the leader of a group that does things for fun, you chiefly need to be concerned with how people are having fun and how they're enjoying things. I think a lot of that comes down to being timely with communication. And I know you're talking about making people feel like they're welcome and can be involved. So I think that that helps out in a big way that the the military never quite totally understood. In terms of more recent experience and things I do help with, like the social aspects of stuff, going through college, I was the leader of a number of groups, especially active in the first aid group on campus and things like that, basically, a bunch of volunteers who would go out and help out at football games, and five K's and marathons and provide CPR when called upon or something like that. That's a kind of an interesting aspect. Because, you know, it ties into what the charity thing of what we do is, no one is forced to be a volunteer, it's just something that you have the ability to do. So managing all those different skill sets to arrive at your goal is a big thing of leadership that I really took away from that. Not everyone's going to be as good at it. Everything else is someone. So you might have someone who's a very good graphics designer, for instance, you might have someone who's a very good talker, you might have someone who's just takes a really good photo every once in a while. Like those kind of things, when you put them together can make a cohesive group. And it's all about reaching out to those people putting them together. And especially if you have someone who may not be the best at anything, it's giving them an opportunity to help as well. It's really important that we remember that the finest is a group of hundreds of people. And if we let hundreds of people kind of get not noticed or not participate, eventually that's going to mean that we're not going to be a group of hundreds of people. The other big leadership experience thing that I'd mentioned more recently as well is my engagement with the interns here at NASA. When I was going through college, it was a case of me being you know, somewhat older than the rest of the group and things like that. So you had to overcome like an age difference and that takes understanding differences of communication. What people are interested in and generally just how people interact with each other, you can't treat you know, a group of young adults the same way you used to treat, you know, an engineer who has been at NASA for 50 years or something like that to very disparate groups. But at the same time, sometimes you end up on the same teams together. So when I'm leading a project or something like that, that's something I have to keep in mind that we have different styles of communicating, it's really easy for stuff to get lost in translation, it's easy for people to get bad feelings about something that said, when maybe no and bad things were intended. It's just another thing that we have to think about. In terms of the finest that means making sure that everyone is kind of on the same page with each other, and doing our best to decrease, you know, miscommunications, which could cause problems, I think in terms of our projects, and things like that, that has a great value, because not everyone is going to have the same kind of methodology of doing projects, either. Alex, you know, mentioned, you know, a project manager and things like that. And maybe that's another key to, you know, some of the differences between us, I think that CO that would be something that I would do myself, I say that because as a CO, you get a connection to a bunch of different people. So not only are you with the project manager, you're the communication manager, you're the kind of the social managers, everyone. So that's kind of a little bit of experience I take with that. And that's what I think will benefit me the most as a leader. Alex Thorne 51:22 Okay, so leadership out experience outside of the finest. So my leadership experience is a lot more less tangible than Ryan's. I didn't serve in the military. I was a boy scout for 20. Some years, I won't go into what exactly happened. But a troop guide guides. For those of you that don't know what a truth guide is, that's the position that's responsible for taking young first year scouts and helping them learn how to be a scout. I did that for a number of years. Beyond that, I was in Junior ROTC. And during my tenure in your in your ROTC. Like I said, I didn't join the military. So it's ROTC, it's Junior, which is high school, I led a number of different groups and teams. I was the xo of, over the entire free what we I forget what we were called, whether we were a squadron or what we were but over the entire ROTC organization, the four years of students. During that time, I helped us build our website, I helped us get into the technological age, we had an aging Colonel who was not familiar with technology, and all he was very sweet. You know, he needed some help. The other major things from that time period were for several years, I helped run our drill competitions. So that means you're working with everybody in our local metro area. So I had a lot of experience there working with a bunch of different people all the way from you know, the, the commanders of the high schools to you know, the students themselves. So beyond that professional, career wise, I am a integrations architect in my current role. I am the youngest person or one of the youngest people on my team, and I am actively looked at as part of the Computer Services management. So I am helping guide our entire university, through what we're doing as an organization from an IT side. Being a younger person, that becomes very complicated very quickly, especially when working with faculty and much older folks. So I'm used to having differences of opinion. I'm used to having to explain things multiple times. And having to communicate across a generational range from you know, a 90 year old emeritus professor, or 90 year old president of the university all the way down to a brand new freshmen. So that helps with the finest not because we're a full of, you know, a bunch of 80-90 year olds, but because we're all from different generations. That's one of the beautiful things about GI Joe is that we are everybody's from a different era. Everybody likes a different chunk of GI Joe, like the 90s Joe's are my thing and half people can't stand them and it's it's just great. It's one of the things that I love. So, but more specifically to an online community. You know, the technical stuff, the technical leadership stuff that I do at my job helps a lot Because I've learned I've learned to communicate and work with coworkers and peers, at other organizations virtually even before COVID. You know, that's been a thing that it has been doing for a long time. So that that definitely, definitely helps. Maggie Cogan 55:19 Okay. Next question is from Joe Colton. How would you make female members feel more comfortable being in a male dominated costume group? How would you deal with a female member being harassed, belittle discriminated against whether it's ethnically or sexually? And if the harasser is another member? Alex sure you start this. Alex Thorne 55:43 Okay. So two questions. We'll start with the first one. How would How would I make member female members feel more comfortable? This is something that I've asked myself a few times and something that we talked about during the last election. It's something that I've thought about, it's one of the reasons why I wanted a female mlo. Because I was hoping that if seeing a female presence on command staff would help us in that regard, help women feel more comfortable. You know, it's really important to me that women are comfortable in the finest, my wife, my sister, are both members. So I'm very, like trying to key in on, hey, let's make this as a comfortable environment as we can. And I've definitely gone to bat a couple of times, you know, we live in, we work in an interesting community with the Joe community sometimes and sometimes people are not nice. And cosplayers, we get judged pretty harshly sometimes, especially our female cosplayers. And I have on more than one occasion, message, an admin of a group about a post that I felt was inappropriate, that was, you know, demeaning one of our costumers and asked for it to be removed and gone to bat. And a lot of the times I try to do that as quietly as possible, because I don't like to air dirty laundry, and I like to keep drama low. And I would rather try to deal with something before one of our female members sees it and gets their it's upset or their feelings hurt. But that's not always possible. That kind of hit both aspects a little bit. But how do I deal with, you know, how do I deal with somebody being harassed, belittle discriminated against and what if the harasser is a number, another member? We have a code of conduct, it is very clearly defined in our code of conduct, but it is we have gone to bat over that code of conduct a couple of times, and we've removed members. Does that solve the problem? Well, it helps it takes care of it. It doesn't. But I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't take the the the issue away, doesn't take the hurt and the anguish and that kind of stuff away. But we we do have ways to deal with it. We've done we've dealt with it. You know, I don't know if we can strengthen it. I don't know if it's appropriate to strengthen it. I don't know if we need to have a conversation, as a group do as our code of conduct where we want it to be. And we need to, you know, strengthen the wording Do we need to make it clear? One thing I would like to would like to do that's not defined right now is what the policy is for, we're going to talk about this last question answer to is what the policy is for removing a member? And what the what the disciplinary action policy looks like, how does it go, you know, who do something Ryan brought up? Who who do members that aren't in the garrison go to, you know, that kind of thing. It needs to be spelled out. And it's not spelled out right now. And that would help us deal with this kind of issue. Because, you know, it needs to be handed up and pass along for free. So it can be dealt be dealt with. If we don't know about it, we can't deal with it. And you know, I want to take care of it. I don't I don't want anybody to feel uncomfortable in the finest. Absolutely anybody. I don't want them to feel uncomfortable and finest. And if somebody does, we need to address it as a group as a command staff as a CcO. It needs to be taken care of. Ryan 59:17 I think Alex hit on a lot of key points. And it does harken back to the question that was asked two years ago about, you know, going forward, you know, what are we going to do for them? And how are we going to protect our members. I think one of the bigger things I got mentioned, that hasn't happened. And I'll frame this a little bit working for NASA aerospace engineering, a very male dominated field, historically and continues to be today. But there's been changes. And I've had insight into why some of those changes have happened because of the different resource groups on the site that I work with and some of the different women that I work next to who are a part of them. And they explained to me that there's really you know, three big ways that you can make things more comfortable for women in that kind of environment. The first one is empowering them and encouraging them to speak up if they see something that's wrong. A lot of people can be kind of browbeat down to be silent and something like that and just accept that things are the way they are. And they're not going to change, you got to give them a hand and give them an opportunity to be able to speak up for that. We talked a little bit on the last q&a about anonymous reporting. And I think that can go a long way to start at least getting people a chance to voice up their concerns, especially when it comes to those very difficult topics. Things like sexual harassment, assault, belittling discrimination, they're things that when you stand up and try and point a finger at someone, you can feel like everyone's against you. giving someone an anonymous way to report, even if it doesn't