The outline below describes how the Working Group identified changes that the members of Lochac support. This outline was subject to review at every step, and the Board of the SCA (US), Board of the SCA (Australia) Ltd, and Committee of SCA New Zealand Incorporated were informed at each stage of the progress.
POLL: Do we want to discuss options?
This is the poll launched on February 1st 2024. If the response was negative, then the process would have been stopped at this point. In fact, over 62% of the membership responded, and 84% of those who did respond were in favour of continuing the discussion.
CONSULT: What options might exist?
There have been many alterative means of selecting Crown discussed over the years. The Working Group put up a list of examples that we already knew about, and sought input from across Lochac about what other ways might exist. The goal of this stage was to capture every idea, but not to go into details on any of them yet. We opened a discussion forum for this conversation on March 18th, which remained open until the end of Rowany Festival 2024.
POLL: Shortlist
Having identified all the possibilities, we eliminated the ones with little or no support. We didn’t want to waste people’s time and energy developing detailed proposals for ideas that will never gain widespread support. People were asked which approaches they might support, depending on how they are fine-tuned. If there were several approaches that got broad in-principle support, we would develop each of them to a detailed stage. The results of that poll are here.
CONSULT: Refine the details
For any ideas that won provisional support, we formed sub-groups comprising people with relevant expertise to put together what they saw as a viable example of how that Crown selection could be run, explaining the reasons for any choices they made.
POLL: Preferences
At this point, we polled members for their response to specific and detailed examples. We did not just ask for a yes/no response to any given proposal, we also asked how strongly people felt about each approach, and asked them to rank their preferences. But this was still just an opinion poll.
The final poll was open from September 22nd to October 22nd, 2024. You can see the results here.
VOTE: Implement a trial
From May 1st until May 31st, 2025 the Board of SCA Australia and Committee of SCA New Zealand invited members to vote on whether or not there should be a trial of the alternative forms of Crown selection which received the most support in the opinion polls conducted in 2024. Because this was a vote of members, rather than a poll, the results are binding upon the Board and Committee.
The question put to the members was “Do you, as a registered adult member of the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA), want the Kingdom of Lochac (Australia and New Zealand) to hold three (3) consecutive Crown Tournament trial formats, constituting of a rapier crown, a crown via prowess over multiple events and a regular heavy crown with the option of champions fighting, in any order, as soon as Corpora and the Board of SCA Inc. (US) allows?”
The vote was in favour of conducting a trial. Just over 58.5% of the members of the SCA in Australia and New Zealand at the time of the vote responded, and 79.6% of them were in favour of the trial.