To the Crown of An Tir, Esteemed Nobility, Peers, Officers, and Populace of the Kingdom of An Tir as well as to the esteemed Society Webminister does the An Tir Kingdom Webminister, Lady Alicia du Bois send greetings.
It has been my honor to serve as your Kingdom Webminister and yet it is time for me to step aside.
When I took office, we had an outdated and custom-built Kingdom website that was difficult to update, maintain, and to generally keep alive. The first thing I did (before even taking over the job) was to analyze the old website, redesign it, and re-do the events calendar system – the most viewed and most used section of the website.
Over the past two and a half years, I revised other systems:
- The award recommendation forms giving the Principalities their own administrative control and the ability for the Kingdom to delegate awards to Principality Coronets
- I transferred the Kingdom’s document library to a version-controlled document repository and delegated responsibility to the Kingdom Officers for posting their own document revisions.
- I restructured and redesigned Our Martial Authorizations database (https://antirlists.org) which tracks approximately 11,000 authorizations of 25 different types for approximately 4,400 individuals. I reduced the quarterly report generation time from 8 hours to mere seconds.
- I created a privacy policy for our An Tir website, a new Kingdom Webminister Policy, and helped create our guidelines for online courts.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic and period of shutdown, I helped conceptualize and successfully implement ways to use technology to hold online business meetings, online courts, Baronial Investitures, and virtual events that, by necessity, have revolutionized the way we do business in this Kingdom.
- I am currently involved in reshaping the technology behind the Kingdom University of Ithra and aligning with the Principality of Tir Righ’s TUTR system to bring Ithra back to life in a 21st Century way.
During my tenure I tried to focus on the following areas:
- Teaching anyone who would listen how to update and manage websites and helping encourage new people to try these things. I have happily taught many classes related to technical (and non-technical) topics. I plan to continue this work in my new role.
- Building community around becoming a Webminister and creating a network of people who want to learn, and to help others learn.
- Protecting private information as much as possible by limiting or eliminating the areas of PII that we publish, gather, and maintain in order to separate and protect our SCA identities from our Legal ones.
- Improving access to the information scattered among a multitude of various websites related to Kingdom or branch offices, tasks, and customs to help make officers’, marshals’, event stewards’, court coordinators’, Crowns’, Coronets’, teachers’, and chancellors’ jobs easier, and to help newcomers and the general populace feel welcome and find community within the Kingdom I love. This will become my main focus in my new position.
I am sad to step down from this position “early” even though I initially extended my term until September of 2021 and fully expected to serve a full three years. However, I also know that I can be more effective and continue the work I have started in my new position as the Web Deputy on the Kingdom Web Team while giving someone else a chance to lead that team.
Lord Saito and I have been working closely together for the past 14 months and he is more than ready to fully step into this position. At this point, I am merely holding him back from it so it’s time for me to step aside.
Thank You to the Crown and the Populace for giving me the opportunity to lead this team and supporting us as you have. It has been my privilege and my absolute pleasure. I feel that I leave us all in good hands.
In grateful service,
Lady Alicia du Bois.
An Tir Kingdom IT Web Deputy
