Epilogistic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
epilogistic) wrote2023-06-20 10:46 pm
epilogistic) wrote2023-06-20 10:46 pm
A House Divided
On Monday, May 29th, my partner and I were in our kitchen, talking. It was beautiful out, sun shining, cats lounging in the window, and a day off from work, but it wasn't a happy kitchen. A few days before, we'd discovered the OTW management was being actively obstructive to attempts to treat security concerns with the seriousness they deserved, which led to azarias, my partner, publicly talking about a lot of things that she'd previously been keeping quiet about in the belief that the worst risks to others were at least fixed. Azarias had posted that she didn't think the org was salvageable; on that Monday, I argued that I thought it was. That it was worth salvaging, that there were too many good people left, and that the org's purpose mattered too much to me, to just give up.
The next day the org sent out an internal message in which they did their best to strongly imply that azarias was somehow involved in the CSEM spam attack volunteers experienced in 2022, one evidently so carelessly thought-through that Legal's portion of the statement blatantly contradicts the Board's stance. You can find the text of that statement here.
This is not actually what I'm going to talk about.
I wanted to talk about it, much sooner than this. A broad, factual laying-out of the situation has been needed for weeks, and I have the advantage of being able to consult one of the chief participants of the story by, at most, walking to the stairs to yell down/up. Unfortunately, if you've never been in a position to try and do such a write-up for a situation that you are this close to, I have a word of advice: don't. Fortunately for me someone else has undertaken such a summary, across a more comprehensive array of topics than I could have managed. Thank you, deeply and sincerely.
I would also love to be able to go in to individually counter some of the minor distortions that are now leading to gleeful nitpicking "takedown" posts and comments, as if this was all some fandom drama that could be solved by pedantic arguments over word-choice. For example, there's quibbling arising from (other) people saying that azarias was "assigned" to handle all the CSAM/CSEM tickets. Azarias volunteered to undertake those tickets because A) that is simply how the system works, you are almost never assigned tickets directly, and indeed there was no mechanism to do so other than verbal directive, and B) she had relevant experience in such work due to her years on LJ Abuse before the SixApart purchase, and believed that, while of course policies would differ, the matter of legitimate CSAM/CSEM would be treated with the same seriousness and support it was given in those days. She continued handling those tickets because of the knowledge that if she did not, the tickets and violations would remain, and have to be taken by another volunteer with less experience with such content.
This urge to take one for the team is a known factor in volunteer organizations, where everyone involved has a natural urge to want to try to help: it's why they volunteered. It's for exactly this reason that tracking volunteer time/commitments is a standard best practice, so that you do not fall into a trap where even with everyone involved having the very best intentions, you accidentally set up a situation where one person is overburdened through people simply being unaware how much is going to one person. Like I said, it's a typical problem, so organizations have over the years developed a comprehensive set of potential strategies to handle it.
The OTW has an endless list of reasons why standard best practice cannot apply to them, why their particular needs prohibit this particular solution, and also that particular solution, and also that other particular solution. Some of them, in isolation, are likely true. Many more difficulties probably relate to conditions that were true once, or in a specific set of circumstances that somehow became generalized; one of the org's founders even discussed being disturbed that the org's early reasoning for not offering membership in exchange for volunteer hours "apparently has trickled down into org culture as 'tracking volunteer hours bad.'" That thread contains many good reasons for a specific practice at a specific time, but freely acknowledges that many of them are no longer valid, and doubtless due for reconsideration. But org leadership has remained hostile to any suggestions along those lines.
When you get that response to as many different kinds of best practices across as many different topics as I know the OTW has objected to over the years, it becomes a systemic issue. And so the org is constantly trying to bodge together homemade solutions, lagging behind the curve, and leaving its volunteers in unnecessarily difficult positions across the org. Many of those same volunteers are ignorant that there even are already-existing solutions that could make their work easier.
This is not the first time major failures have happened as a result of those knowledge-gaps, that institutional opacity. It's not even the first time where communication and commitment-tracking failures have led to a spectacular blow-up centered around one volunteer.
That is what I'm going to talk about today.
Not lim, though I desperately hope lim reads this for reasons that will soon become apparent. Azarias can talk for herself, and has been. Personally, OTW Board, I don't know why you didn't just respond to her initial private request for an apology and a retraction with a half-assed "It was no one's intention to imply that. We apologize if anyone experienced confusion." You ought know she'd quietly go away, because she did after the lies you told her when restoring her account. Simply saying that you never intended the reading that so many took from that statement could have solved many problems. Why didn't you?
