Why Coven of The Far Flung Net Works Part Three: DEDICATION
For the first half of CFFN's existance, I ran everything. I read every paper, good and bad, read every lesson and tried my damndest to keep the thing going. During these times, I went back to college and got a couple of BAs, got mugged, ran out of money to pay my bills (resulting in CFFN going offline a couple of times) got stalked twice, but I kept it going because I was dedicated to the idea of a virtual coven.
I tried to get Phoenix to take responsibilty, but she had neither the time or the inclination. I really don't think the CFFNers had any clue how many times we decided to can the whole thing and were just going to get to the next lesson before we just gave up.Always something, or more likely someone, would then do something that just FLOORED us, making us suddenly realize that we did the hassle for a reason.
We did discover a couple patterns, and the big one was that when the student list exceeded 50, we'd have a melt down. Of the five big size-based meltdowns, I personally blame myself for two. Remember, I was doing this with virtually no UEW support at the beginning and absolutely none by 2002, trying to balance life and family and, frankly, not having anywhere resembling enough money to live on. One person, especially a person who isn't a big group person, being seen as the end all and be all of a group is never healthy...Oh, yeah, and the fact that you've been doing something for 15 years is only impressive until people find out you started at 12...heh.
The other size meltdowns were primarily caused by the fact that some of us (the offline UEWwies, mostly me and Phoenix, and a couple of very dedicated students) were very dedicated to UEW as a tradition and many new people were more familiar with Wiccan mailing lists as things based on community consensus.
This meant that if someone with this view joined and decided, oh, that Rede of the Wiccae was dedicated UEW sacred text (this never happened, it's a fake example) and got a couple people to agree, I, as the big meanie, had to point out what UEW teaches, and the consensus people (First Circle Students, all, mind you) would demand that UEW and I change, and if I refused to change, it was because of something wrong with ME.
It may seem silly, but this was when I needed that dedication the most, because sometimes I *really* wanted everyone to be happy, but it's very much true that if you follow the fashion of the day, not your beliefs, you're a fashionista, not a priestess.
We countered this by crafting a fairly long list of the people we could serve (see the current iteration at http://www.cuew.org/cffn/index.html ) and could not serve and restricting the chat list to people who'd been in for a while, but the most effective way of dealing with this was for *me* to step back into an advisory position, allowing people to understand the UEW materials as a set of materials, not me, personally.
So, we had to limit our scope, saying what we could and couldn't teach, and then who we could and couldn't teach and stick to those same damn guns come hell or high water.
Each of these things was vital to making CFFN a functional virtual coven- we had to know who we were, who we could serve, what we could learn and teach and at the same time be dedicated to putting up with the absolute BULLCRAP that sometimes came up as a result of the fact that people were involved. We also had to change when change was mandated, and the first mandate would involve history....
Coming soon: Part 4, A History emerges where none was wanted