Balancing public perception of the SCA and having a private life as an officer

[aishabintjamil]

This essay has grown out of a discussion on a private social media group about a somewhat vague policy recently approved by the SCA Board of Directors governing social media interactions. My intent this morning is not to talk about what that policy says, but rather about what it's reasonable and appropriate for one to say.

The policy is vaguely written, and the regional (Kingdom) officer interpretations thereof are even more vague, that it could be read to say that it claims that an officer saying something public on their personal social media that mentions the SCA can be interpreted as making their whole page an official social media outlet of the organization, and thus subject to organizational rules and scrutiny. Irrespective of what they actually meant to say, I'd like to unpack that a little.

I can see why they worry about what officers at all levels might say in public, because it does reflect on the group. A hypothetical reasonable person might well say that since we chose that individual as an officer and continue to allow them to be an officer, that the group as a whole is at least tacitly supporting their non-SCA opinions.

I've wrestled with this in a couple of ways in my non-SCA life. I held a security clearance for many years (before there was much in the way of social media in existence) and as part of that accepted that anything I said might be scrutinized in my next clearance review. Yes, that was an invasion of my personal life. It was one I agreed to when I accepted the job. The trade-offs seemed good.

Today I sometimes travel for my current employer, and I may post fun pictures of what I did after work, but I don't say why I was there, or even who my employer is in public because we have NDAs with some of our clients. Again, that's a contractual thing, which I knew up front, and the positives about the job more than outweigh that restriction.

The whole officer position vs. life outside the SCA has come up recently when it became clear that some highly placed officers (royalty, etc.) hold views on their personal pages that many of us find personally reprehensible and that run counter to the stated positions and goals of the group. More than a few people are taking this as evidence that the group as a whole subscribes to, or is riddled with, those attitudes. It's easy to see that while they have a right to hold those views and to express them in public if they wish, that we may also have the right to say "Those make us look bad. Thank you for your service. We can't continue to accept it."

At the same time, my gut reaction when it appears that the Board of Directors and/or Kingdom Officers might want to tell us what we can and can't post on our pages is a vehement Hell no!

How do we balance the need to be sensitive to our public image against our personal rights and privacy? Especially when we don't really trust the people at the top to do it in a less than ham-handed fashion, based on past performance? I'm not sure I have an answer.

The best idea I've come up with is so far is that I didn't resent the intrusion into my left represented by my security clearance because I understood and accepted it going into the job. But a full time job is a different beast from a volunteer position. We approach a job as something that there's competition for, and the combination of that scarcity of resource and the positive things that the job gives us in return (money being a big one, both immediate and future) makes us willing to accept conditions on it.

We very rarely have competition to fill SCA officer positions, at least at the local level. It's seen as us doing the group a favor, not as something we're competing for the privilege of doing. So explaining obligations and restrictions to people considering offices might not work the same way. On the other hand, not explaining them until after they're in the job certainly won't make them more likely to stay on. It's a conundrum.