Watched a webinar from HQ

[ianw]

There's a recording of it here:

https://join-emea.broadcast.skype.co...c6c0719/en-US/

Man, hour a 22 minutes? That's a long time. I drifted off at points, and skipped bits, and didn't bother with all the questions but things I thought...

They're certainly making themselves look busy!

14-25 provision working party is a work in progress. But at the moment basically means there will be some scout run NCS schemes next summer.

25000 responses to the uniform consultation. A reiteration that we *are* and *will be* a uniform organisation.

Kester Sharpe didn't like some of the unscoutlike reaction to the info centre changes. Her reminder of our scout values felt a bit like the whole class being told off at school when it wasn't you that was mucking about. That said, this internet age of anger and keyboard warriors is not a helpful or good thing, I think. And you'd have thought scout leaders should be the ones remembering their scout laws, but maybe I'm old fashioned now.

OSM and HQ...things are "with the lawyers", as far as I could tell, they're talking about "single sign on", and being able to seamlessly move too and fro between OSM and the scout website and particularly the HQ programme planning tools*.

* Beaver and cub ones are live, and scout one is coming next August**

There's more stuff on the website about adult recruitment.

The Beta website will swap to be the main website soon.

** I saw a job advert for that, quite tempting but it was a short term contract, paid to think up programme ideas? Sounds alright.

[dsheehan]

Just re-watched this morning as I was busy Scouting last night!

I genuinely think its a good idea to hear updates of the big picture UK stuff straight for the horse mouth, although agreed it could have been a little tighter and to the point (read- shorter)

I definitely didn't feel we needed the 10 minute rant from the Deputy Commissioner on her personal grievance. She is in a senior figure head position, she made an unpopular decision, volunteers (often especially Scout Leaders) tend to be fairly vocal about thing. It should really be expected and taken on the chin. Telling thousands of volunteers off publicly- not helpful.

[shiftypete]

Will watch it this evening as had a District meeting last night but sounds like I won't like Kester Sharp's reaction to perfectly valid critisism by volunteer Leaders of a decision made to reduce the hours the info centre is open to 9am to 5pm. I would have expected a bit of contrition and further explantion of why they felt the decision was necessary not what has been described as a telling off by both of the above posters.

[Bushfella]

An hour and 22 minutes... jeez. Thankfully I don't have to watch that. I fall asleep during action moves that don't last that long. Someone has lost the plot. Seriously.

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[ianw]

but sounds like I won't like Kester Sharp's reaction to perfectly valid criticism by volunteer Leaders

Aaah, well, there's the thing, apparently she got a fair amount of abuse/personal attacks, rather than valid criticism, from scout leaders. In the written form anyway. File under "Disappointed, but not surprised"

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An hour and 22 minutes... jeez. Thankfully I don't have to watch that. I fall asleep during action moves that don't last that long. Someone has lost the plot. Seriously.

It's not aimed at jaded splitters.

[Yellow Beaver]

OSM and HQ...things are "with the lawyers", as far as I could tell, they're talking about "single sign on", and being able to seamlessly move too and fro between OSM and the scout website and particularly the HQ programme planning tools*.

* Beaver and cub ones are live, and scout one is coming next August**
.

I'm seriously under-impressed with the programme planning tools - especially the "search for activities" element. The search appears to only work on the activity name/title... which relies on the title of the activity really accurately portraying what the activity is about.

If you search for "knots" it produces zero results, whereas "knot" produces five.....

"Scouting history" or even "history" produces no results despite there being an activity called "A race through time" which is described as "See where you fit into the history of the worldwide Scouts family in this fast-paced history game."

[shiftypete]

Aaah, well, there's the thing, apparently she got a fair amount of abuse/personal attacks, rather than valid criticism, from scout leaders. In the written form anyway. File under "Disappointed, but not surprised"

In which case I totally agree with you that it was akin to telling off the whole class for one person being naughty. I bet it was way under 1% of Leaders who were watching that webinar who sent abusive/unacceptable messages not sure why the 99%+ of the rest of us needed to be told off when presumably whoever did it did so in an idenifiable manner on social media or via email so could largely be dealt with individually. Did she even address the legitimate concerns of the rest of us over the info centre hours change?

[pa_broon74]

I can't actually find the blog, I did find her subsequent post about it on FB...

Reading the comments there however, rather gave me the sense that there is a polarisation of sorts going on. You have the on-message HQ view with it's supporters (going by the many messages of support on the subsequent FB post). Then, how should I say, I bit of a slightly cynical grassroots movement, that vocally kicks back against a lot of the 'modern' on-message stuff.

Also, in the middle - which I think is where most volunteers live - folk who don't give a toss because they either don't concern themselves with any of it, or just keep their heads down.

(I'm afraid I have at least one foot firmly in the cynical grassroots section of things...)

Got to say though, getting het up about opening hours of the info centre - to the extent that you're prepared to give a perfect stranger grief about it... It's a very prosaic axe to grind.

[ianw]

Reading the comments there however, rather gave me the sense that there is a polarisation of sorts going on. You have the on-message HQ view with it's supporters (going by the many messages of support on the subsequent FB post). Then, how should I say, I bit of a slightly cynical grassroots movement, that vocally kicks back against a lot of the 'modern' on-message stuff.

It's probably part of the social media echo chamber, I mean, Kester is hardly the Scout version of Katie Hopkins, so she's hardly likely to attract people to her page who are just there to have a pop. And it's also possible that she can just delete all the negative post comments.

[Andrew Rush]

It's not aimed at jaded splitters.

Is he the Popular Front, then?

[big chris]

i was intrigued...

https://twitter.com/search?q=kesters...d_query&f=live

nada on there.

[shiftypete]

It was a full 5 minute lecture on Scouting Values, a complete waste of Leaders time in what was already a very long webinar (those bothering to log in to the webinar are higly unlikely to be those guilty of apparently sending abusive messages online to senior volunteers)

Still no proper justification or apology for the reduction in the info centre service (the logic of how info centre staff will be supposedly able to answer the phone more whilst also simultaneously able to answer more emails by moving staff off the quieter shifts totally escapes me) and why it was apparently not even considered to at least have at least one evening a week where the info centre is kept open later.

[SteveF]

[QUOTE=shiftypete;465512]It was a full 5 minute lecture on Scouting Values, a complete waste of Leaders time in what was already a very long webinar /QUOTE]

It certainly was a lecture. I don't think lecturing adults like that works - it just "puts people's backs up."

[ASLChris]

TBQH, if it was anything like the posters have suggested above (I haven't had any time to watch it yet), she needs to remove that plank from her eye - that's not meeting the Scouting values at all.

[Bushfella]

This is an interesting thread now. I'm almost intrigued to watch this so that I can make my own critique... But not quite that intrigued.