Why haven't you still?
But like I said, that's not what I want to talk about today.
What I want to talk about today is the things we don't know we don't know, and how you fix that. And I want to talk to you about what I know so many of you have been feeling, that sense of, "This is all horrible, and I don't know what to do. I don't know how to fix this, but I don't want the OTW to falter and fail, I don't want the archive to go away! I just don't want it to continue with problems like this."
I know exactly how you feel. Because I feel it too. I've been dealing with it for weeks, even while I deal with my own extremely personal, extremely immediate view of the human cost for the OTW's mismanagement.
Azarias has expressed what she wants from the org: a public retraction, posted in the volunteer Slack and on Fail FandomAnon where the message was originally posted, and an apology. I stand behind her on that. As I said, it's not so hard to grant. She didn't even request for the apology to be public. Under the circumstances, I am going to make that request myself.
But to those of you without power to effect that, if you want to know what you can do: start talking.
Incidents like this don't happen purely because of malignant actors. Incidents like this happen when communications break down, and if you take nothing else away from what's been going on, you should still nonetheless be able to gather that the org has failed in communication on multiple fronts. Communication between volunteers, communication between committees, communication between the org and the fans it represents.... Many of the current problems facing the org could have been resolved quite easily with better communication -- a fact they have been getting clear complaints about, and having other crises related to, for years. They know they have a problem. They could have fixed it. Again, why haven't they?
I can't answer that. All I can try to do is what they won't: talk about it, and urge others to do the same. Directly and clearly, unlike current OTW policy, in which volunteers must pass questions involving other committees through their chairs, who then pass answers back -- a game of telephone that I am frankly shocked no one saw this inevitable result from. Communicating about work that requires precision is hard enough without a mandatory middleman who by their own admission is often not conveying exact words. Did they actually expect this situation not to fail, even if everyone involved has the best of intentions?
I know the org has burned so many more than just azarias, and I urge you to speak up. I have read your posts about turned-away help. I've seen the screenshots where innocuous questions are rounded on with shocking intensity. I know just how many of you volunteered for the org bright with hope and possibility because you believed in this thing that I still want to believe in as well, and ended up quitting or just ghosting out with a much more cynical feeling in your heart. I want to hear from you. This is the moment to come forward and speak; the more who stand up now and acknowledge the problems, the clearer and cleaner the picture of what we're working with we can get, and the stronger we can all be by speaking together. Azarias is, beyond a doubt, willing to continue face-tanking for everyone, but I don't want her to have to do this alone.
And precisely because I still want to believe in the OTW, I also want the opposite. I want your good stories of the org. I want the times you interacted with the OTW itself, someone acting in an official capacity for it, and it went absolutely wonderfully, about the good parts of the organization that I have to believe are still there. I wanna hear about the things implemented or achieved that you believe no one else could have, or would have. I wanna hear about the great co-volunteers who have really made your org work so much better and easier with what they do. About the bonding and the joy and the trust that I desperately hope some of you still have, because I know how much they helped when we were moderating Elfwood back in 2002, very much figuring out what we were doing as we went along. I have to believe these things exist, otherwise I will lose all hope, so tell me about them. Tell me about them so we can learn from them to hopefully help fix the rest.
The org has a commitment to a culture of silence to the point it continues to mandate extremely outdated policies like security through obscurity. This has created problems that aren't just severe, they're chronic. I can't explain why they still pursue this culture. All I can try to do is work around it, because it should be extremely, blindingly clear: it is not working.
And to those right now who desperately wish all this would just go away so they can get back to reading that one WIP that finally updated after forever: would you believe I wish that too? I've become very invested in AO3 over the years. I've become an expert in certain areas of the tagging ecosystem, and believe me, that is not a transferable skill. I have a massive WIP subscription list. I owe the people behind the 2018 search upgrade dinner or something for how much easier it made my fic-finding life. I love that site, flaws and all.
But it does have flaws. We need to step past the reflexive urge to say that openly dealing with those flaws is attacking the archive and the org, because otherwise those flaws will never be fixed, and more people will be hurt. Cracks spread, especially when you have no idea they're there.