let you ask all the detailed questions to them, because they don't want to be called out and focused on it at least gives you a data point. If you get enough data points from enough people saying this person is causing a problem, you can act on that. It gives you sort of a background on people to say that maybe there's something wrong with this member, and we need to do something about it. It's better than things being silent, or people being too scared to speak up. The second big thing is actively encouraging more women into the organization, it's a very difficult thing to do when you have male dominated fields, because it's a big wall that feels like you know, you can't get through or it's this is a boys club, or this is not meant for you and things like that. Two years ago, we talked about actively reaching out to women in kind of the community, they serve them that costuming is something they can do. I think that Joe brings up a great point that this is something to focus on, because that was a big effort of her tenure as CO is getting more women to join the club. And I think we were largely successful for that. In the last year, though, and especially probably because of COVID, we've lost a lot of those avenues, we don't get to go to conventions, you know, this year and things like that. And maybe that means we haven't had that many female applicants and this year, what that means is that we need to go different avenues to keep that flow of people incoming. And that's important. Because if you know, we have a down year of male recruiting and say, only 30, males join compared to 50, that's still a very male dominated group. But if you have, say, one female member join instead of five females, and I'm joined, that's a huge difference down the road in terms of representation. I think Alex also then kind of hits on the third point, which is leadership roles for those women, getting them visible, getting them active in the group. It's another way that you can kind of make things a norm as opposed to an abnormal, it's very important that we make sure that all our members are represented. And especially when it comes to differences in gender discrimination of any race goes away, when you get people in those positions of power. And they understand that this is what we are, if a person has these, you know, personal prejudices and things like that, and they see those people in position of powers. Generally speaking, they start realizing that I am the outlier here, this club isn't for me. And that's another way that you can kind of purge the tree of people who are having those bad feelings and things like that. Because frankly, if they're involved in the group, at that point, they're just there to troll. And you can spot a troll from a mile away. It's very important that we understand that these three things don't happen individually, they have to happen together. It's one of those things, we have to take an all encompassing approach to it. If you have a half measure, it's a no measure. And one of the things I think that stands out, we talked about the discipline aspect, if we have someone who sexually assault someone, I think we need to spell out very plainly to all the members, this is what they did. This is why it's not tolerable, this person is not going to be associated with us anymore. What happens when you try to keep things you know, quiet and take care of it that way? Sometimes rumors start, people start saying things like, you know, I don't agree with why this person was kicked out because they didn't do anything. Well, if you spell out to someone that they sexually assaulted someone, now you put them in the position where they have to agree that okay, sexual assault is okay.. And I think because of our group, and the group of people we put together, I think most people will realize very quickly, they can't say that because they don't believe it. So to me, I think that's one of the difference we might have. But in general, I think we agree on most of the parts of what we can do to make that better. Maggie Cogan 1:03:45 Thank you. All right, a Chad's question. The first session was enlightening to not only the audience, but it seems like the candidates as well. What key things did you take away from the first session? And how do you apply those learnings going forward, regardless of the election outcome? Ryan you can start Ryan 1:04:08 I guess for me, the the most enlightening thing so far, would probably be in the nature of the questions. We have members who are very, very focused on things like communication, we have members who are focused on things like more merchandise, we have members who are focused on things like more events. So that to me says that we have a group of people that are engaged in the finest and want to be a part of it. But when you look at the number of people, you know, doing those things, it's rather small compared to the total size of the group. I think today, Chad put out a number and said that there were something like 90 people registered for the election. This is down from one away of law last two years ago, the last election we did. Now that might not seem like you know, too big a thing, but you know, 20 people about 20%. And at the same time, we have more members since then. So that tells me that there might be some more people who are inactive. Now there could be other challenges associated with that. We know that last year we had more time For people to register, so that could be a contributing factor. We know that Facebook has changed how it does notifications, that could be a difference in how people have been registering. But to me, the fact that we don't have a very clear increase in people registering tells me that we might be disengaging more people than we would like. So when I see people like this, we're very passionate who asked these questions, it tells me that, you know, there is a core people that are willing to stand up and do good things for us. And maybe that's the key to getting those people who are a little bit more disengaged back involved with things. I think in terms of the answers, I know very well, where Alex stands on a lot of things. And I appreciate his candidness on some of the things that he needs improvement on, I think that's the best thing no matter what the outcome is going forward that those things get worked on. Because we agree the charter needs to be fixed. We agree that we need to get better at you know, communicating with people, these are basic things that I think going forward are going to be taken care of no matter who wins. But I think to me, the very enlightening thing is that we still have that group of very passionate people, even if they're not the same group we had two years ago, even if they're not the same group we had five years ago, those people are there. And we need to work our best to make sure that they're the ones that are involved in getting us moving forward. Alex Thorne 1:06:15 So I think the big keys that I took away from that first q&a, which Chad you're 100% right, I think I learned some stuff that I I wasn't aware of, both from the chat and the questions. And from listening to Ryan in person, you know, part of what gets lost in conversations online is emotion and passion and intuition, and our intonation sorry, you know, things that when you don't interact with somebody in person, you will you lose, and it's very easy to sit back and say, this person doesn't agree with me. Why are you know, and why are we not meshing? So one of the big things I took away took away from the first q&a was just how similar Ryan and I are on a lot of these points that for a while, and a lot of ways I thought we were going to we're going to differ vastly. And if you look at our answers, even tonight, or over the first Q&A, yeah, like Ryan said, there's a lot of stuff that we agree on, I mean, down to the down to a tee stuff that needs to get done. And the things that we don't agree on are mostly personal preferences, you know, leadership styles, how Ryan handles something, versus how I handle something, which is both learned and, you know, developed as, as you grow. So and as a whole things that I took away, you know, I need to be I personally need to be a little more open and a little more careful. When I'm reading somebody, something online, that's a that's a big one that I'm going to state right, right obvious, not that I've taken anything necessarily incorrectly, but you know, it's just you have to remind yourself that, you know, emotion doesn't come through online passion doesn't come through online, it's really easy to read something and view somebody disinterested when you're reading texts off a page, and you're reading it in your own head, versus, versus listening to somebody say their words and their opinion. So the other thing is, is that it just proves that I love this format. This is this is a great format for us. And this is something that we need to use more often, when we can use it. Maybe not for Q and A's, but maybe, or maybe for more than happy hours, you know, I'd love to see some command staff meetings be done with this, I feel like we could do probably a month's worth of work right now in you know, a couple of two hour meetings. If we all got together and got live, you know, and knock some stuff out really quickly. So those are those are those are, those are big points for me. Last thing, there's like, there's a lot of stuff that I thought I was doing that I'm missing on. And it's important as we grow and we learn that we understand where we're, where we're failing and what we're weak on. And some of that stuff has been highlighted to me both through the conversations and the questions and, you know, the frustrations of members being brought forward during these conversations, because right now the finest is my responsibility. I'm the one leaving leading the ship. And so those frustrations, while may not be directed at me are my responsibility. So that's something that is that I'm taking away, you know, and then I'll take forward regardless of what happens if, if I end up not being reelected, then I'm doing something else. You know, that's something that I get to carry forward with me as I grow because it's something that I get to learn. So Maggie Cogan 1:09:56 thank you. Next one is from Pauly More often than not in answering the questions, you both agree on the majority of points to the questions asked, Would you both consider and agree regardless of the outcome of the election, that you both should be in the command staff in some capacity, not just as garrison leaders? Would you? How would you best utilize each other in a role within command staff? Alex, you want to start this one? Alex Thorne 1:10:25 Sure. So let me start with with this, let's let's read what the charter says about a CO. Because it's important that we understand. So if a consecutive term is not granted, the CO must wait two years to run for the CO position again, or one year to run for command staff position. So if I'm not reelected, I'm uneligible to be on command staff, the way the charter is written for at least one year, in regardless of, you could kind of define that as a run for a position. So if I was appointed to a position, there may be a loophole there. But what's let's, let's let's start with that. So we have an understanding of what the charter says as it stands. Um, the next point? Yeah, I I agree, Ryan, and I agree on a lot more than I thought we did. And, yes, I'm under utilizing Ryan. Also, Ryan's not been a resource that's been available to me for almost a year. Kind of. I mean, I guess that's not necessarily fair, because I probably could have asked Ryan at any time, and he probably would have stepped up. So that's not really a fair, fair statement to stay. But I do appreciate having Ryan on command staff, I have tried to start utilizing some, him, for some things, we've started talking, we started talking about some charity stuff earlier, because I can just hand Ryan something, and he'll just get it done. And it's important to recognize who's passionate and who you can hand something off to and just, you know, they can just run with it. And it's something that it's something that I'm lacking, I was that person for Joe, a lot of times she would hand me something, and I would run with it. And