Subspace-620

INTRODUCTION:

Call me Ishmael. No, that's stupid, nobody is named Ishmael anymore. Nobody says, Let's go over to Ish's place and watch the game on TV. Besides, my name is Jeff. Call me Jeff. I had to ask around, as the U of A Star Trek Club (UASTC)was formed before I joined. I'll try to be as objective as possible about telling the story of the early years of the club, and I won't make any more allusions to Moby Dick. Well, just one more: we definitely had a Great White Whale in the club, but I will leave it up to your imagination as to which member that was.

THE VERY BEGINNING:

According to Tara Shortt (not at all whale-like), the UASTC started in 1987, maybe about six months before I moved to Edmonton. This club called themselves the USS Bonaventure, which I think maybe was based on the typical Constitution-class starship that Trekkies are familiar with.

I came from UBC, where halfway through my Psych degree, I ran out of money, and the cost of living was too high. I moved to Alberta becuase there was more work, and I could live more cheaply and still go to school. At UBC, I was a member of the UBC Science Fiction Society, which I imagine is something like your present club. It was very, very relaxed, though, and also very literary. Perhaps our most illustrious member was William Gibson, who was getting ready to publish his "Burning Chrome" collection about the time that I started to run out of money, which made me likely the least illustious member. I remember Bill's funky early Mac laptop, which I instantly hated.

Moving to U of A, I expected to find a similar group, but instead the Bonaventure was very strictly Star Trek, and also strict about rules and regulations, as well as being very fond of wearing their uniforms and props in public. Oh, well, I figured, SF is SF. Some Bonaventures were well-read in SF, others could recite the entire Star Trek canon by memory. Most of them were nice folk, though.

Bonaventure started out as a private club that happened to be mostly university students. They rented out space from a local library for their weekly meetings, but quickly found a better deal by renting out a classroom from the U of A. When they couldn't get together, they ran a computer BBS, also called The Bonaventure. A BBS (Bulletin Board System) was sort of a private dial-up Internet that existed before the Internet. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system for more information on BBS's in general.

From what I recall, the Bonaventure club was run by Captain Howard Gibbons, and the BBS was run by SysOp Max ________, his friend. Although the Bonaventure club was mixed with university students and general public members, some of the younger university students tended to hang out together. According to the Bonaventure charter, they were allowed to form a "shuttlecraft" called Encounter.

THE ENCOUNTER

Encounter's first commander was, I believe, Joanne Wotypka. Joanne was very pretty, very bright, and most of all, very willing to go through all of the paperwork to start a proper U of A Club Charter. The Encounter thus became formally The U Of A Star Trek Club, and were awared the office at 620 SUB. The more casual university student members of the Bonaventure club migrated to this office, where I think we were provided with a desk and a couch. Joanne provided a bunk bed for extra room and sleep, and we decorated the place with the usual posters.

Early members were Joanne, Earl Woods, Tony Longworth, Ron Briscoe, Allan Sampson, Carrie Humprhies, Paul _______, Steven Neumann, Susan Neumann... maybe a few others I regret I may have forgotten. I joined a little later, followed by Jim Sandercock.

We were a very small club, with no real chance of growth. Our big marketing scheme was a weekly ad that ran in the Gateway for free for years: "WANNA SEE SPOCK SOCK ON A LOLLIPOP? COME TO 620 SUB, U OF A STAR TREK CLUB". That line was witten by Steven Neumann, based on a large black and white photo of Leonard Nimoy in costume eating candy. If you still have that photo, I would consider it a personal favour if it were to be destroyed. Nobody paid attention to that ad but me. Nobody saw the spelling error. It was many months before I realised that we could change the ad, at which point it became something like, "FEELING LONELY AND DEPRESSED AND YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT? SAME HERE. 620 SUB STAR TREK CLUB." That at least got some response from a group of neurotic girls who were very nice but not at all into SF. After that, we made the effort to be better club recruiters.

However, the University itself added to our number. Our lonely little club was paired up with an even smaller club, The U of A Scuba Club, led by the vivacious Andrea Macleod. The scuba people were definitely not Trekkies, but they were very friendly and accomodating, especially now that they had a window view instead of a corner of the cellar in SUB.