So if you're a volunteer, past or present, what I genuinely, sincerely most want you to do right now is sign off from the volunteer channels, go somewhere away from all this, and just think about things for a while. Have you ever seen a policy that made no sense be upheld despite it causing difficulties? Have you ever found yourself with a problem you're not even sure how to solve because of the org's structure? Have you ever noticed a concern a fellow volunteer raised being talked over or swiftly dismissed? Have you ever heard a ready-made solution for a problem be rejected because a homemade solution was supposed to be in the works, only to have it not materialize for years, if ever? (If you haven't, you have now.) Have you ever noticed a committee, project, or certain kind of volunteer being treated as if they were less important to the org than others? (Like, say, perhaps the OTW weibo being planned to shut down because of "excessive workload for the mods", who had actually never even been contacted about it?)
Have you ever seen something else that struck you as wrong, odd, or unnecessary, but at the time just thought it wasn't all that big a deal?
Just think about it. Just think about what you may have seen and just shrugged off or dismissed at the time, that in retrospect maybe you shouldn't have. And even if at the time you quietly went along with it and now you're uncomfortable, I want you to understand that I do not blame you. It's the nature of humanity to have gaps in our awareness that only become obvious after we've learned enough to illuminate them.
Maybe you've really have never seen these kinds of problems at all -- I know that another issue of communication the org has is how extremely siloed the committees are from other, by design; it's very very easy for someone working in Elections to have no real idea how PAC handles their stuff. It's entirely possible some committees are staring at all this in bewilderment because it's so alien to the smooth set-up they have going. And I want you to talk about that, too, because that's good! That's one less thing to worry about, one more bit of evidence that however bad the structural damage turns out to be, the foundations are still sound. One more thing we can learn from.
I don't blame anyone for things that happened when they were unknowing. What I ask now is that you work with me to make things known, to expose those gaps, to bridge that awareness. I want to shine a light on the OTW, what it is, and what it has been, so that we can see what we're truly working with. Please, if you love the org, if you want to see it succeed as badly as I do... work with me. Talk to me. Don't turn away from this. If you were helped, remind me why the org is good. If you were hurt, I'm so sorry someone wasn't there for you then. All I can do is be there now.
I don't believe that the OTW is irretrievable. But that's a condition that will be true if the org maintains its status quo, which includes this culture of silence about the internal workings of the org, bad or good. Break the silence. If this is an organization and an archive of our own, let it be for the voices who have been ignored for far too long as well.
I will be doing my best to keep a list of posts of people who have spoken up on these and related matters, and their topics of discussion, here. I provide my comment section for anyone who wishes to discuss things in it. If you're concerned about maintaining anonymity, I am sorry that I do not have the reliable capacity to moderate anon comments, but if you would like to have me present your story for you, I have created a gmail account, inanabundanceofcaution @ gmail.com. I can only post what is sent to me, not verify it, and I cannot provide a promise that no eyes but mine will see it; again, a realistic and honest assessment of my physical capabilities means that I may have to ask a close friend (not azarias, for a few reasons) for help separating spam from sincere responses.
https://221loislane.tumblr.com/post/720525024411484160/an-account-of-the-current-otwao3-allegations
An overall summary of the situation.
https://chestnut-pod.dreamwidth.org/141175.html
Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW
A speculative overview of the potential organizational problems the OTW faces. Extensive discussion in the comments, some highlighted by the post.
https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1669350441971494914
https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/797384.html
A discussion of some of the many problems with the OTW's handling of CSEM&CSAM concerns. The second post is a mirror of the contents of the first.
https://twitter.com/varlinheau/status/1669705921956651011
A former PAC member speaking out in support for azarias and rahaeli's posts and comments.
https://tei.dreamwidth.org/317019.html
A former PAC member discusses their concerns with the OTW's current fiscal strategy, which may be suffering from the same communication problems.
https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/598577.html?thread=3668924977#cmt3668924977
A highlight of a former volunteer's experience in the CSEM spam attack in 2022, taken from here. transformativeworks.org, the platform they chose to address these concerns on, does not easily allow individual comment linking, necessitating I link it here rather than in the "failures of communication with volunteers" section.
The next day the org sent out an internal message in which they did their best to strongly imply that azarias was somehow involved in the CSEM spam attack volunteers experienced in 2022, one evidently so carelessly thought-through that Legal's portion of the statement blatantly contradicts the Board's stance. You can find the text of that statement here.
This is not actually what I'm going to talk about.