it's kind of looking at things, I don't necessarily have a dedicated person that I can go to. So whether we however, we move forward. Yes, Ryan, needs to be more utilized if I win. And if you see oh, you know, that'll be a different story. But we can work it from there. I don't know. I, I don't know. I don't know what I could ask Ryan to do. I don't know if I could ask Ryan to be my project manager, because he seems to have those skills. But I don't know if he'd want to give up running the garrison in Texas. And I don't know that I want to ask him to give up running the garrison in Texas, because he just started it. And he does well as a garrison CO. So those are conversations that we have to have if if we proceed forward with that kind of thing. But there's certainly room to Ryan certainly being underutilized. And there's certainly room moving forward. If I'm reelected to to better utilize Ryan. Absolutely. Ryan 1:13:15 I'll start by saying that I appreciate that. And I definitely respect the fact that you know, communication is one of those things that when you see a person and you listen to them, you definitely get different perspectives of them. And I'll agree that, you know, I thought we would differed on more things, too. I will raise though that it could mean that maybe they're not the right questions are being asked. But at least in terms of the basics, the most important things that people care about, I think we can definitely agree that we agree in those cases. The other brief mention, I'll say the charter, you know, the charter says a lot of things. And sometimes we don't necessarily enforce them. When I see something like that, where you can't be a part of command staff for a year after that, I would raise the question, what was the point of that in the first place? Was that so you have a complete transition? Is it so No, there's no hard feelings. If someone doesn't get chosen for something? I don't know about that. I would just say that that could be something we might want to take a look at when we do the charter revision. In terms of you know, Alex, and if I should win and things like that, it's kind of the same thing where, you know, I don't want to make demands on him, depending on what's happening in his life. Obviously, you know, with a new baby and things like that, this next year is going to be pretty tough. But at the same time, I think Alex is the kind of person where he would find the time for what he's passionate about. And I would say that know what he's good at, in terms of getting projects and especially the creative things he does the cards, for instance, all the work he's done on the girls of the finest and the finest fundraisers of the years for the designs, he makes some of the merchandise he's kind of spearheaded, definitely the work that he's done to kind of get more people involved on the forum. There's all sorts of things that I think he could be good at the trick with, you know, specific CS membership is saying, you know, what role does that necessarily fit into? And it all comes down to, you know, really how the CO wants to organize things. In terms of me, you know, it might be possible that I have people doing things that aren't necessarily on CS. In, maybe that means something, maybe it doesn't Maybe it means that Alex, you know, would be offered an XO position or something like that. Again, that's a huge time commitment. But that's an option, it's on the table, I would say that going forward, we need everyone involved in the finest not just if they're on CS or not. So I wouldn't put too much stock in the fact if someone's not on CS. Even when I wasn't like I still tried to be involved where I could. So that's just another example of things going forward. I don't think we need to be necessarily CS focused, we need to be kind of the project and the result focused. And sometimes the best person for that result isn't CS. Maggie Cogan 1:15:42 This is just a general question from James, a lot of discussion of finances just out of curiosity, do we have a donation numbers for 2020? That's far? Alex Thorne 1:15:50 James, I can I can speak to that we do have a donation number, we have a little inconsistency that we're trying to hunt down right now. So I will share what we what we have in the bank account, what we feel is the is an accurate representation of a number. But actually, Sara, and I were on the phone just prior to this conversation. Sara's our finance officer. And she's individually rolling through transactions trying to figure out what's going on. So Dan Noble, right, it brought the discrepancy to our attention and been trying to hunt it down for a little while. And we're still working through it, because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on from moving from 19, financial 19, where we weren't doing the system to the system we're using in 20. So our current number in the bank, or accounted for right now is a little over $13,000 raised and that has no expenses coming out of it. So that is the the number that we have to donate. Ryan 1:16:59 I know it's not a question. But do you mind if I just chime in on something real fast. So I think the big thing to take away from that is that, you know, one mistake even years ago, can follow you for a long time when it comes to finances. And it doesn't matter if you improve things. If that mistake is still on the system. If you don't catch it, it can still bite you. So I think we should keep in mind that, you know, there could be things happening that we just haven't seen for a long time. I want to also point out that in terms of, you know, the fundraising we've done this year, it's very impressive. The fact that we are where we're at, especially with the efforts of eighth Ohio, Dan, especially the the auctions and things like that the people have been able to get out to conventions and do that safely and still able to get some money raised for that is completely excellent. I think one of the big things that we should start thinking about in terms of the fundraising is especially you know, what is it going to look like going forward to kind of keep this blend even when conventions start going back up? It's obviously a question that each garrison can ask themselves. And I think it's important that we do that, because that might show certain Garrison's in places where there's not a lot of cons that they can still contribute in a lot of ways. There's lots of ideas out there. I know from engagement in the past with fundraising and things like that. I had a spoil of riches. We had cons in Chicago, and Indianapolis and Columbus and Detroit and Grand Rapids, which I could get to very easily but say someplace out like 602nd in Arizona, you know, they have Phoenix, you know, once a year or something like that, or Utah or Colorado if they make it to Denver, Salt Lake City. So I think this does go to show that there are things possible on the fundraising side that aren't necessarily about inperson convention fundraising. And if we can motivate that if we can get other people to try things out, I think we're going to see that number get even bigger next year, even if these restrictions are still in place. So going forward, I think it just kind of restates the need for us to be very careful financially, to make sure that we're getting these little problems, wriggled out of the system, and things like that. And I definitely think that some of the feedback that we've gotten from things with this little problem is going to help for that. I know, one of the things Dan has been passionate about. He knows improving communication on the financial side, one of the things that got brought up, and I apologize if I go long on this, but there's the financial form that was created where COs can tell you know how much money they put into the finest PayPal, you know, based on what they raised and things like that. And to me, that's good, but it's missing the backside of it. And Dan pointed this out very astutely where he said, it really needs someone on the other side to say, Yes, I received this. And I think that's being input started now. I think that's something that they picked up on. But it's definitely a case of something that was mentioned. And, you know, we could have moved a little bit faster on but I do agree we're heading the right direction with that, especially in fixing these problems. Alex Thorne 1:19:45 Yeah, and I'm gonna take 2, 13 seconds because Ryan brought up a really good point, which is something that I want to make sure that I think that we both want to make sure I'm gonna I'm gonna say make that statement again. Moving forward is we want to be able to support what Garrison's do on a financial On a fundraising side, and if that means, you know, making a webstore as a club and trying to work through that and be able to provide items for those are ways for those Garrison's to get stuff out there, then that's something that we need to do. It's something we need to evaluate. And so it's something that's really important to me. It's something that we've been we've been talking a lot I've been working on, Sara and I have been looking at at Yeah, absolutely. I want to make sure that we want to make sure that as we're moving forward, we were addressing those needs, as how do we move forward as a whole? How do we address things where folks can't don't have the resources to do it themselves? Which is something we talked about, like with Task Force, 27, they have web person, but you know, Utah doesn't, or Colorado doesn't, you know, so how do we make those resources available to them? From the club level down so that they can continue to do the same kind of thing, and have that availability? So I think that's a great point that Ryan made. And I think that's definitely something that we both want to want to see. And to answer, I believe, Bazooka is Roger, Air Force Junior ROTC, which is one of the other reasons why I'm a plane guy if you didn't notice. Maggie Cogan 1:21:14 All right. And then this one is from Kevin Rietzel on the process of new costume approval, do you see it as a status quo? And that it does not to be adjusted does not need to be adjusted? Or should the costume approval process change? Alex Thorne 1:21:32 I don't remember startup idea who started the last time Ryan, do you? Did you design? Ryan 1:21:38 Was it me as I followed, and then you went after me? Alex Thorne 1:21:40 Okay, you're Ryan 1:21:42 so customer approval process. I definitely think it has an area that we can make improvements on. We talked briefly about in the last QA about a potential option for that, I just want to go back into that and explore it a little bit more. As the process currently stands for approval, you have to get the majority of guests votes, or guests with suggestions from all of the garrison COs and Squadron leaders, the CO, and I believe the xo as well. And when you add up all those people, that's, you know, what, 22,23, 24, or whatever, that can be a process to get a majority. The fact is, is that a lot of those people aren't necessarily that available anymore for this kind of stuff. And that can result in weeks of waiting for the person who submitted to say nothing of if it takes a long time for it to get brought up in the first place. So every little bit, you know, you add a couple weeks, suddenly, you have a process of months, for just some people to say, Yeah, it looks like a pretty good costume or not, I think we can definitely improve that quite a bit. The way I would do that would be potentially looking at a costume Review Board, basically, you know, maybe three, four or five people, a small group of people who are really passionate about costume quality, who pay a lot of attention to detail to things and I'm sure even just saying attention to detail, Maggie and Alex probably have an idea already about three or four people who really put in a lot of effort when it comes to costumes. If If those kind of people are involved in the process, you know, you're going to root out all the problems with them, you're going to give them good quality feedback, and it's going to be timely. And if we can reduce that amount of time it takes to get feedback, whether that's they're approved, or they have to make some changes, that person is going to feel a lot better about the process. The worst thing and