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Not related to the band...unless it's a Culture Club fan club.

A long, long time ago, when I was a member of the old Linkin Park forums, they had a forum dedicated to different kinds of clubs and clans. As you can see, most of these were silly clubs to express LP fandom, but over the years the idea of having privately made clubs with their own members stuck with me. Then about a year and a half ago, I was playing Sunrider Academy, a game where your character is the vice president of the school's student council and has been tasked with getting several troubled school clubs up to speed. At some point I wondered...why wouldn't some combination of these two things work for Wintreath?

Culture Clubs for Wintreath
When someone wanted to form a club or clan, they would write a charter for it detailing what the club was about (an activity? a game? a band? a fan club? something else?) and how it would be ran. The Storting would then approve each charter, and once passed, the founder of the club would be able to start a topic on a new club forum or subforum dedicated to that club's discussions and activities. Once established, each club would need to:

• Have at least five Citizens actively involved in the club
• Contribute something to regional culture every season (a game, event, contest, etc.)
• Comply with all calls from the Monarchy or Storting to contribute to a regional event (Summersend, etc.)
• Additionally, the Storting could revoke a charter for any reason

My thinking is that such a system would promote activity in the Storting and encourage its involvement in cultural affairs, encourage the region to grow organically, and in time provide relief to an overworked and overburdened Cabinet. My thinking is that eventually at their discretion the Jarl of a ministry could elevate a club to a guild and designate its leader as a Thane (possibly replacing the current Thane election system with a guild leader election system), but if this system were implemented I'd want to see how it worked out before going that far.

Any thoughts on this idea?

Two words.

p o t a t o  c l u b

Two words.

p o t a t o  c l u b

Maybe I didn't think this idea through enough.

So... it's like Houses, but with an actual purpose? I'm in.

Houses have a purpose...being connected with your friends and the people on Wintreath you love.

I mean, true, but you know me, I only value things I can use.

That came out wrong. Or did it?

I am not really a fan of this idea since I get the feeling these clubs could then monopolize the running of the games and while I am sure qualified people would join the club, there will probably be others with good ideas who don't join the clubs because of a lack of interest in being a member of a club and they would then be prevented from doing anything with the game.  I personally prefer the "independent" hosting system we have with these games.  Would replacing the Thanes with the leaders of these clubs make it so that people who are not members of the clubs for whatever reason could not vote on the Thane?

I am not really a fan of this idea since I get the feeling these clubs could then monopolize the running of the games and while I am sure qualified people would join the club, there will probably be others with good ideas who don't join the clubs because of a lack of interest in being a member of a club and they would then be prevented from doing anything with the game.  I personally prefer the "independent" hosting system we have with these games.  Would replacing the Thanes with the leaders of these clubs make it so that people who are not members of the clubs for whatever reason could not vote on the Thane?

Hmm, these are interesting points. Honestly, when I first created the RP Guild, I was planning on letting everyone who wanted to RP join it, before being talked out of it by Moot. It doesn't really bother me much for this idea, if that is the case, since your joining the Fanclub doesn't actually have to amount to anything. It's basically like just saying that you like the same things the members of the club like and would like to get involved with some events related to it.

I like this idea as it could help give more structure to a bottom-up form of culture where clubs of ordinary citizens work together to start things rather than a top-down approach where the responsibility is largely on the Ministry and Cabinet.

Question: If 1 person founds a club and 5 people are required to actively be involved in the club, is there a time limit on recruiting 4 more people? And what if they get 4 but not 5 people by the end of the time limit (assuming there is one) -- is the club then automatically shuttered? Or is that more a suggestion, and it's all up to the discretion of the Storting? I think it'd be simpler if it were, for example, 3 people required to found and maintain a club as it would prove there is already support for a new club and also allow for more niche clubs (since I think 3 people who are very active in a smaller club would be just as (if not more) worthy of existence than 5 people who are hardly active in another).

