I AM BECOME SCRIBE
About a month ago, I was elected as Scribe for my fraternity, ΑΕΠ at George Washington. As such, I took over responsibilities for communicating our events, not only to brothers but also to the university administration, our overarching national organization, and the public at large. Before I was elected, Scribe was seen as a sort of fake job, being limited to filling out mandatory forms and taking the occasional few notes. The real power of the position, as my peers treated it, was in having a voice on the executive board, allowing one to promote their vision of what the fraternity should look like. However, speaking with our assigned consultant from nationals and reading up on training materials he provided, it became increasingly clear that this interpretation was causing quite a few problems for our chapter. Given that my role at the time was Brother at Large, which I had gotten elevated to the Executive Board by reading our constitution, I realized that we could benefit from better workspace and communications infrastructure. Despite having a lot of very competent leaders, I found that they would often exchange hundreds of texts in our executive groupchat debating situations that they didn’t have enough information to make decisions on. Events were planned through long chains of texts, both in groupchats and between officers and event chairs, meaning our meetings often centered around people opening up iMessage and reading things aloud as opposed to operating off an agenda. Furthermore, members of the chapter would often complain that events weren’t being communicated well enough. So, I ran for the role and won. Now it’s time to do the work.
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