the thing that I've been told a couple times now with new members is that man I submitted months ago, but I haven't heard anything or It's been weeks, like what are they do? And I have to tell them that, you know, we have to go through the process where you have to have our members in the CS group, you know, get their shot at saying yes or no. And it's really one of those things that the more you look at it and the more you realize we're only going to add more squadrons, and more Garrison's. That means it's only gonna increase the amount of people involved in the process. At some point, we got to go lean. And I think now might be a better time than any to start thinking about that and getting it done. So that's one thing I would do to change that. In terms of other things like the field manuals, for instance, which are tangentially related to this, we're gonna have to go through a big update process soon to clarify things that aren't going to be able to be bought anymore. So that's going to be a big deal for us very soon. It's something that's on the radar, I think, and Alex has made this a focus of recent discussion. So I appreciate that. But it's just kind of all together, you know, what can we do to make this more straightforward, more clear, and more timely. Alex Thorne 1:24:27 So yet another thing that Ryan and I agree on? So yeah, and I have I posted in a couple of places I've posted on our recruitment page, that we had some pretty significant delays to our approval process for a variety of reasons. You know, some of them are just factors of 2020. So Maggie, and I stepped in and tried to highlight and accelerate and help that and I've done that on more than one occasion. I've gotten involved, track something down, gotten it posted. Trying to try to stir up votes, you know, trying to try to be a responsible CO. And help out there because growth and new members are important. There's some on so the approval process in itself as it stands, I think there are a couple of things that we can address that they can make things better. I don't think it's super clear right now to even to our members necessarily what we look at for approval. How specific how granular You know, sometimes standards are not applied across the board. You know, you see it when when we see it, when the new member posts come up. In members, we have one costume that is Pauly, and we have another costume that's not Pauly. And you're like, well, Pauly got in. But this one didn't. This one got into. So where's the standard at? You know, part of that is that we deal with so many different characters, and there's so much personalization that can be done in a costume, that it becomes difficult to evenly apply stuff across the board. So one of the things that we've one of the things that I've done, Ryan's participated in these a few times, I think, was we've done some mock approvals with costumes from COs or from command staff members. You know, so we've taken our own costumes, we've put them up and we've gone through the process. And we've said, Alright, instead of giving yes or no vote, let's nail down let's talk about with discuss every point that you don't like or do like, and let's figure out and make sure we're trying to apply standards appropriately. I actually really liked that process. But like, like Ryan said, It's time consuming right now, because we have. So it's Garrison's. It's garrison, COs, xo, CO and mlo that can vote. There's like 17 people, because it's not. So it's the only group that can't is Squadron leaders and the web officer. And the finance officer. Right. And, and Johnny communications officer, those three. So the other thing that I think that we can do is I think we can automate portions of this process. It's something that I've looked at as an as an IT guy from my, from a, you know, in integration architect perspective, we have stuff coming into a form, and then it goes to somebody's inbox and it sits for a while. Yes, Pauly, it's either Pauly or not Pauly. Those are the standard. It goes somebody's inbox for a while, maybe it sits because they didn't see it. You know, even though Maggie and I are copied on the emails, you know, if it becomes cluttered, you lose stuff in an inbox. So if we're moving to if we're moving something from one system, or submitting in one system, we're moving to another system, and that we're putting it into the forums, we have a manual intervention step in there that's causing part of our problem. So one of the things that our forums allow us to do is they allow us to send an email to the forums and making a makeup post. So theoretically, I can send an email from the forum to the forums for command staff, where approvals go, and that step gets removed. And then that takes out, you know, some of what we had been waiting on for our last submissions. We're just getting people posted. Not even not not people voting, just getting people posted. But yeah, do we need to reevaluate majority voting on costume approval? Because we are growing? And at some point, it's going to be untenable? Yeah. We need we also need to nail down what our approval process processes processes, it needs to be super clear, clean cut defined, which is not always the easiest thing to do. And we need to be better about communicating what's going on with it. You know, it, even a simple email to a couple of those people would have helped address their questions and make them feel a little better. You know, we've got your application, we're looking at it give us a week or two, that kind of thing. And maybe it's maybe it's adding people maybe it's adding extra help so that the mlo is not the only person dealing with applicants. There's there's a bunch of different things that we can do to improve the process. And we just need to take a sit down and take a good hard look and say, these are five or six things that we can do. And absolutely, I think it definitely needs to be approved. One thing that comes up a lot on command staff. So I know I'm going long on this, but this is something important and some that I've been thinking about is that we have three for those of you that are not familiar. We have three voting statuses right now. We have a yes, we have a yes with changes. And we have no but yes, and yes with changes are basically the same thing. Because yes, with changes gets in and then nobody follows up and says did you make the changes that we asked you to make? There's no provisional acceptance to the finest you're either in or you're not. So that kind of just dilutes the whole process, in my opinion, and I would much rather say somebody, yes, you're in. Here's some feedback to improve your costume. rather than, you know, have a third voting status. So that's something we've talked about. It's something that command staff needs to talk about. And maybe there's something that needs to be done that way. It's again, it's about enforcing a standard and trying to even define what a standard is for approval when you don't have. It's not like we're all stormtroopers. We don't have a cut, you know, character we can look at and say, Yep, this is Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, you really have to be knowledgeable. And there's a couple of times where I've had to go and look up a character because I'm not familiar with them. And I think we've all experienced that on command staff. So yeah, Ryan's got a great point. Maybe we do need to do some kind of costume Review Board, some kind of additional layer to get people that are really passionate about building costumes involved in the right places. I think that's a great idea. Ryan 1:30:59 I'm not sure but did we miss the second one from Joe about involving timid members? Maggie Cogan 1:31:07 From Joe? Alex Thorne 1:31:08 I think we did. Yeah, it was before, Polly. It was before Pauly's question. Between Chad and Paully's. Good catch, Ryan. Maggie Cogan 1:31:17 Oh, I did miss that one.I thought they were all the same paragraphs. Okay. All right. So how do you connect with more 10 members to mid members to encourage them to be more involved? either help with charity or costumes? Or even running for a garrison CO? How do you encourage garrison COs to involve their entire garrison members or members in general to be more involved? Alex starts? Alex Thorne 1:31:54 I think so. Brian took that one last and first than that, I sorry, I've been up since 4am. So everything's starting to kind of blend together. Okay, so this is a good one. And this is also something that I struggled with, because I was the timid member. Maggie Cogan 1:32:12 Yes, you were. Alex Thorne 1:32:13 Yeah. For those of you that didn't met a meet me, I came to Joe Con, my very first. So I went to two conventions. I did our local convention. And then I did Joe Con, and I met everybody in the finest and had a great time. But I was super ridiculously shy. I'm an introvert to, to a tee or I used to be, and one of the things that I loved about the finest is that it's helped me come out of my shell. So I absolutely, like feel this question on a personal level. You know, and it's a tough, it's a tough question, because how do you how do you know somebody well enough, that doesn't? That's timid. How do you connect with them? You know, how do you get to know them? How do you get through the walls that they've built up without, you know, breaching their truster? creating additional anxieties? So it's a great question, it's a very tough thing to do. And I don't think there's an easy answer other than trying to provide opportunities and providing ways to connect and providing personal connections. You know, one of the things that Ryan said last q&a that kind of resonated with me was reaching out to members. Something that I do when I can, but not something that I can do all the time, because there's a lot of us. But you know, and something that I've really missed in 2020 is the ability to reach out to members, they're really the ability to see people in person, which is one of my favorite things about the finest is going to conventions and meeting people meeting other finest members and connecting. So, yeah, it's a, it's a big aspect. And it's not something we've really been able to do. I like the virtual happy hours, we've had a couple of we've had a couple of members that I've never met before, get on the virtual happy hours, which has been kind of awesome. So I enjoy like that. And I think that presenting more opportunities for that kind of thing, continuing a virtual happy hours, continuing ways for connections, improving ways to get involved, like offering those opportunities, like we've talked about multiple times tonight about designing merge about doing contests about giving different platforms for communication, our will will will help especially if somebody has a preference on how they prefer to communicate. If they would rather have a text conversation or you know, not do something in person or they're more comfortable on discord or you know, forums. It's important, it's appropriate that we have avenues for that. And to Ryan's point, which again, he's talked about is we need to do something we need to give an option for anonymous, which is one of those things that I took away we talked about last week q&a, and I kind of have sat on it a little more and yeah, I mean, it should be something that we have There's a lot of arguments to be made for and against it. But there's a lot of a lot more pros to it than not. So I think that's something that's good. either help with charity or costumes. Okay, so we're talking about encouraging them. One of the things that I've loved as a, as a CO, as I've gotten the ability to help start some squads, I've gotten the ability to help get some Garrison's moving. I've helped some do some design work, for Garrison's. And I love that, like, that moment of discovery when a person is super excited and super passionate wants to start a squad. And, you know, like, wants to come up with a name and is creative. And like, here's a design and you know, and we work together and we improve that I love that connection on I love that personally. So encouraging stuff like that is is great, because more squads and more garrisons is more growth than that's benefit for all of us. How do we encourage garrison COs to involve their entire garrison, this is