I wanted to talk about it, much sooner than this. A broad, factual laying-out of the situation has been needed for weeks, and I have the advantage of being able to consult one of the chief participants of the story by, at most, walking to the stairs to yell down/up. Unfortunately, if you've never been in a position to try and do such a write-up for a situation that you are this close to, I have a word of advice: don't. Fortunately for me someone else has undertaken such a summary, across a more comprehensive array of topics than I could have managed. Thank you, deeply and sincerely.
I would also love to be able to go in to individually counter some of the minor distortions that are now leading to gleeful nitpicking "takedown" posts and comments, as if this was all some fandom drama that could be solved by pedantic arguments over word-choice. For example, there's quibbling arising from (other) people saying that azarias was "assigned" to handle all the CSAM/CSEM tickets. Azarias volunteered to undertake those tickets because A) that is simply how the system works, you are almost never assigned tickets directly, and indeed there was no mechanism to do so other than verbal directive, and B) she had relevant experience in such work due to her years on LJ Abuse before the SixApart purchase, and believed that, while of course policies would differ, the matter of legitimate CSAM/CSEM would be treated with the same seriousness and support it was given in those days. She continued handling those tickets because of the knowledge that if she did not, the tickets and violations would remain, and have to be taken by another volunteer with less experience with such content.
This urge to take one for the team is a known factor in volunteer organizations, where everyone involved has a natural urge to want to try to help: it's why they volunteered. It's for exactly this reason that tracking volunteer time/commitments is a standard best practice, so that you do not fall into a trap where even with everyone involved having the very best intentions, you accidentally set up a situation where one person is overburdened through people simply being unaware how much is going to one person. Like I said, it's a typical problem, so organizations have over the years developed a comprehensive set of potential strategies to handle it.
The OTW has an endless list of reasons why standard best practice cannot apply to them, why their particular needs prohibit this particular solution, and also that particular solution, and also that other particular solution. Some of them, in isolation, are likely true. Many more difficulties probably relate to conditions that were true once, or in a specific set of circumstances that somehow became generalized; one of the org's founders even discussed being disturbed that the org's early reasoning for not offering membership in exchange for volunteer hours "apparently has trickled down into org culture as 'tracking volunteer hours bad.'" That thread contains many good reasons for a specific practice at a specific time, but freely acknowledges that many of them are no longer valid, and doubtless due for reconsideration. But org leadership has remained hostile to any suggestions along those lines.
When you get that response to as many different kinds of best practices across as many different topics as I know the OTW has objected to over the years, it becomes a systemic issue. And so the org is constantly trying to bodge together homemade solutions, lagging behind the curve, and leaving its volunteers in unnecessarily difficult positions across the org. Many of those same volunteers are ignorant that there even are already-existing solutions that could make their work easier.
This is not the first time major failures have happened as a result of those knowledge-gaps, that institutional opacity. It's not even the first time where communication and commitment-tracking failures have led to a spectacular blow-up centered around one volunteer.
That is what I'm going to talk about today.
Not lim, though I desperately hope lim reads this for reasons that will soon become apparent. Azarias can talk for herself, and has been. Personally, OTW Board, I don't know why you didn't just respond to her initial private request for an apology and a retraction with a half-assed "It was no one's intention to imply that. We apologize if anyone experienced confusion." You ought know she'd quietly go away, because she did after the lies you told her when restoring her account. Simply saying that you never intended the reading that so many took from that statement could have solved many problems. Why didn't you?
Why haven't you still?
But like I said, that's not what I want to talk about today.
What I want to talk about today is the things we don't know we don't know, and how you fix that. And I want to talk to you about what I know so many of you have been feeling, that sense of, "This is all horrible, and I don't know what to do. I don't know how to fix this, but I don't want the OTW to falter and fail, I don't want the archive to go away! I just don't want it to continue with problems like this."
I know exactly how you feel. Because I feel it too. I've been dealing with it for weeks, even while I deal with my own extremely personal, extremely immediate view of the human cost for the OTW's mismanagement.
Azarias has expressed what she wants from the org: a public retraction, posted in the volunteer Slack and on Fail FandomAnon where the message was originally posted, and an apology. I stand behind her on that. As I said, it's not so hard to grant. She didn't even request for the apology to be public. Under the circumstances, I am going to make that request myself.
But to those of you without power to effect that, if you want to know what you can do: start talking.
Incidents like this don't happen purely because of malignant actors. Incidents like this happen when communications break down, and if you take nothing else away from what's been going on, you should still nonetheless be able to gather that the org has failed in communication on multiple fronts. Communication between volunteers, communication between committees, communication between the org and the fans it represents.... Many of the current problems facing the org could have been resolved quite easily with better communication -- a fact they have been getting clear complaints about, and having other crises related to, for years. They know they have a problem. They could have fixed it. Again, why haven't they?
