Music Committee
Contents
Mission Statement of Vega Strike Music Committee (Draft)
To enhance the musical aspect of the Vega Strike experience through the establishment and maintainence of a series of requirements, guidelines and best practices in regards to its music; ensuring the music submissions meet these requirements and are of sufficient merit to be included in the game; promoting the project to prospective composers; providing training, mentoring, and support services to assist composers with completing their tasks; and, providing Vega Strike's developers with the necessary feedback they need to improve the music component of the game engine.
Why a Music Committee?
The primary reasons for organizing a music committee are:
- Standardization is lacking in Vega Strike's current music - styles are all over the place and there are very few common themes. A music committee can bring standardization and also provide training and mentoring to the composers to improve their musical skills.
- A committee is generally not overly dependant on any single individual to be able to function. Due to the open source nature of the product and hours required for a musical director-type role, it is unlikely the project would be able to secure an experienced musical director willing to or having the time to take on a project of this magnitude without compensation.
- Committees are more compatible with the open-source ideal that people working together at a common task can accomplish great things.
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Representation of the Committee (Draft)
The Music Committee shall be composed primarily of composers but with developers and story-writers also participating. The committee will have a 10 member limit to prevent bloat from overly slowing proceedings.
The Breakdown of the Committee is as follows:
- Chairman/Vice-Chairman: Responsible for breaking a tie vote - vice-chair acts in Chair's stead if absent.
- Personnel & PR section: Responsible of recruiting people, and mediating with other organizations (eg: magnatune proceedings)
- Creative section: Responsible for executing and proposing activities for the creative staff (composers). That includes organizing work on pending tasks, recognizing/proposing/planifying new tasks, organizing tutorials, etc...
- Storyboard liason: Communicates the needs of storytelling to the creative section and back. Important task source and consulting body.
- Development liason: Communicates the needs of the creative section to engine development and back, organizing changes in the API that are required or desired by the creative section.
People on the Comittee could belong to one or more section/role, with priorities attached to those functions. For example, the Chairman could also be a part of the Creative section. He could also be secondarily a part of another section, but to avoid overcommiting personnel we are avoiding "tertiary assignments". To avoid undercommitment, though, only primary assignments should be taken into account for "staff allocation". So... if a section has no primary assignee, it would be considered understaffed.
Inclusion or separation from the commitee does not relate to contribution, but rather decision-making. If you contribute a lot of high-quality music, but do not wish to take part in decision-making affairs, you would become a staff member reporting to the Committee, not a Committee member.
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Meetings
Meetings would take place on a monthly basis in the Vega Strike Forums, creating a thread for each meeting. An agenda will be posted at least one week before the meeting is to take place.
The standard agenda for a meeting is as follows:
- "Opening" - The Chair would open up proceedings
- "Old Business" - Each section should have a unified progress report as first post. New tasks and their priorities would be assigned to Committee members or staff members as a result of these progress reports.
- "New Business" - Any new news or suggestions would then be requested, which would result in additional task assignments. These further tasks would be assigned to specific groups, Committee members or staff members.
- "Closing" - The Chair would close proceedings once all tasks had been assigned and all agenda items had been dealt with.
Special items that are large enough to warrant their own section in the agenda would be scheduled for either immediately following the Opening or just before the closing.
Should a particular task or issue require a lengthy treatment, a specific thread would start and run in parallel with the main meeting. Using the message boards in this regard makes it easier for people to divide their attention to multiple subjects.
Special-call "real-time meetings" will also be necessary from time to time, carried out through the VS IRC channel preferably, or through any other interactive messaging system at everybody's reach. Those would be necessary when a certain task needs important discussion in the sense of interactive exchange of ideas, where delays present in message board-based systems would hinder the effort.