something that I struggle with, because sometimes I myself struggle with engaging garrison COs in command staff to get them involved. It's something that we can definitely see as being a problem, something we've talked about, you know, sometimes sometimes we may be, we need to realize that the people that are in positions are not the best fit. And I'm not saying that I'm advocating to replace people. But if we need to shake things up in a garrison needs to be shook up, maybe we need to look at that. Or even let's go a little bit further. If that command staff position needs to be shook up, and somebody is not doing what they need to do. And they're not being involved, and we can't get them to be involved, then maybe we need to be encouraging. But maybe we also need to think about, hey, maybe this isn't the best fit for you, you know, where do we get you some place where you'll Excel, not, hey, you're doing a bad job, I don't want you to I don't want you on command staff, I don't want you in the finest, which I know is something that Dan worries about every time every time we talk is that he's gonna say something, and I'm gonna turn around and say that, Dan, I love you, you're great. But, you know, maybe we just need to be we need to, we need to evaluate that. And that's something that's hard for me to do as a person because I it's as a it's not a management skill that I've developed, I haven't had to let people go I I try to be very diplomatic, I try to be very conscious of people's feelings. And, you know, I don't, I don't like to upset somebody. So, you know, sometimes that puts puts us in a bad spot. And sometimes it's a thing that I need to get over and just look at doing. So I think I answered most of that. I may have rambled a little bit. But I think that's about it. Ryan 1:37:52 I would say one of the biggest keys is patience. Having been, you know, CO a couple times now of Garrison's, you deal with all kinds of different people. And when you're dealing with members who are timid, or maybe they have anxiety or a fear of you know, being in a position where they make a mistake, and you know, they get ostracized or something like that, you just have to understand that everyone's going to move at their own pace, it's a very, very difficult thing for some people to accept, you know that, you know, either this person four times in, you know, they keep saying no to me. And that's just something you need to accept that, you know, they're going to make the decision in their own time when they feel like they're comfortable. So you need to do is basically take a look at yourself and say, Hey, you know, what, could I potentially approach this differently? or How can I do this a bit, in a different style that might be more appropriate for them? It's a hard thing to realize, but, you know, sometimes you're the intimidating factor, it's a very difficult thing for some leaders to accept that, you know, maybe they're the ones causing the problem. And that could be a case where a CO of the garrison stepped aside and maybe asked the CO, the finest, like, you know, this person has kind of been really quiet. And when I talk to them, you know, they don't really seem to like talking to me, would you would you mind talking to him a little bit, you know, maybe see if they want to get involved in something, that's a way that you can use the leadership chain of command to help out and reaching these lower members, even if it means going up. Or if you have a xo in the garrison, maybe going down. It's just kind of shifting gears to match the person. I think that's a adaptability at its finest is understanding that everyone is going to mesh a little bit differently with other people. And it's about finding who they mesh with to really make those connections. I would say that, you know, my friend group might not be the same as someone else's friend group. Because of that, you know, how we communicate the jokes, we have things like that. It all comes from personalities. If the finest CO, you know, tries to do this all by themselves, they will not be successful. And the second part of that question, you know, getting garrison COs to involve people is a big part of that. We really need buy in from the garrison COs. If a person is in a leadership position, they need to have the drive. They need to have the availability and they need to have the time to really make those efforts. And that's not an easy thing all the time. It'd be great if it could just be, you know, a fun little hat that you wear, and you get to make decisions on CS. But there's responsibilities that comes with it. And that ties a little bit back into the next part about, you know, getting timid people to run for leadership positions. Sometimes that's intimidating, like, you know, do I have time for this? You know, what am I getting into, you know, am I gonna make a mistake and make someone mad. That's where secondary leadership opportunities, things like being an xo really stand out. I appreciate forever. The fact that Sean Cho made me his xo, and I got to work on projects. And I got to be a little bit involved in these different things before I was actually a leader of anything, it was just a way that I could kind of slowly get acclimated to being in that position working with different people. And that exposed me to, you know, a whole bunch of different ideas and different kind of discussion styles within the finest. And that really gave me a clear step to making CO where I felt a little bit more comfortable about myself. So to me, it's a process of starting at the bottom, you know, taking the baby steps that you need, finding what works and what doesn't. And when you find something that works, you know, letting it run. If someone really enjoys communicating with someone, and they're best friends. Maybe they don't need to go through me maybe that's just fine. And as long as I'm cued in that works for me. So that's just kind of one example of that, I think and what kind of ties into the larger picture of having the patience and being adaptable about letting those people participate. Maggie Cogan 1:41:26 Alright, we haven't gotten any other questions as of yet. I don't know if anyone has any questions or not. Um, if we have some more coming maybe want to take a quick break. And come back. I don't know. Joe Colton wishes to know your favorite ice cream. Ryan starts this one. Ryan 1:41:51 This is the hardest question of the night on you know the situation but I would think in general if I walked into any ice cream shop in the world, and I saw all the flavors available to me. I would probably go with mint chocolate. Unknown Speaker 1:42:07 Yeah, nice. Alex. Alex Thorne 1:42:11 peach pie. Maggie Cogan 1:42:13 peach pie. I don't think I've ever seen that. Alex Thorne 1:42:15 It's a local. There's a local ice cream shop that does it. Maggie Cogan 1:42:21 Oh, God for going into this guy's I want to need a break. Um, yeah, hold on first though. Right. So if the ice cream is hard, what's your favorite cookie? Ryan 1:42:32 Oh, favorite cookie. That's Oreos by a mile. Maggie Cogan 1:42:34 Okay. Alex, Alex Thorne 1:42:37 my wife makes a cookie called a chessy. It's a recipe that she makes. And they're they're delicious. So hands down. My wife's my wife's cookies. Maggie Cogan 1:42:48 Oh, my God, what is happening? Ryan 1:42:51 you encouraged it? Maggie Cogan 1:42:52 No, I didn't. I said we can take a break first. Where are we? Alex Thorne 1:42:57 Let's give Maggie five huh? Maggie Cogan 1:42:59 Yeah, Ryan 1:43:00 agreed. Maggie Cogan 1:43:02 I'm almost empty guys are killing me. All right, five minutes. We'll come back. We'll start answering these ridiculous questions. There might be real ones in there, though. Alex Thorne 1:43:13 There are a couple of there are a couple of real ones. Are there two good ones at least. In there. Maggie Cogan 1:43:21 Dan saying ignore his thing. Ignore his this was just favorite. thundercat Alex Thorne 1:43:27 Oh, snarf. Maggie Cogan 1:43:28 Yep. All right. Let's take Wait, what? Take five we'll be back in just a minute. we're back. Did we answer the Am I doing the goofy questions? Alex Thorne 1:53:32 Whatever. Maggie Cogan 1:53:34 Ryan, Ryan 1:53:35 I would say save those for lightning round at the end, maybe. Okay, make sure we get the serious ones in. Maggie Cogan 1:53:39 Okay. Um, so the first serious one I see is, uh, if you could ask each other one question, what would it be? Ryans turn? Ryan 1:53:57 Is, that's a pretty good one. I guess to me, you know, the questions that, you know, I tend to ask, like, I tend to be focused on things like results and stuff like that. And, in this case, you know, I would ask Alex, you know, just from, you know, your past two years as the CO, you know, we've done a lot of amazing things. And there's obviously been a lot of accomplishes that we're very proud of, if going forward, you know, if you're CO, again, you know, what sort of standard you set for improvement upon that, like, what do you like measure in terms of, you know, your success, you know, what's it like, for instance, you know, if, you know, 10 years in the future when we do or, you know, 11 and 12. When we do 25th anniversary, you know, they look back at the tenure of Alex, the CO, you know, what was the biggest thing that you improved upon the second time around, like, what are you going to focus on? Alex Thorne 1:54:57 Solid question. There's, there's so many things that one could say here. Like, there's so many things that we've talked about, right. Um, you know, I think the biggest thing that I think we will all agree is really that short is lacking, or that's lacking is communication. So that's the biggest one to point my finger out and say, if we don't get this better, if communication does not improve, and all the aspects of communication do not improve, you know, maybe we're not going to make it to, to the next anniversary after 15. That's it, that's an easy one to look at. Member involvements a big one too, and they just kind of go hand in hand, I think we've talked about that, too. I would really like to see us grow those. So if you wanted to boil down to what my points coming into being a CO, where they were, grow, have fun, continue doing good. I kind of like all three of those moving forward. And those are easily easily measurable, we can tell if we've grown, we can tell if members are having fun, because they'll stay involved. And we have metrics around how much good we're doing. At least from a charity aspect, you know, there's untanned, there's intangible things that we do, like bringing people introverts out of their shells, and bringing people together, and that kind of thing. So I think those are the big three, with, I hope, I can say we look back and say, Hey, Alex, he got reelected, and we got the communication thing figured out and the finance got stronger. I want to see us get stronger, I want to see it grow, I want to see it Have fun, I want to see us do good. All those things. And that's the, that's the legacy that I hope I leave whether or not, you know, my co ends and my tenure ends in two months, or continues and ends sometime next year. Or in two years, whenever it whatever happens. That's, you know, kind of the way that I've been evaluating and looking at it. Maggie Cogan 1:57:16 And the question you would ask Ryan, Alex Thorne 1:57:19 it's tough. This is, uh, this is probably one of the toughest questions, and I can be honest with you, not something that I that's something that I would have spent a lot of time thinking about. I spent a lot of time thinking about what Ryan's been saying. And been trying to compare it to what I think and judge, you know, my perspective and opinion through someone else's shoes. So I'm going to be very blunt. And Ryan, I hope, Your Honor, I hope you answer honestly. What is if you could say, you could say and one, one thing, what's what's one thing that I'm not doing that we need to be doing? That I'm not being successful at that we need to be doing? Ryan 1:58:06 I think for me, it's really a question of efficiency. And when I say that, what I would say specifically that we need to do better is we need to really put a push in for doing things in a better way. And the thing that comes to mind, and something that I've always been passionate about is the fundraising