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Those are part of my cursory thoughts (especially since I think we've already built up an incredibly successful and self-sustaining RP community), but I think my position is closer to Robin's and North's in that I wasn't aware that that was what we were supposed to be doing in the first place.

(In fact, I don't even remember being promoted to Councillor, nor have I found records of it anywhere in the forums or my PMs after considerable time searching. Though when the current set of Councillors accepted their positions, Aragonn said that our purpose was to "help [him] with decision making regarding roleplays and roleplayers." And the only things that Gerrick brought up were clerical work like updating the Guild list/ranks and archiving dead RPs.)

Perhaps the Council in its current state is a redundant institution. I don't know.

I got the list of Councillors from the stickied Guild topic. I don't know how it came about, but someone put your name there.

It's not that I think roleplaying hasn't been a success on here, it's just that I think there's room for improvement. I may be biased, but I think Wintreath is an incredibly successful region...yet I still look for ways we can grow and improve, and I expect the Cabinet to do so with me as well, which is partially what led to the discussion about thane elections to start with. Though if nothing else, just based on the facts that the council and the Patriarch aren't on the same page and you apparently didn't know you were even a Councillor, there seems to be a communication problem the guild needs to tackle.

Perhaps there's been a misunderstanding as to the purpose of the guild, but I want it to succeed, because in my mind it serves an important role in the community and the government. At the very least I would encourage the three of you and @Aragonn to talk with each other and get on the same page...that alone may make it easier for inspiration to flow.

And if not, I'm sure I can come up with plenty more "incredibly minor" ideas for the guild to pursue.

I just feel like it's failing in the sense that there's been no change to the status quo for over a year. It's been a stagnant place with very little actual discussion, improvements, or upgrades. Any group or organization which doesn't grow and expand is one which dies.

I got the list of Councillors from the stickied Guild topic. I don't know how it came about, but someone put your name there.

I know I'm on the Guild Council, I just have no idea how I ended up on it.

The Appointment of new GM thread, which started in December 2015, is where a lot of that discussion took place. Laurentus, who was the Guild's founder and Guildmaster at the time, was becoming busy so he opened a discussion on who the new Guildmaster would be. He appointed Aragonn as interim Guildmaster after a month of discussion, but Aragonn was also busy at the time. Then in January 2016 after Laurentus officially resigned from his government positions, Aragonn reopened the discussions on who should be Guildmaster. We were trying to decide if we wanted multiple Guildmasters or what, but it was finally decided in February when Laurentus came back and appointed Weissreich as Guildmaster with Aragonn, taulover, Barnes, and me as the Council. In July 2016, Aragonn was appointed as the new Guildmaster after Weissreich went inactive. In February 2017, we rebooted the Guild, and he chose the current Council, which was decided through PMs.

Thanks! (I feel dumb now for 1. not being able to find that thread and 2. not remembering it very clearly.)

I just feel like it's failing in the sense that there's been no change to the status quo for over a year. It's been a stagnant place with very little actual discussion, improvements, or upgrades. Any group or organization which doesn't grow and expand is one which dies.

What change do you feel needs to happen? What do you think would make the guild less stagnant?

For starters, we could have at least two or three people with the role of welcoming new members of Wintreath who are interested in RPing on the forum and guide them to the RP Guild. With all the things I've got going on in my life, sifting through new member applications isn't exactly something I'm just dying to do, so a good team who can be active almost all hours of the day every day of the week to do this for me would be great.

For starters, we could have at least two or three people with the role of welcoming new members of Wintreath who are interested in RPing on the forum and guide them to the RP Guild. With all the things I've got going on in my life, sifting through new member applications isn't exactly something I'm just dying to do, so a good team who can be active almost all hours of the day every day of the week to do this for me would be great.

I've started doing that recently, though often Gerrick's already done the introduction stuff regarding RP by the time I get there.

It's not specifically stated as a duty, and there's only the two of you doing it.

Well? Would any of the other "Councillors" care to respond to him?

Seems to me that if you want to have elections in the first place, you want to know what the actual duties for this post are.
All I can think of is selecting a new GM (or whatever you call it), which is really something that can just be done by the Patriarch, and maybe the whole regulating interest thing (which...honestly, is that necessary? Why not just have people make interest threads, and if there's no interest, it dies and gets archived?).
It's one thing if it's merely a thing to promote RP activity (as in the form of the rank structure the Guild already has, which I've been tragically penalized in since I prefer writing few, long ones instead of many, short ones, which is probably dumb but whatever that's how I roll), but if there's a Council it sort of implies y'all are doing some serious stuff in the background - even if all it might be is aggressively pruning essentially defunct threads, since seeing ones that are essentially 4-months-dead might be a disincentive.

If you can't think of any structural changes that you guys need to make on an ongoing basis, though - why not just try do more RP things instead of changing how things work?
Have the Council run things like Pengu's CYOA every so often (something relatively self-contained, short, and theoretically high activity if it wasn't for people forgetting to key in their actions, and now Pengu being busy).
Have a bi-or-tri-monthly 1-2 day RP jam, where short, freeform RP things (themed around something, probably) can happen, which would drum up activity and be a nice starting point for people who are like 'hmm I dunno what RPing is and it seems hard'.
Help GMs have or make a primer for new people to jump in on, especially for really long, involved RPs where there's a lot of history, like that Wintreath Space thing - which I bring up because I avoided it because I was scared of how much background there seemed to be, which a precis may have alleviated.

People asked about the history of Wintreath Space Expeditions, and we explained that there wasn't really much to know about it and everything could be found by skimming through the old RP which we kindly provided a link to.

everything could be found by skimming through the old RP

That's exactly what I was talking about.
Somebody asking for a summary doesn't want to hear 'look, just read the books and you'll get it' - they want a summary. If you provide a 'this is what you need to know', they get into it, and then at some point they'll figure they should take the time to go back and get a more complete view of it, because they're already invested. But if you just say 'skim through it all', you'll lose people who might have joined in if you'd summarized everything in 2-3 paragraphs because there's a lot of sunk cost there in terms of time and energy.
It's one thing to make the request to read through something big and ambitious in an interest topic - because no matter how ambitious you get, it's still that mental thing of 'well it's just one post'. But the old RP had almost 800 posts in it. Even if each one was ~2-300 words, that's a lot to skim through. Most people simply won't make the effort, or probably worse, go in completely blind and pretend they know what they're talking about.

Doc's post hints to the fact that clearly there is still A LOT of room for improvement. As much as the Guild exists to solve problems, it is supposed to be promoting RP too. If memory serves, I think I made Barnes one of the councilors at one point, specifically so new RPs could get more coverage from articles and so forth. It seems something has been lost, in the meantime. It is evident I didn't do a good enough job of explaining what I expected from the guild as a whole, not just individuals I selected for certain posts, and that is where the current misconception seems to come in.

EDIT: As to my views on elections in the guild, I don't see why it shouldn't be done, if handled properly. The old guard becomes busy and fatigued after awhile, and must make room for experienced people with fresh perspectives, occasionally.

EDIT 2: Actually, I'm surprised I didn't include a mission statement for the Guild when it was founded. Perhaps this is an error I should correct.