POC recognition
Dear Niantic.
I love a good first Saturday event (both actual and virtual) and I’ve been the resistance POC for over a dozen events now. I enjoy working with other agents to plan missions, build (and rebuild) in game communities and showing new agents how to do stuff. It’s quite a lot of fun. It’s also a lot of work and with swag, cakes (remember cake?). Some months it’s a struggle to get the time and money to do it. In our area there is a small team of committed individuals who always step up to take the reigns though. Other areas aren’t so lucky.
With that in mind could I suggest a tiered badge for agents who POC official events. It may swell the ranks of those willing to take the lead and boost event numbers.
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You might not be aware of it yet, but you're not a POC.
POC = Point of Contact
These are generally used by Niantic to discuss things like playboxes for Anomalies.
POC's in Anomaly teams have traditionally exceeded Niantic's requirements by organizing their own parties and swag etc, but that is not part of the POC role. That's something the 'Faction organizer' takes on, independent from the Point of Contact role.
So if Niantic is not asking you about information for something they need, you're not a Point of Contact. You're a local faction organizer. Ingress First Saturday is largely run without Niantic involvement aside from providing the codes etc.
As a point of note, POCs (and other people working with Niantic) in previous years have been recognized with Volunteer Coins or other swag. We didn't have a Niantic event in 2020, so I don't believe any volunteer coins were sent out.
If you’re referring to POC as person of colour. Then you’re making an awfully big assumption that I’m not.
I get what you mean. Though when submitting the request for an event you are asked for an Enlightened POC and Resistance POC. Granted that’s from Fev Games. But it’s still the correct term for the local organisers.
It's not. The correct term is faction leader, either ENL Leader or RES Leader. Anyone can self plocaim itself as an IFS organizer, even cheater. It's a voluntary thing and your prize is having the IFS in your location.
As Perringaiden said, POC is something designated by Niantic (and it's temporary), it's not self proclaimed.
If the IFS form from fevgames is saying POC it is incorrect.
I was referring about the meaning you proposed (point of contact), because of course I know that both of us are persons of color. I've been of colour green for 4 years and now I'm blue.
Ahhh you beat me to the punchline
There has never been a reference to POC anywhere on Fev Games; The event reg form, event pages, emails and guide pages all refer to Enl/Res or Event Leaders. Please let me know if if you find anywhere on Fev Games that says POC in reference to FS Event Leaders.
We can discuss all the terminology on POC/Event leader. I do think the initial discussion was about "recognition for POC/Event Leaders/IFS organisers" and the term was POC was used as a term for that. And this has discussion became a discussion about POC is the right term for this.
And talking about that, I would disagree with a (tiered) badge for IFS event leaders. People go crazy when a badge is involved. I would expect a lot of **** events, and the workload on that will drop on a small group of IFSUN volunteers. I would expect more failed events.
I also think that being IFS event leader does not even come close to being Niantic Anomaly POC, and that was usually rewarded with a "handfull of swag". And lots of happy faces, and in the end we all do it for the happy faces :)
Fair enough.
I agree that a badge would lead to all sorts of trouble and we as organizers should continue to receive the same FS badge we enable for our communities, but it would be nice to have a stats line or some sort of metric to show for our efforts. The planning, execution, and verification of these events, over ten hours per month, is invisible to most participants - especially with IFS@Home.