aspect of what we do. If you know, we show the numbers to people about the amount of money we raised versus the amount of money it cost to make items to get them shipped and send them out. That percentage has always been huge. To me. It's a case where we can raise, you know, over $10,000. But if 5000 or 6000 goes to shipping and things like you know how much it takes to make them suddenly, that's a much smaller number. My focus when it comes to merchandise has always been to get that margin better. If we make the argument that you know, even if you raise $1, you know, it's a good thing. That's true. But if we're in the position to do something just slightly different and make that $1 into two or three or four, suddenly, that opens up an entire new level of fundraising that we're capable of. And to me, I think what we kind of run into problems with is that we get stuck in routines. You know, we've always used this patch producer, we've always done the merchandise this way. I think we definitely need to take more efforts to shop around. Sometimes that might mean going with something that's new. And maybe we can try and spread that out with new merchandise to test them out before it goes into the big Charity Campaign where a lot of stuff is on the line. Another option might be to time things a little bit better, because we know discount deals happen like especially at certain times a year. Those printers love running big discounts. Maybe we can type our fundraisers around that to make the most out of it. It's one of these things that I've experimented with as garrison CO. And sometimes when I mentioned you know, Hey, I got these patches made for $1 each Isn't that great? Two weeks later, someone comes by and says these patches will take you know 3.50 to make because it's from someone that I've used forever. My perspective is From the charity standpoint, we're really missing out on a chance to do better. And when it comes to member merchandise, I really think the onus needs to be on reducing that cost of members as much as possible, because I think we owe that to them to put in that little extra bit effort. So to me, I guess it would come down to, you know, I would say, you know, try to be a little bit more efficient with that, you know, be a little bit more open when someone suggesters mentions, you know, I think this would be really good to try out sometime, it's, it's really tough when you see the same things happening with, you know, using someone because we know them, for instance, and I understand relationship building and maintain them is important. But with merchandise, there's just so much things have changed in the last five and 10 years that it's really gone out the window in terms of how much you can save, if you just change things a little bit. Maggie Cogan 2:00:42 Um,I don't know how much we can go into this, I guess. See? How is our relationship with Hasbro? Alex? Alex Thorne 2:00:57 I mean, Ryan, is that a question that you feel like you can talk to you there? Ryan 2:01:02 I mean, let me let me say what my feeling is. And I think a lot of, you know, lower members and stuff like that, you know, have this idea that at some point in the past, Hasbro, you know, gave us the thumbs up. And we ran with that for a while. And there's not really been anything else since. And what that kind of runs into is this question of, you know, this matter of what is or is not a gray area for what we do. From a person that doesn't know these connections and things like that, it doesn't really make sense to me that we set a line way over here, when we might be able to get more out of it. But because we're afraid of the line getting pushed way too far over here. We don't bother with it. It's kind of a moral question. When you think about it, you know, like we talked about last time, you know, do it until you get caught vices, you know, asking for permission and being told no. And to me, I think the regular member you know, they don't want something like the 501st has they don't want to have to be you know, beholden to some corporate suit somewhere that says that, no, you can't do that. No, you can't do that. I don't think anyone wants that. But I think at a minimum, they want us to be secure. And things like our logo, they want us to be secure. And things like using an image of ourselves in costume, you know, to promote things. Because at the end of the day, that's really the general question of cosplaying. Like, if I take a picture of myself and a Cobra Commander costume, is that fundamentally a picture of Cobra Commander? Or is that fundamentally a picture of me? And if we can't even use a picture of ourselves, you know, holding up something I say vote Cobra, you know, that makes a lot of members turned off. So that's the place where I think we can make some improvements on if we can figure out those things. But I'll let you take the whole, you know, big explanation of that. That's just Alex Thorne 2:02:44 so I it's not that I disagree with you by any means. There we we, I feel like we've kind of always operated in a gray area. You know, some of the folks that have been around a longer longer than I have kin could probably speak better to that. But you know, our relationship with Hasbro's always been unofficial, kind of in that gray realm. You know, we kind of do what we do. Occasionally we get a thumbs up, Hey, you guys did a good job. As far as I know, we haven't gotten our hand slapped yet. But also, I know that a lot of the positions and a lot of the people that we used to talk to are no longer with Hasbro. They've moved on to other opportunities. And there for a while there really wasn't anybody in GI Joe at Hasbro. There was nobody to be concerned with us. So you know, we're kind of in an interesting time because Hasbro's revitalizing GI Joe, and that kind of puts a question in a lot of minds in my mind. You know, one of the things that we talked about one of the things we really looked at this year was a big discussion on IP and what's appropriate and what's not and what's trademarked and what's not, what can we get away with and what Can't we get away with and where the line is. You know, and we I operate under like Ryan said, I operate under the it's better to ask for forgiveness and permission. Because in a corporate environment with liability more often than not, we're going to get to know from a sued rather than even getting into consideration. It's a lot harder to it's a lot harder for somebody to pull back and pull a cease and desist order on a charity campaign that's raising money for service dogs, you know, in the name of GI Joe as a wit or an in the name of an organization that dresses as a GI Joe. So yeah, we're we definitely operate in a gray area. And there isn't really a strong relationship. There are contacts there are people that know about us people that used to know about us. I know every once in a while we get a we you know We get a shout out or Johnny tags Hasbro in a post that kind of thing. But the relationship is is unofficial at at best. And sometimes, you know, we're just not sure whether or not was appropriate. And there there are some decisions to be made there. Stuff like the brand new manual that we've talked about hopefully it will help with that kind of thing. But there are some real conversations to be had about, you know, you know is Cobra trademark is the logo trademark, where's the line? What can we use? wolky? Not us. I think for the most part, if you look at the legal precedent, we're safe with the costuming stuff. But even that can be a gray area. Sometimes I know. Some folks have gotten dinged for some different stuff. But also agree with Ryan, I don't think anybody wants to be beholden to a corporation in an organization where we're trying to have fun and do good. And you know what this is more about? for a lot of us, this is more about keeping GI Joe alive. And especially for the years where there was no GI Joe, it was one of the ways that we kept GI Joe alive. So to be holding to a corporation and be told that we can and can't do certain things, I don't know, kind of we would take a little bit of the soul and the spirit of the club to me. But it's those are conversations and decisions that we will probably have to deal with at some point. And we've been very fortunate, up until now that we've been kind of just operating in the gray area that you know, and we've been allowed to do what we do. As long as we've been I've been thinking as long as we've been careful and always tried to be careful about logos and IPS. But it's not always evenly applied. So, you know, again, some of that is just kind of like it's a command staff members thing, we need to all kind of sit down and come to an agreement and say, Hey, this is what we can do. And this is what we don't think we can do. And this is how we move forward. Yeah, I one more thing I want to speak to because I'm just because I'm hitting on Nike thing is I do remember, when I first joined that it was right around the time that the movie came out. And at that time the club was run by or when I was looking to join club was to run by Tony. And at that point, we weren't accepting costumes based on the movie. Because they were afraid of getting cease and desist letters. For the costumes based on the movie the designs based on the movie, there's an actual there was actual post made via the finest CO at the time that says, hey, we're not accepting costumes based on the movie. So yeah, I mean to say that we have gotten thumbs up from Hasbro a couple times. Yeah, but there's definitely been some concerns even in the past, like, Hey, where's the line? Because we don't know where it is. And we're worried about it. Of course, costuming was a different thing back then to it wasn't what it is today, where it's, you know, nerd culture is celebrated and popular like pocket realized, like it is today. So also different worlds different timeframes. But just something to keep in mind is that that avenue always, always changing. And we are definitely operating in a gray area. Maggie Cogan 2:08:15 All right. Next one is from Johnny, what are your ideas for how we engage more members and encourage more participation in events like this and voter turnout? I think it's Alex, you're trying to start. Alex Thorne 2:08:32 So that's something that I'm always worried about, that I have. Whether it comes through or not. It's something that I I'm always concerned about when we we talk from a CS perspective, when we talk from a CO perspective, we talk from a member perspective, how involved are people going to be in, in events in things? You know, I've watched, I've watched how involved people are in the happy hour, I've seen people come and go and disappear. From the club. You know, I've been in the club since 2015. I people that were super active when I was in don't aren't even coming around anymore. I don't have an easy answer to that question. Other than, you know, the kind of what I've said a few times, which is we try to offer as many offers as many opportunities as we can we try to offer as many platforms as we can. Maybe we need to maybe Ryan's right. Maybe we need to reach out maybe we need to have a conversation with some of these members, see if we can get in touch with them and say, hey, what what what made you leave? What Why aren't you What's going on? Why aren't you active? What What can we do? What can we help with? Maybe there's a maybe there's something easy, maybe it's the amount of spam posts that get posted into the members. Maybe it's that the forums were ancient and they weren't updated for years, or that communication was bad. You know, I think that some of these quality of life things help solve the involvement questions. Some of the Medication things will help solve the involvement questions. I think there are things that we have to deal with, I think we have to deal with big issues like communication. And hopefully, as we do stuff like that will start drawing people back in. You know, it's a, it's a mixed bag, even on command staff, I have folks tell me that, hey, I've turned the, you know, I unfollowed the members page, because it just goes all over the place. I mean, your command staffs doing it, like, what are our members doing? I don't know, I feel like I'm rambling a little bit. And I