Let's talk about leadership in our hobby. In a posting to my blog, I started the subject with the following:

 

I was having a PM conversation with a community member the other day, and it occurred to me that most people in our hobby do not equate their time and experience in the hobby to that of being a leader or having the opportunity to provide leadership.

 

Fred Xman has over 1,200 posts and his profile shows that he has been a member of the AVSIM forums for 7 years and that does not include his participation and contributions elsewhere. Question: Is Fred a leader in our hobby?

 

You can read the entire blog entry here:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/blog/1/entry-71-leadership-responsibility-in-our-hobby/

 

So, what is your take on leadership in our hobby? Share your thoughts here.

With no disrespect to Fred, I would say no, he is not a leader. Running up numbers like the quantity of posts or years as a member do not automatically make you a leader. Think of people at work.. maybe they have been there 10-15 years but they are in the same position they were when they started. Does that make him/her a leader? A leader is someone who takes charge and someone who people will follow. He/she could have good analytical skills, street smarts or just plain charisma but if it isn't displayed or put to use he/she is merely one of the crowd.

 

Same applies in flight simming. To me, leaders in our little world are active, participating, engaging, contributing, taking bold steps. They may be actively helping on the forums, creating new add-ons, shaking up the status quo, going the extra mile to help a simmer, taking the hobby in a new direction. To me, those are leaders in my book.

 

Clutch

I'm getting a sense of Dejavu here, or am I just losing my marbles... :Hypnotized:

Interesting point.

 

Personally, I do not see what is being described (the experience, guidance and help aspects), as being linked to "leadership"... I see them as being attributes of knowledgeable, helpful, friendly and willing individuals. But I find the 'leadership' tag a little too superior minded in my honest view, to be linked to those positive qualities.

 

To me, Leadership is a role that involves judgement and decision making in the main; against a set of prescribed or adopted values, measures, or objectives. So 'leading' within a business, in order to drive financial success of that business, or 'leading' in a charity/voluntary organisation, in order to maximize the help provided to those that the charity serves.

 

The qualities outlined in the context of this hobby (all of which are great, positive, attributes) of helping, guiding and assisting newer members of the hobby, are for me less about 'leadership' and more about possessing technical and procedural information (whether that be about any aspect of the hobby, from a complex airliner addon, to tweaking a CFG file), and being willing to share it with your fellow hobbyists.

 

I am not actually arguing against any matter of substance with the debate - just that I don't consider that which is being discussed to particularly form 'leadership'.

 

With almost 30 years in an old dog of a huge international corporation, I suppose if I am honest, I tent to hold some negative views about those who are too keen to profess themselves as 'leaders'. It shouldn't do, but to me it often comes with a lot of ego and self-importance, and as those negative aspects were not at all what Tom was referring to here, perhaps that is why I don't see 'leadership' as an umbrella term for those willing to offer help, experience, knowledge, even wisdom to fellow hobbyists.

 

Regards,

Geordie.

Same applies in flight simming. To me, leaders in our little world are active, participating, engaging, contributing, taking bold steps. They may be actively helping on the forums, creating new add-ons, shaking up the status quo, going the extra mile to help a simmer, taking the hobby in a new direction. To me, those are leaders in my book.

I think this is, more or less, one of the best definition we will get for leadership in our hobby. (More or less, because not every leader can create new add ons or take the hobby in a new direction) There are some addon developers who may be in that position, but they choose not to.

 

Individual posters (like Chock, Ronan and CoolP) can be viewed as leaders on this forum, but can't change the direction of flight simming. Posts from real world pilots (like Ronan) can "pull back the curtain" of what real line flying entails, but again, cannot change the direction of the hobby (despite using their RW experience for complex airline addons).

 

 

Post count should not equate to leadership. There is one member of AVSIM who has posted a number of one liners and sentence fragments adding very little to knowledge of other simmers. From reading more than one of these posts, I would not call that person a "leader" as some of the comments made can be consider "prickly" at best and "rude" at worst.

 

So strictly speaking, we DO have leaders. We have the posters mentioned above, we have people like Word Not Allowed and the person who is modding the DX10 FSX code (can't remember the name sorry!), and last but not least, we have AVSIM (Tom).