Well-rounded players

[acwg (Alternative Crown Working Group)]

[The ACWG is posting this on behalf of Baroness Annys Blodwell, who emailed the working group with her thoughts]:

I think whatever the means chosen, there should also be some determining factors on all those entering (including consorts) to ensure that our royalty are well-rounded players with a multi-sphere commitment to the SCA.
My suggestion is: both members of the candidate couple(s) must have done the following in the previous two years: taken a position of service - e.g. held an office at any level, run an event, served on the BoD - that is not connected to the martial field; have entered a Kingdom-level A&S competition and/or entered Laurel Prize Tourney and/or taught an A&S class; have taken part in some way in at least 2 different forms of martial art (this includes running lists, acting as a marshal or a field herald, but not running a martial event); have at least twice travelled to another group (not Stormhold-Krae Glass, St Florian-Riverhaven) for an event, of which only one can be Rowany Festival, Canterbury Faire, Crown Tourney or Coronation.
The idea is to have a field that has shown they have a broad and deep involvement with the SCA, that they have an understanding of travelling for events, and that their involvement is not limited to mostly one field.

[Uberto (Uberto Renaldi)]

This is what my eligibility crtieria was attempting to achieve - ensuring that those wishing to be royalty are "well-rounded players with a multi-sphere commitment to the SCA".

[Valerian The Red (Valerian The Red)]

I think that this is an aspect of the discussion that needs more attention and serious consideration. In my mind the crown are supposed to be representatives for ALL community activities conducted in the kingdom.

While we have had some discussion of this topic on the general discussion board, I think something we should try is to create a short list of what we are trying to do by changing the current method of crown selection.
From my experience with the discussion in the kingdom at events the key requirement seems to be about opening up the method of selection to people outside of the heavy community, as this is a source of contention with non fighting players.
This seems to align with the discussion so far, but I think this should be more nuanced than that.

As an example, how should a crown respond to a complaint raised through the rules as we currently have them about a heavy/A&S/whatever issue if they have no experience in that part of the community? Would the Earl Marshall become the de facto decider of any escalated issues or would the crown be forced to make a potentially uninformed choice?

So a requirement I see being needed, is that we have some means or strategy for the crown to deal with issues where they find lacking experience in that field.
It might be that they defer to the peerages of those activities or some other option we can think of.
But this needs to be considered further.