Buffyverse Meta Essay -- Questions List

[dlgood]

Have signed up to contribute an Essay for buffyversemeta - planned date July 11 - and am looking to tackle the following topic:

The Initiative, logical answer to the Demon world? Does the Buffyverse still need such an organization even now?

So I figure - as an added feature of my journaling experience - that I'd crack this open a little and give a small glimpse of my process. And for me, if I actually take time to write something rather than just wrenching out of my rear, the #1 step is the Question List.

As most of you might guess - given my professional and academic background - my initial inclination is to say that something resembling the Initiative would certainly be needed in a world where demons exist. But we're working with a question that can either be broad or specific...

So let's look at the topic, and see what issues are springing to mind, to see what I might want to investigate.

1. Roles of a "Government Demon Research Initiative" - what are differences between the Initiative as revealed on the show vs. Initiative-type organizations on a conceptual level?


2. Failures of Shown Inititive - how much was Institutional Bureaucracy and how much was Institutional Mission/Vision?


3. An otherwise normal world, where demons & magic secretly exist. What does that mean for 'normal' society?


4. Where are the intersections between the world of demons and the official world? (Citizens, Civil Institutions, Military, NGOs)


5. Issues of scale - how we treat this at varying levels of social organization (Local / State / International)


6. What are my Paradigms? (Public Safety / Homeland Defense / National Security)


7. What are relevant Organizational Models & Mission Areas? (Neighborhood Watch, FBI, Navy SEALS, Interpol, NATO, etc...)


8. Building an Initiative: What's my Mission & Vision?


9. Who are my Constituencies & Stakeholders?


10. What is the role of Transparency & Accountability?


11. What is my funding mechanism? Budget? Oversight?


12. What resources do I need? How am I going to staff such an agency?


13. How do we maintain relations with existing actors within this shadow community?


14. What are my metrics? How do we measure success/failure? What is our improvement process?


15. What are the likely costs and benefits? Can it be made to work?

I could pretty easily bite off enough to write a GVPT401 Term Paper, so I'll probably have to scale this back quite a lot. But, off the top of my head, anyway, this is a starting point for issues of concern.

It's both a theoretical and concrete matter.

In a world with long-time secret demons and magic, it is tempting to default to the position that this works for society. And that a secret world requires a secret response. There are three primary tensions that leap out at me, though:

1. For the general population, Ignorance is not always a viable protection from predators existing in the secret world.


2. Defenders operating in the secret world may ultimately identify more as part of the secret world and consider their status paramount over the condition of the general population.

Generally speaking, open governments with substantial checks and oversight serve the public far more effectively than highly secretive, unchecked governments run by unaccountable political leaders. The Founders of the American republic well understood that transparency would be critical for detecting errors, uncovering corruption, and ensuring accountability, while political leaders who operate in the dark, wielding vast powers with little oversight, virtually always conceal their mistakes and act to maximize their own interests rather than the country's.

And the fundamental case of taking a "Yes More Government" position is that we are using collective public interest as a baseline. Which may well be harder to do in the aftermath of Katrina, but I guess that'll just mean more fun for me working out this case...

Comments

Re: Vigilantes?

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That's covered under:

9. Who are my Constituencies & Stakeholders?
13. How do we maintain relations with existing actors within this shadow community?

Re: Vigilantes?

[lettered.livejournal.com]

Oh! I completely forgot 13 by the time I read all these comments. Oops.

Also. Stakeholders. *snorfle*

I'm really interested to see what you come up with.

Re: Vigilantes?

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

I've loved the stakeholder pun.

I should remind you that S4 & the Initiative arc first aired back when I was in grad school taking my Public Management course. If we had played a "every time you run across the phrase 'involve key stakeholders' in class readings" drinking game we would have been far to wasted to graduate.

Re: Vigilantes?

[lettered.livejournal.com]

HA, that's brilliant.

I wasn't sure what you meant at first by 9; I'm afraid a lot of your list deals with jargon used in ways I'm not familiar with. Probably because my drinking games all involved "authorial intent" and "the persistence of phallic imagery"; otherwise I'm ignorant.

Re: Vigilantes?

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

We had authorial intent, although we used "intent of the framers" instead.

I'm going to have to look out for jargon. Feel free to ask questions if I use language in ways you find confusing.

Re: Vigilantes?

[lettered.livejournal.com]

Okay. But most of this kinda stuff becomes accessible once one actually starts talking about it. For instance, I didn't get what you meant by "Transparency", and then I read the comments and went, oh, duh. I tend to be slow on the uptake, anyway.