apologize. It's just it's, it's one of those things that is been on my mind. And it's like, I'm not sure how to solve it. And maybe we need to have a discussion about it, maybe that's something we need to do. Maybe we need to do like a, you know, try to get together and do an all hands members meeting or an all hands command staff meeting and get as many people involved, and we can discuss it. Or maybe we just need to post a question on members and see how many answers we get. Maybe that would be a good first, a good first step, I, I don't really know. But I've got some ideas. And I hope we can do better with it. Ryan 2:11:15 Fundamentally, I think there are two main avenues to kind of go about doing this. The first one is variety. Not every person is going to be tailored for a certain sort of interaction, the zoom meetings, for instance, I mean, we've sung their praises, because it's worked really well for this situation. But when you start getting about, you know, 20, or 25 people in a zoom meeting, that's not necessarily great for communication, especially as more timid people, because, generally speaking, there's only one person talking at a time maybe to have most of their talking over each other. But all the attention is on those people. And that's a very big spotlight to be in, if that's the place you don't like to be. So I could see things like the happy hour or turning off some people because you know, it's a big group gathering. If you imagine a convention bar, for instance, if we had a finest meet up after something, you would have a big group of people probably crowd around laughing, tossing the jokes with each other. But then you might have a few smaller groups on the outside, with, you know, smaller discussions going on between some very close friends with each other. I mean, I definitely see myself in a smaller group in that situation. So maybe that's why the happy hour meetings don't quite, you know, jump out at me as something that, you know, I want to go out of my way for if I can. So it's just something to think about that is there's no one size fits all. So getting a variety of experiences out there, whether that's, you know, doing one on ones with people or having small group meetings, or something like that, that kind of ties back into having a lot of different projects that bring in other people. If you can organize small groups, it makes it a little bit easier for those people to speak up and form those bonds in between people. If I've worked with someone on a cool thing, that's something I can always look back and talk to them about. The experiences that the finest really excels that are those little interactions that happen nowhere else stuff that comes to mind, like finest house, for instance, or when the East Coast crew came to pick up the snake armor from Indiana, like those little things are something that we can take forward with us and kind of hold on to, and the people that were involved in that can kind of fall back on that as a way to reach out to people. The Second Avenue kind of ties into that last point where I say it's about making the effort. And as you said, reaching out is very important. Every one of us know someone in the group that might be willing to be here right now, if we had invited them. It's one of those things that we don't want to encroach on other people's lives, we don't want to be an annoyance or a bother to them. But if you can pull that one person back in even for a moment, there's a chance they might run with it. And from there, it expands outward, because if they can pull in another person, all of a sudden you get more activity out of it. The the biggest lesson, you know that I learned as a CO of the garrison is that you can pull and pull and pull. But if you keep pulling the same way, you're going to get the same result. You got to mix things up, you got to try a different approach. And sometimes that means reaching out, sometimes that means bringing in someone else, and most importantly, having them have the environment that they're going to excel in. So for me, if we want more people involved, we got to make the place a place they want to be we got to make it a place where there's people they want to be with and we got to be doing things that we're all gonna have a good time doing. Maggie Cogan 2:14:24 All right, um, do you find value? In lesser you social media like YouTube, Instagram, or hashtags? To name a few? Alex Thorne 2:14:33 Maggie you missed Chad's question? Maggie Cogan 2:14:35 Yes, I'm answering asking that one last. I've already discussed it with Chad to make sure it was okay with it. Great. So Ryan your first. Ryan 2:14:46 So social media platforms in themselves are kind of a snowball. You have to get them rolling for them to really get momentum going. And the thing about that is when you go across different platforms, it's really difficult to get Get that all in order. It's one thing to run a Facebook page. It's another one to run a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other connected social media platform. But there's advantages to doing it if you can get that done, or some tools out there that allow for posting across different social media applications. There's lots of different applications, which you can pull in to make that a little bit easier on yourself. But ultimately, if we want to do these things, we have to be consistent. If you start an Instagram page, and if you post one photo and never post again for a month, you're not going to make any headway. If you have a Facebook page, whether you're a garrison or detachment or anything, if you post one picture a month, you're not going to generate any momentum. It's about doing it daily. It's about hitting it hard. And Johnny knows exactly about this. He's at it all day, every day. But that's what it takes to make a high performing page on social media platforms. If we want to bring in those things like YouTube and stuff like that terminal videos, we got to understand that posting a link on Facebook is only going to reach so many people, you have to have a big following on YouTube for that to be an organic sort of following happening there. So all these little trees that we have to grow to make those social platforms work for us. Because even though they are interconnected, they each kind of value each other differently. If you ever take a look at like algorithm specifics of Facebook's and things like that, you will notice that when you share something, you get less views than if you post it yourself, you will notice that if you post it with a picture, you will get more views than him for that a picture he posted with a video, you should hopefully get even more than that. But sometimes things can go a little bit re if we want to make use of these things, if you want to really get the value at it, it's got to be something we go into hard with. There are no half measures, otherwise, you're just spinning wheels. Alex Thorne 2:16:40 So, yes, there are tools, there are various social media platforms that we're under utilizing. We, like Ryan said, we're under use under utilizing them for a reason. And a lot of cases, it's about consistency. It's about generated content. It's about generating engaging content sometimes, which is, you know, it's one thing to take a really cool video or take a really cool picture, a bunch of GI Joe costumers and posted on a Facebook page, that's GI Joe focused, it's another thing entirely to slap it together in a video and try to put it on YouTube and compete on that platform. It's Yes, there is a ton of value in it, if it's done the appropriate way. If it's done consistently. If there's somebody passionate about it then wants to take it and run with it. That's what we need. We need a passionate person. Johnny does a fantastic job. I've tried to do Johnny just Johnny's job a couple of times, I never do it as well as Johnny does it. And I almost always post like half or half of my posts when I'm running PR, are tigerhawk stuff, because it's what I have content for. Not because I like the tiger hawks more than anybody else. But it's just because what I haven't easily available that I know that folks haven't haven't seen before. So one of the things that we talked about, because we talked about social media on the last QA, I think that was William question as well. Was was it's to a degree, it's about generating content. And it's about how do we get content in the hands of the people that need it in a way that makes sense. And it's accessible. So that's where we talked about doing a photo contest to get new content on Facebook, that Johnny could just go and grab. And it's readily available. It's where Ryan talked about having a Dropbox or Google Drive or just some location to just slap files in and say, you know, Hey, my garrison did a photoshoot. Here's the files. You know, it's something that we do I do with Tiger hawks, when I we do a photoshoot, I try to send Johnny a couple of pics, you know, let him know, hey, we got some new stuff. So you can use it, you know when you need it. But you know, part of it's just about generating content and not being stale. And again, a lot of that's hard when you're a member involvements falling when you're not having events, when you're in a pandemic and 2020. There's a bunch of different reasons that makes that difficult. But yes, there is value and lesser and lesser used social media tools that we're not using. And yes, if we get somebody passionate in there, we can use them more effectively. And yes, we should consider doing that. And maybe that's a way to get somebody else involved in a leadership role. Or in a position, you know, hey, you're you're a YouTube video person, take it run with it, you know, do what you need to do. We could have a social media team. We don't, but we could. Ryan 2:19:34 I would just add one last thing that Yeah, each individual member has an ability to affect this and that's by like sharing and subscribing the things that we post on social media. I know that sometimes it might feel repetitive. I know that sometimes you might be asked that quite a lot. But it honestly makes a difference. The algorithm takes it in and accounts for this. A good example if Ohio they're doing an auction next weekend, I am marked as going to that auction even though it's not a physically real auction or things like that. And not only because I'm interested, but Facebook puts that into the big filter of knowledge and says, Hey, Ryan is interested in this. He's going to it. Maybe Ryan's friends are also interested in this. And we should push that to them, that there are little things you can do to really make stuff grow. But it takes activity on social media. So Alex Thorne 2:20:16 I can talk data analytics, I'm blue in the face. Yes, it's a big thing. The algorithm is a big thing. It's an ever evolving monster. And we are constantly fighting it. And Ryan is right, those things are super important. And it's even like, like on Instagram, for instance, they just change their algorithm. And what's more effective, like a like doesn't isn't the same as what it used to be in a share is better or save is better? You know, it's always evolving. So yeah, that's a great, that's a great point, Ryan. It's something we definitely need, then it definitely helps us. Maggie Cogan 2:20:52 Okay, this next one is a little bit more back on Hasbro. Plus some comments stuff from the chat. I don't know if you guys have been watching it. With the new Cobra tooper cosplaying works. Now, it'd be a great time to try talking to Hasbro and working out a promo for the line. But then also, we need to be very careful here there is a more heated topic with some members. All I can say is that Hasbro is looking to develop a one to one scale costume parts on their own. And we need to be careful in what we are developing and distributing. If Hasbro feels we are encroaching on their money they can make or it could be it could backfire. Right? Alex Thorne 2:21:27 There's a lot of those questions, or is that just like a discussion between members? Maggie Cogan 2:21:32 So there's a lot of discussion between members. But the question was the now like, don't you think it would be a good time to like, reach out to Hasbro right now, especially with the new costume line? Or the new toy line and us building one of