Also: Do people join clubs just by signing up, or do they need to be approved? If they do need to be approved, is there a way to prevent that from being misused?

I really like this idea. This system was used (with immense success) in Renegade Islands Alliance and Equinox. Having experienced the system in both those regions myself I know for a fact how well it works and I loved being a part of it. It is definitely worth a trial run at the very least here in Wintreath. If this happens I actually have a couple ideas for some clubs that I believe would be well-received. ^_^

I like this idea as well. As someone coming from the cultural standpoint into government, I think this could be used as a great bridge between the two. I do have to wonder if forcing clubs to create events will help boost involvement, because in past forums with clubs I've seen(and started) events that only one person showed up to. But hey, we can try it and see what happens. We do seem to have a more consistently active community that I've experienced before.

However, I'm not sold on the guild leaders replacing thanes part of this. While it could work, I feel like it would encourage power-grabbing. I've seen one too many people turn on a dime once given power, or on the flip side becoming crushed by said power.

I like this idea as well. As someone coming from the cultural standpoint into government, I think this could be used as a great bridge between the two. I do have to wonder if forcing clubs to create events will help boost involvement, because in past forums with clubs I've seen(and started) events that only one person showed up to. But hey, we can try it and see what happens. We do seem to have a more consistently active community that I've experienced before.

However, I'm not sold on the guild leaders replacing thanes part of this. While it could work, I feel like it would encourage power-grabbing. I've seen one too many people turn on a dime once given power, or on the flip side becoming crushed by said power.

I don't fully understand your last point. We vote for thanes right now, don't we? What's the difference?

I am not really a fan of this idea since I get the feeling these clubs could then monopolize the running of the games and while I am sure qualified people would join the club, there will probably be others with good ideas who don't join the clubs because of a lack of interest in being a member of a club and they would then be prevented from doing anything with the game.  I personally prefer the "independent" hosting system we have with these games.  Would replacing the Thanes with the leaders of these clubs make it so that people who are not members of the clubs for whatever reason could not vote on the Thane?

They wouldn't be able to monopolize the games unless the Storting explicitly granted it that authority, but I don't think it would make sense to, just like it wouldn't make sense to have the Thane of Werewolf monopolize Werewolf games under the current system. The point of clubs is to allow people with the same interests to come together and do something based on that. If a club is based around a game, it would hopefully result in more people willing and able to run the actual games as well as a support community behind them that could do things like make guides, schedule and promote upcoming games, and get people into the games to start with...beyond the stated requirements of contributing to culture and festivals. That doesn't mean that someone outside the club would be barred from hosting their own games.

And the idea of replacing the way we choose thanes isn't something I'm proposing at the moment, just something that I could see happening after awhile in the future if the clubs idea was successful.

I like this idea as it could help give more structure to a bottom-up form of culture where clubs of ordinary citizens work together to start things rather than a top-down approach where the responsibility is largely on the Ministry and Cabinet.

Question: If 1 person founds a club and 5 people are required to actively be involved in the club, is there a time limit on recruiting 4 more people? And what if they get 4 but not 5 people by the end of the time limit (assuming there is one) -- is the club then automatically shuttered? Or is that more a suggestion, and it's all up to the discretion of the Storting? I think it'd be simpler if it were, for example, 3 people required to found and maintain a club as it would prove there is already support for a new club and also allow for more niche clubs (since I think 3 people who are very active in a smaller club would be just as (if not more) worthy of existence than 5 people who are hardly active in another).

Also: Do people join clubs just by signing up, or do they need to be approved? If they do need to be approved, is there a way to prevent that from being misused?

In my head, activity would be assessed every season (every three months), but besides the requirements to contribute to culture every season as well as to festivals, I don't have anything more specific in mind...three Citizens is fine with me, or we could go by post count or something. I imagine we'll nail down the specifics between now and building the legislative framework that'll enable clubs.