The Lincoln Park Trixie Society has installed Vivienne "Viv" Ashford-Crane as the Society's first Director of Society Intelligence, a newly created Officer position reporting directly to the Executive Director.
The role is concerned with what the Society has, until now, handled informally: the gathering, vetting, and disciplined non-circulation of information bearing on Member interests and village affairs, the Society has always done this. It now has a Director for it.
The Role
The Director of Society Intelligence is responsible for three things, and three things only.
- The Society's open-source observation of village conditions — what has opened, what has closed, what has changed ownership, who has moved, who has returned, and what is being said at the school pickup line.
- The maintenance of the Society's relationship with Member-volunteer observers, who provide context across the neighborhood's formal and informal channels.
- The defensive posture of the Society itself — Member data, communications, and the discretion that membership presumes.
The Society wishes to be clear about what the role is not. The Director of Society Intelligence does not investigate, surveil, or pursue. The Director does not maintain files on non-Members. The Director does not act on information; the Director keeps it where it can be retrieved when needed and otherwise left alone. The Society is defensive, not operational.
"We are not interested in what other people are doing. We are interested in being correctly informed about what is happening to ours."
The Officer
Viv has served on the Standards Committee and brings experience in corporate security, most recently as a Managing Director of a private practice she will not name on a website. She describes her work as "the protective side of the discipline."
She lives on Hudson Avenue with her husband and two children. She drives a black Mercedes G-Wagen and is regarded, by those who know her, as the most calm person in any room in which something is going wrong.
The Society notes, with characteristic understatement, that the role has effectively existed for some years. It is now formalized. The Member roster has been updated.