Talk:Officina Consulis Maioris MMDCCLIX

Revision as of 11:34, 17 June 2006

Title of article

Really better to call it Officina Consulis Maioris.

Corde, you know better and you have shown a precedent. Make the move.

Officinae generally

I have to say I'm a little bothered about these officinae in general. I'm worried we're creating structures which will cause people unconsciously to think about government in a certain way. That's worrying both because it's never desirable to limit thinking and because the ways we're making them think are un-Roman.

Roman magistrates didn't have offices in the sense of places where they went to do their work. They worked at home, or in the forum, or in the senate, or wherever. When people wanted to see them they went to their houses or find them in the forum. An officina was a workshop, a place where a professional craftsman worked. Adapting that word, and that idea, for magistrates risks reinforcing people's modern-minded assumption that magistrates are specialist professionals who go to work in the morning and go home in the evening, rather than the Roman way: amateur, generalist, no clear distinction between public and private. Some magistrates think the traditional Roman conception is outdated and choose to run bureaucratic offices, and that's their prerogative, but we shouldn't be creating structures which portray that as the standard, let alone the only, way to do it.

Similarly the standard format of these officinae nudges people to think in a certain way. The consular officinae seem to come as standard with a section called "goals". Some of us may think that magistrates should have goals, and indeed many of them have; but there's no reason why a magistrate must necessarily have any at all. Most ancient magistrates ran for office on an unspoken manifesto of "I'll leave everything as it is and do basically nothing except respond to situations which arise", and that's a perfectly respectable plan for a Roman magistrate. Of course a modern magistrate who had such a plan could say so under his "goals" sub-heading, but the very fact that the sub-heading is there implies that there should be definite goals, and someone reading the page and seeing that the magistrate basically had no goals would be prompted by the structure of the page to think that that was not very satisfactory. Likewise when the officina aedilium plebis talks about "goal statements, project assignments, and reports", it creates the expectation that these are all things the aediles plebis somehow ought to have and thus makes it look like they're not doing their jobs if they haven't got them.

I haven't any alternative to suggest at the moment, and I'll ponder how else we could do it (perhaps simply let each magistrate set up his own whatever-it-is on his user page? That would at least resemble 'working from home'), but I just wanted to raise the worry before we get too comfortable with this set-up. Cordus 06:16, 17 June 2006 (CDT)

All fair enough, and it is good that we are thinking about these things. My notion was that individual magistrates would adapt the pages themselves. I was just trying to suggest things they MIGHT use the pages for. There are two things I find unsatisfactory. First, that some magistrates set up websites all over the place. Some of this properly should be State records. As it is, either the records are out of our control or we have to duplicate the content ourselves. Second, forcing webmaster staff to be record keepers isn't working out very well. There is a huge backlog and little progress is being made with that. If we have a page for each magistrate to use then we can freeze that page at the end of term and thereby we will have a record already done for us. Each magistrate could appoint a scriba just to keep things up to date. A final point. As I understand it, edicta are only valid while the magistrate stays in office. This system will reduce the proliferation of pages titled "Edictum..." If officina is a bad choice, how about the Latin for "notice board"? M. Lucretius Agricola 06:33, 17 June 2006 (CDT)