EARL J. WOODS

After some time, Joanne became too busy to run the club. We held an election and appointed Earl Woods as the new leader. You list him as being "brash" in your website, but really, that would be that very last word to describe Earl. I can describe for you "The Woods Manoeuvre", which appeared in a short story. In a fictional battle with a superior starship, Captain Woods turned the belly of his ship to the enemy and jettisoned the covers to the warp core. A single phaser blast would ignite the antimatter and blast both ships into bits a thousand times smaller than tribble farts. Then, Woods invited the enemy commander over for a luxurious dinner, where he carefully explained at length the Federation position and negotiated an acceptable compromise. That's the Woods Manoeuvre, and as brash as Earl ever got.

Earl was a poli-sci major and both a Big L and small l liberal, in every sense of the word. He was (and is now) devoted to the Alberta Liberal Party as well as the liberal nature of the Star Trek Federation. Being a poli-sci major, he yearned for the opportunity to prove himself a leader, so who were we to stand in his way?

At the time, Ron Briscoe ran a BBS he called Freedom, in direct opposition to the rules-intensive Bonaventure. Freedom was not strictly a Star Trek BBS, but there was a lot of content based on Trek and other SF. Earl used Freedom as his sounding board by writing a huge volume of Star Trek-based short stories that took place on the USS Encounter. The Encounter was one of those alternate-reality stories that featured all of the UASTC members as characters, for better or worse.

It was here that Encounter made an unofficial transition from shuttlecraft to ship (Reliant-class), but not by following any Star Trek Club charter rules, which if I remember, actually pee'd off the Bonaventure. So, I guess the Encounter was the first "ship" for the UASTC, and Earl promoted himself from Lieutenant to Captain. Again, we couldn't argue, he was such a believer.

Please click here to see a recent "re-imagining" of Lieutenant Woods, based on the recent Star Trek movie: http://shyluk.blogspot.com/2010/04/100-lieutenant-earl.html

TONY LONGWORTH

If I had to describe Tony, I would call him "the life of the party". Earl was friendly but reserved, while Tony was bombastic and outgoing. At one point, Tony wanted the UASTC to be more involved with outside projects which were usually beyond Earl's stodgy zone of comfort and our collective budget. In 1991 or 1992, the UASTC and the Scuba people rented a van for a memorable trip to Los Angeles.

Tony decided to form his own organization, called the USS Hully-Gully, which was sort of a sly protest club devoted more to fun stuff and less to sitting around computers. However, Tony's respect of Earl was so high that he made Earl the honorary co-Captain. The Hully-Gully really existed only as a name and as entries in the Freedom BBS. It was too much paperwork to actually form a new Star Trek organization at the U of A.

The UASTC also formed alliances with another misfit club called the M.O.O.S.E Club (run by "Mustafa Al-Habib", pen name), whose primary purpose was to generate the evocative "Space Moose" cartoon strip as well as keep an arcade game of Space Frenzy set at the most insanely difficult level at all times. The M.O.O.S.E. people sometimes provided some interesting diversions.

JIM SANDERCOCK

I was graduating by the time the younger club members were establishing themselves. From what I recall, Jim Sandercock, looking almost exactly like the Salvatorian version of Jesus Christ (minus the holy wounds, but plus wire-rimmed glasses), took over the UASTC when Earl & I graduated. I lost track of what happened to the club after that, which would be 1992. Jim I remember as being an intermediate between Earl and Tony, and so would have been a good choice to run the club. I also recall that another Jeff joined up, mostly to replace me.

Thank you for reading this!

Jeff Shyluk, BA 2010

Hello, my name is Joel and let me tell you a story. This is the story of Subspace 620 during my time as member of the club with special emphasis on the 2009-2010 year that I was Club president. I hope you find it informative and interesting. Thank you for your time and do enjoy....

When I joined Subspace 6-20, in the fall of 2007, the mailing list was abuzz with discussion. There were many events in the planning at most times and my email account was getting swamped with emails. I was able to make it to a few events the first term, in particular the fun start of year barbeque in Emily Murphy Park and the great Halloween Party at Josh's apartment's Party Room) but by christmas I was getting so many emails it was overwhelming so I stopped reading a bunch of them, instead focussing more on school work. Now by the time the winter term was well underway I had decided to get back into the action and made it to a few more events, culminating in my Election to the position of Extended-Executive at the end of year elections.

As is often the case, the summer was much quieter and before I knew it I was helping out at clubs fair, trying to sign up new members. During my second year in the club, and first on the executive, I made a serious attempt to attend more events and even get more people coming to some events. This was also the year that I was handed responsibility for the club's website. The website had not been given a full overhaul in a while and I set my sights on bringing it up to speed with more current club status and also keeping it up to date as much as possible. This task proved to be more work than originally expected and by the year's end I had only managed a minor update of the inner workings of the website, bringing the pages more in sync with each-other but no large scale overhaul.

