User:Kort Everett Jackson/Letter 2-25-08

February 25, 2008

TO: All Visitors and Users of ADSIC

FROM: Kort Everett Jackson

SUBJECT: A New Era

Greetings all visitors and Users of ADSIC. We are closing in on a milestone that even I find hard to believe. On March 15 of this year, ADSIC will celebrate it's first year in existence. Yet, we must not forget another anniversary. On February 27, we will celebrate three years of the founding of AcaDecScores, the site that started all of this.

However, ADSIC has begun to stray away. Some of us have been overtly consumed by rules, legalese, failed constitutional drafts, a failed Guidebook, and other (for a lack of a better term) bureaucratic crap. We cannot continue down this garden path and expect to succeed for much longer.

I will admit that I had played a large role in the "bureaucratic crap". But time brings change, and with it, much needed wisdom. Unfortunately, it took the surprise departure of an editor to make me realize just how much damage I had occurred with my capricious ideas.

Some things have succeeded. The School bios are doing quite well. We recently switched to wikipedia-esque code with sortable tables, something that ADS had never had. We even started a Scholar's Cup section which seems to be very promising.

Other ideas, like the ADSIC Facebook group, and the constitutional drafts, were not as successful, and left much to be desired.

Therefore, I wish to share with you an old adage. I read somewhere that if you want to be a lumberjack, you gotta go to the forest.

So, let us all go to that forest. Here's how:

1) Effective immediately, all the constitutional drafts are hereby repealed. All offices created by these constitutions will terminate immediately, with exception to the Unicameral Council of ADSIC, which shall exist until the term expires on April 2, 2008. Further existence may continue as a council of editors, but this is unknown at this time.

2) Also effective immediately, I endorse the policy set forth by Gil, found here.

3) Also effective immediately, I endorse Adam's new main page design, found here.

As I write this, I continue to feel rather tired and feeble, so I need to conclude here by announcing that this is a new era of ADSIC, an era that has long been denied by some, especially me. It's time to return to what made us successful.

Many would see this letter as a instrument of surrender, an admission of defeat. I personally, do not. I see it a bit differently. As former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating would have it:

"Well, this is the sweetest victory of All."

All best,