[DougJustDoug**]

Deck Knight, don't be too hard on yourself here. This was a fine CAP, with a lot of participation, a lot of great submissions in every step, and we learned a lot along the way. I think we all have a more detailed awareness of certain aspects of weather in competitive play. We also took what can be legitimately described as "bad typing" and explored what constitutes bad typing and how to use it to our advantage.

Like every CAP, I really don't care one bit whether this is a beast in OU or if it sucks. We *tried* to make a good CAP, and in the process of striving to make it as good as it can be -- we learned about the topics we discussed along the way. For those of you that are new to CAP, that is our mission. It's about the journey, not the destination.

Yes, this CAP had some spicy debates, heated arguments, and outright brawls. Yeah, a few members even quit along the way. But listen everyone, I've been through 14 of these projects and I've been an active leader in every single one of them -- this has not been the most dramatic CAP, not by a long shot. I won't dredge up history, but we've seen much more contentious fighting in the past here in the CAP forum, and we've seen far greater casualties in terms of membership. Yeah, I'll always remember Mollux for having a bumpy road here and there, but it was by no means a train wreck. Far from it.

Every CAP project has problems -- EVERY SINGLE ONE. It's the nature of the project. If people aren't arguing strongly for their opinions, then they don't care too much about what they are fighting for. If the entire community just kicks back and only posts in bold voting threads, this project would be pretty fucking boring, if you ask me.

We set up this community to make an overt contest of every step, with one named winner and the rest of the submitters go home with nothing but the joy of participating. That structure is INTENDED to make people clash over ideas, directions, and decisions. If you want a forum where we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, you came to the wrong place. CAP is about pitting ideas against each other, and forcing the community to choose only one in each step. That's inherently a contentious situation, and there is no getting around it. We should argue and debate with passion and reason, and then after a decision is made, we move on to the next step with no hard feelings or grudges. I don't think we should revel in watching people beat each other up, or hurl personal insults, or any other kind of unfair tactics. But get used to contentious discussions, because it's kinda the whole reason we do this in the first place.

Another great thing about CAP is -- we try to learn from our mistakes. When I first set up the CAP forum and wrote our first set of rules and process guidelines, I wanted to make sure we had a process and a culture that treated policy as an ever-evolving thing. No policy is written in stone, and we explicitly review our policies after every single CAP. We'll take a long look at this CAP and look for ways to improve the process or to prevent mistakes we made this time. I personally have a couple of different PR threads I will be authoring, and I know there are other members of the PRC ready to do the same. Our project isn't perfect, but we're always trying to make it better.

Deck, you did a fine job. You and I are pretty much the only remaining diehards that have been active in CAP since our very first Ice/Bug experiment. You know the deal, so I don't need to explain it to you. You had some wrinkles in your project, but all in all, it turned out pretty good. I'm glad you finally got a chance to lead a project start to finish, and I hope you feel good about the outcome.