This brings us to the elections that had me being elected club president. As part of my platform I promised to clean up the club office and make the club's closet/ex-bathroom a full and useful part of the club office. Also I had made clear my intention to update the constitution as well as continue the upgrading of the Club Website.

Once classes ended the first of these challenges kicked off. After being refused assistance with making the closet/bathroom more useable from Student Group Services we settled for doing it all ourself. The first step was, naturally, cleaning out the closet and tossing out all the garbage that was in it (as well as returning some items to our past office-mates. This was eventually followed on with the building of a new raised-floor, yes that wood floor in the mini-sub-office is Subspace 620 property (Should the club ever be evicted it should be removed and kept by the club), and the search for a new, smaller desk for the sub-office was kicked off.

In addition to the desk, a new couch was sought after and eventually one was donated via the future president of the club, James McNeice, by his landlord. This was accompanied by a set of wooden shelves and a microwave that went to UACS (Undergraduate Association of Computing Science). Not long afterwards a new desk was purchased (The smaller one in the mini-sub-office) by Subspace 6-20 and the old, larger one was returned to Student Group Services. While it would be another few months before the floor would be finished and all the furniture put in place the club office was well on its way to being made far nicer and more useable.

This brings me to my first promise I made in my election platform, the constitutional reform. Mostly the changes made to the constitution were to bring the constitution up to date with what the club's then current practices were. This included replacing mention of phone lists with mailing lists, creation of an appointed position of webmaster and updating the club name to officially include 'Fantasy', among a few others. The largest change that was proposed (And later accepted) was the possibility of running online elections. Prior to this all elections were mandated to be held in person. Considering the minuscule turnout we tended to get at the election event it was decided that online elections would be better for the club by allowing more members to vote and by having an more extended voting period. In a bit of Tautological twist, the Constitutional Amendment was itself ran as a online election, meaning that had the online election motion failed the whole amendment could have failed. Fortunately this part of the amendment passed with flying colours as did all other motions aside from one. The only motion to fail was the one to limit the mandatory minimum number of official executive meetings to once a term instead of twice a term.

The next most memorable event during my presidency was the bank account....

Now Subspace 6-20 had had a bank account since 1993-4 (Back when we were still the Star trek Club). This account had had signing authority passed on until 1998-9. The executive from that year, I was told by an executive from the following year (Fleet Admiral Amanda), did not pass the signing authority on when they graduated. Now this was not seen to be too big of a problem as the club still had the Debit card and knew its pin, meaning we could still make withdrawals and deposits. Business continued mostly as usual until after Amanda graduated. At this point some confusion arose that the signing authority was still held and could still be passed on, though at no time here was the bank informed of any of these transfers. So It came to my presidency that we got a notice from the bank that due to inactivity the account was now locked. After trying to unlock it and being told about the signing authority problem attempts were made to contact members of the 1998-9 executive. As those were not successful the bank account was essentially abandoned and a new one has since been opened (With real transfers of signing authority promised to occur this time).

Finally we come to the issue that had started to crop up during my year as Extended-Executive. The problem was that of dwindling attendance and dwindling use of the mailing list to organize events. The latter issue was at first attempted to be resolved by, in the winter term 2010, establishing a weekly movie night in the office (Which has since been continued by Presidents James and Jared in the CSC Common Area to much success). While this did not really grow the membership, a change that occurred shortly after I stepped down as president to go on an internship did give a large boost to membership.

This change, that saved the club from dwindling out of existence, was switching to Google Groups from Yahoo Groups. The reason why this was effective was that Google Groups allowed, at the time, for the adding of members and requiring them to act to be removed as opposed to inviting and needing them to act to be added. This is important because it means that by default, anyone who signed up at Clubs Fair is automatically on the mailing list without needing to take affirmative action. This means that even if the person is swamped in the first few weeks with new emails or misses the invite email they are still on the mailing list and can learn about and come to events. For this very reason, one year later, when Google removed the 'add to list' feature Subspace 6-20 move to Groupspaces (Who still had the 'add' feature). This move again allowed the club to maintain high mailing list membership, thereby resulting in many more people hearing about events and as a result coming to events.

Now it is April in my final year of University and I am about to pass off responsibility for this website to a new club member so I bid you all Adieu and wish you all the best of luck in the future!

Joel Boulet, Bsc. 2012

P.S. Long Live Subspace 620!