Music Committee

Mission Statement of Vegastrike 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.

Representation of the Committee

The committee will have 8-10 members, composed primarily of composers but with developers and story-writers also participating

Roles in the Committee include:

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 of 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 would belong to one or more section, probably with priorities attached. Say, the chair wouldn't be just that, he would probably be also part of either one of the PR/C/D sections. He could also be secondarily a part of another section, but let's say there are no "tertiary assignments" - just to avoid overcommiting personnel. 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.

We also want to make it clear that inclusion or separation from the commitee does not relate to contribution, but rather decision-making. If you contribute a lot of high-quality art, but aren't at all helpful (or possibly even obstructing) in decision-making affairs, you're a staff member, not a commitee member. Nothing good or bad about that, it's just the place where you can help the most, and bother the least.

Meetings

The idea is to let the chairman open up proceedings, posting top-priority tasks, along with a motion for "further tasks".

Each meeting would gather tasks for processing and would be quickly treated, in order of proposition. Should the task grow and require a lengthy treatment, a specific thread would start and run in parallel with the main meeting. That's an advantage of message boards, it makes easier for people to divide their attention in multiple subjects. As well, at each meeting, each section should have a unified (let's let the details of that to the specific organization of each section) progress report as first post.

Those would be "organized meetings". There's the option for special-call "realtime meetings", carried out through the VS IRC channel preferrably, 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.