those costumes? Alex Thorne 2:21:47 I I don't know. It's a it's a it's a very it's a very Was it my turn to go? I'm sorry. that's a that's a very, very slippery slope. We've so Johnny and myself and Gerald Weiss and a few Keith and a few others are kind of digging into the Cobra trooper classified Cobra trooper because it's a cool figure. And we're like, we're gonna get a field manual done for it. Yes, we can get a field manual done for it. Does that mean we're distributing costume parts? I don't know. Gerald Weiss had stuff 3d designed that looks identical to the toy that he's 3d printing that he's producing in his at his business, that he runs on the side. And it's not. It's not finest owned. It's not finest funded. But it primarily deals with members. It's a gray area, it's it's one of those things. If we get a field manual, I mean, I'm sure when we get a costume done and a feild manual done, we get a couple of them together and we post a picture, Hasbro is gonna pick it up and like it and run with it. But I don't know if it's appropriate to reach out and say, Hey, we're working on developing this. You know, can we can we help you with a promo? i? I don't? I don't know, I don't know the way to I get really worried when we start talking about dealing with legal teams and IP. And there are some major concerns there. Just from me and understanding what I understand about it. Yeah, so I love to see us, I'd love to see us have an active relationship with with Hasbro. But I want to make sure that we do we go about it in a way that's appropriate. That doesn't limit what we're doing and doesn't force us down a rabbit hole of selling the soul of the club or getting rid of, you know, being forced into doing something or not doing something that we really wanted to. So I just, I I'm going to advocate caution and an abundance of caution. You know, but that's not to say that we can't have a discussion. It's just we have to be I think all he said it correctly, which is we have to be really careful. And I don't think any of us are well suited for that conversation. Except for there may be a few be a few designers. I think Pauly may be may have a better understanding of IP than some of us. I know, Keith has a good Keith our Quartermaster has a decent understanding. I know Ryan and I have talked about IP stuff in relation to what's appropriate a few times. So I just I I cannot say how much that I exercise an abundance of caution when talking to Hasbro or trying to get in contact. But if it happens, and we can do it in the right way. It's a great thing. I would be excited about it. I think just about as much as anybody Ryan 2:24:49 I would just tag on to the end of that with you know, some of the tangent discussions I've had with Pauly you know about certain things. There is someone who is charged with the job of going online and looking for these things and points them out, and putting it to the lawyers and the lawyers send out the cease and desist and things like that. So whether we want to engage with it or not, it's something that we have to you know, potentially expect in the future could happen if we get that way to talk specifically on the reaching out to Hasbro as a cosplayer, or as you know, doing a model align or something like that. A way that a lot of these corporations do those things, is they usually prefer to be the one to reach out to you. And the reason they do that is that allows them to do things like you know, check your background and stuff like that, make sure you don't have something that's going to bite them in the butt when it comes to their publicity and things like that. But they also look for things like your follower count on social media, they look at how popular you are, they look at you know, generally speaking, you know how within their lines you walk, so they can, you know, give you something to wear, or they can put you in that position to be on that line and stuff like that. So that's a little bit of a different thing that maybe someone like, you know, Joe might have a better idea about in terms of you know, how things like, you know, organizers reach out for stuff, whether it's conventions, or ads or things like that. The only point that I would kind of add on to that, then is that, if we want to be that, we need to be the singular focus of Joe costuming so much so that on social media, if someone says GI Joe costume does finest, like, and if you go to conventions a lot, and if you are at booths, and if people walk up and say yeah, man, I've seen the finest online, I'm so surprised to see you here. There is absolutely no better feeling than that. Because that says that we are the standard when it comes to GI Joe costuming. Now, the end run of that if we keep doing that, if we keep hitting these marks, if we keep growing on social media, eventually things might come to us. And those sort of offers what we can do to facilitate that as being act by taking the steps to kind of show that this is something that we're capable of doing. Now, like we said, we don't know if there's going to be big problems with us, you know, making things or you know, distributing files, for instance, for 3d printing, but cosplay is cosplay. And if we make an awesome costume that is really cool, or for instance, wins the Hasbro cosplay contest, like they're going to notice you and they're eventually going to reach out for that kind of stuff. If those things come out, and they think that you're a good fit for that. We can't force it. But we can do our best to make ourselves the obvious choice for that kind of stuff. Alex Thorne 2:27:24 Yeah, that's a great point, Ryan. It's got to be a little more organic. In its generation. Maggie Cogan 2:27:34 All right. So there's Chad's question now. As we start to wrap up the session, what do you want us to walk away with? Ryan first. Ryan 2:27:50 So through these Q and A's, you've heard a lot of things repeated. You've heard us talk about things like communication, you've heard of us talk about things like being inclusive, you talked about ways that we can get more people involved and active. The thing I want you to take away most is that when it comes to these leadership changes and decisions, there's a lot to be said about consistency and being even in kind of smoothing the flow of things. I want also people to understand that no matter what happens, you know, we're in a good place going forward, I think the biggest thing that I want you to think specifically me going away, is that I offer some different views, a different perspective, and a way to do things that we haven't done in several years, or at least differently in several years. The key to that is that organization sometimes need these turns to get those perspectives in and to let new people start talking. It's nothing against the fact that these people will put in all sorts of efforts over the last, you know, five, six, or even more years and what they're doing. It's about giving other opportunities out there for more people to get involved to. And hopefully taking those past experiences, combine them with new perspective, and making a better product in the long run. Being a CO is a chance for me to put us in a direction that's going to make us even better in the next two years, potentially four years. And even more than that. So please, when you're voting, I asked you just think about where you want to see the finest and if you think we need that new perspective to be more prominent, because that's the best thing I can do is changing up the leadership style, and getting more people into the perspective. Maggie Cogan 2:29:23 Thank you, Alex. Alex Thorne 2:29:27 So thing that I want everyone to take away, which hopefully has been clear is that regardless of what happens, the finest is going to continue. We're going to continue as an organization, we're going to continue as a group, you know, a few years ago with CO elections. Not not the last one between Ryan and I but some prior years there have been steady been tension. There have been arguments. There was folks that left the club you know a couple of times We came close to not not being the thing I think anymore. And, you know, I want everybody to walk away from this feeling that this is amicable and, you know, whatever happens, we're going to continue and we're going to continue to grow, we're going to do good things. You know, and if we need to change leadership, then then that's what the members want, then that's cool. I mean, whatever we need to do as an organization, to keep us where we want to be and where the members want to be. Let's do it. Hundred percent. You know, I'm behind that. So, you know, this has been, it's been great. I've loved being CO, I've loved being xo, I've had a lot of fun being involved, I hope I get to continue to be involved. I hope I get to continue to be CO, because I got more stuff I want to do. I got stuff I want to fix. But, you know, whatever we need to do, and whatever the members feel we need to do and feels appropriate. Let's Let's do it. 100%. Maggie Cogan 2:31:06 Right. I just want to read this question, because I think it's frickin hilarious. If there's a tie, can we have a cage fight to determine the new CO, I suggest putting on pay per view and putting all the money to charity. Just Just a thought. Alex Thorne 2:31:22 I'm bet Ryan's probably taken a few more combatives classes than I have. Ryan 2:31:29 I was an electronics technician. We don't do combat. Maybe we can do like a code fight or something. Yeah, go. Maggie Cogan 2:31:37 Code fight me. Cool. Um, but I think that's pretty much all of our questions. I would like to thank both of you. You guys did almost like four hours of question answering between the two sessions? Um, I think you both did Great. Alex Thorne 2:31:58 Yeah, I hope everybody liked this format. I think it was, I think it's good that we got to talk I feel really good about while the written word is kind of fun. And, you know, Ryan, I both wrote, like, 25,000 words, the last time. Yeah, this was kind of a nice refresher to actually like, talk and give an opinion. And to hear Ryan's opinion, you know, has been good for me just as much as anybody. So I really appreciate that this is the way that we got to do this. And that, you know, I hope that everybody liked it. And I hope that it, you know, works. Ryan 2:32:35 The only thing I would add is supposed to, you know, share it, you know, people in your garrison. People you know, who weren't here might be interested in voting and things like that. Like, even if they didn't register, you know, there might still be a chance to squeeze them in. But even if they don't vote, you know, it's at least something that gets the finest on their mind a little bit. So that's the first step we can make to you know, get some more people involved in this because I think both of us would rather you know, lose an election with 300 votes, then when with you know, 50 or something like that. Because at that point, there's so many people that, you know, don't have the stake that it's going to make it hard for anyone going forward. Maggie Cogan 2:33:13 Just as an FYI, because there are a couple COs from Garrison's in here. If somebody didn't register, if you can get me their email during the week, while we are running the elections, I do have an option to add in like a handful of extra emails. For people who missed the form somehow, or whatever. If you have a garrison member that says that ever got the email, contact me I can usually fix those. So there is there's there's a backup of people if they did miss somehow getting registered, we can get them into vote. Alex Thorne 2:33:55 So it's a pretty limited pool, though. Isn't it? Maybe like a sink. So yeah. Something else we should probably do. Maggie, you should probably post a picture of what the email looks like on the members page so that everybody can get a feel for like the header in the subject. Maggie Cogan 2:34:19 And then yeah, basically, just figure out what time you want to start and what time on end. Alex Thorne 2:34:28 Yep. I'll leave that up to you guys. You guys. Chad. Man, you guys have been doing a great job running this getting this figured out sorting it out. So you guys said it. You guys. Let us know what it is and we'll we'll all abide by it. Transcribed by https://otter.ai