From: ddfr@quads.uchicago.edu (david director friedman)
Subject: Decentralization and Minors
Reply-To: ddfr@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 02:53:35 GMT


I believe there may be a connection between the decentralization
thread and the thread on minors, waivers, parental approval, etc.
Consider:

In most kingdoms, minors are not permitted to fight. So the sort of
problems that require waivers, permission, etc. are minors falling
down stairs, getting drunk, associating with people their parents
disapprove of, and the like. These are not problems unique to the
Society--they apply to all sorts of other activities.

Suppose your teenage son invites some friends over to play football
in the back yard. Do you get waivers and parental permission forms? I
doubt it. Suppose a regular group of gamers gathers in your living
room--do you first check to make sure that any minors have their
parents' permission to attend? Probably not. What about your student
organization having a party, or a weekend at the beach, or ... ?

I think the difference between these cases and a Society event is not
what is being done (tackle football is more dangerous than anything
minors are permitted to do in most of the Society, and role playing
games have worse press than we do) but the size of the organization
that does it. My guess is that larger and more formal organizations
are more worried about legal problems than smaller and less formal
organizations--probably with good reason.

Why would this be true? One reason is that larger organizations have
more assets and are thus a better target for suit. Further, a formal
organization has a well defined chain of command--which means more
people who can be sued personally. It would, I think, be a lot easier
to win a suit against the kingdom seneschal or the steward for
something that happened at an SCA event than to win a suit against
the author of a role playing system for something that happened at a
game using his system.

The same pattern may well hold for ideologically motivated suits. If
you believe what the Society does is bad, and if it is all being done
by one organization, than a suit against that organization or its
high officials strikes a serious blow against the Society. A suit
against the Podunk University Student Anachronists is a much less
effective move in a crusade. So an activity being run by one large
organization is a more attractive target for suits, whether the
motive is money or ideology, than an activity being run by a hundred
small organizations.

Many people have noticed that the Society has become more concerned
with legal details over the years. Most have attributed it to changes
in the world around us. 

It is certainly true that, over the past twenty years, courts have
become more willing to rule in favor of people who have been injured
and seek reimbursement from a firm or other organization that they
claim is responsible--although there is some evidence that the courts
may recently have begun to swing back in the other direction.

But I do not think that external legal changes explain all of the
change in the Society. The tendency to require paperwork--regular
reports, many of which seem to serve no real purpose--has increased
in areas, such as the arts, where it cannot be explained by an
increasing threat of civil litigation. And, for the reasons I have
just been discussing, it seems likely that making the organization
larger would tend to make it more cautious even if there were no
legal change going on.

If this argument is correct, then one reason why we are increasingly
careful about waivers, parental consent forms, and the like is that
the Society is dominated by a single organization, the SCA
Incorporated. If so, decentralization along the lines I have
suggested would make it somewhat easier for minors to participate,
putting back into the Society one of the virtues it has been losing. 

David/Cariadoc