I can't answer that. All I can try to do is what they won't: talk about it, and urge others to do the same. Directly and clearly, unlike current OTW policy, in which volunteers must pass questions involving other committees through their chairs, who then pass answers back -- a game of telephone that I am frankly shocked no one saw this inevitable result from. Communicating about work that requires precision is hard enough without a mandatory middleman who by their own admission is often not conveying exact words. Did they actually expect this situation not to fail, even if everyone involved has the best of intentions?
I know the org has burned so many more than just azarias, and I urge you to speak up. I have read your posts about turned-away help. I've seen the screenshots where innocuous questions are rounded on with shocking intensity. I know just how many of you volunteered for the org bright with hope and possibility because you believed in this thing that I still want to believe in as well, and ended up quitting or just ghosting out with a much more cynical feeling in your heart. I want to hear from you. This is the moment to come forward and speak; the more who stand up now and acknowledge the problems, the clearer and cleaner the picture of what we're working with we can get, and the stronger we can all be by speaking together. Azarias is, beyond a doubt, willing to continue face-tanking for everyone, but I don't want her to have to do this alone.
And precisely because I still want to believe in the OTW, I also want the opposite. I want your good stories of the org. I want the times you interacted with the OTW itself, someone acting in an official capacity for it, and it went absolutely wonderfully, about the good parts of the organization that I have to believe are still there. I wanna hear about the things implemented or achieved that you believe no one else could have, or would have. I wanna hear about the great co-volunteers who have really made your org work so much better and easier with what they do. About the bonding and the joy and the trust that I desperately hope some of you still have, because I know how much they helped when we were moderating Elfwood back in 2002, very much figuring out what we were doing as we went along. I have to believe these things exist, otherwise I will lose all hope, so tell me about them. Tell me about them so we can learn from them to hopefully help fix the rest.
The org has a commitment to a culture of silence to the point it continues to mandate extremely outdated policies like security through obscurity. This has created problems that aren't just severe, they're chronic. I can't explain why they still pursue this culture. All I can try to do is work around it, because it should be extremely, blindingly clear: it is not working.
And to those right now who desperately wish all this would just go away so they can get back to reading that one WIP that finally updated after forever: would you believe I wish that too? I've become very invested in AO3 over the years. I've become an expert in certain areas of the tagging ecosystem, and believe me, that is not a transferable skill. I have a massive WIP subscription list. I owe the people behind the 2018 search upgrade dinner or something for how much easier it made my fic-finding life. I love that site, flaws and all.
But it does have flaws. We need to step past the reflexive urge to say that openly dealing with those flaws is attacking the archive and the org, because otherwise those flaws will never be fixed, and more people will be hurt. Cracks spread, especially when you have no idea they're there.
So if you're a volunteer, past or present, what I genuinely, sincerely most want you to do right now is sign off from the volunteer channels, go somewhere away from all this, and just think about things for a while. Have you ever seen a policy that made no sense be upheld despite it causing difficulties? Have you ever found yourself with a problem you're not even sure how to solve because of the org's structure? Have you ever noticed a concern a fellow volunteer raised being talked over or swiftly dismissed? Have you ever heard a ready-made solution for a problem be rejected because a homemade solution was supposed to be in the works, only to have it not materialize for years, if ever? (If you haven't, you have now.) Have you ever noticed a committee, project, or certain kind of volunteer being treated as if they were less important to the org than others? (Like, say, perhaps the OTW weibo being planned to shut down because of "excessive workload for the mods", who had actually never even been contacted about it?)
Have you ever seen something else that struck you as wrong, odd, or unnecessary, but at the time just thought it wasn't all that big a deal?
Just think about it. Just think about what you may have seen and just shrugged off or dismissed at the time, that in retrospect maybe you shouldn't have. And even if at the time you quietly went along with it and now you're uncomfortable, I want you to understand that I do not blame you. It's the nature of humanity to have gaps in our awareness that only become obvious after we've learned enough to illuminate them.
Maybe you've really have never seen these kinds of problems at all -- I know that another issue of communication the org has is how extremely siloed the committees are from other, by design; it's very very easy for someone working in Elections to have no real idea how PAC handles their stuff. It's entirely possible some committees are staring at all this in bewilderment because it's so alien to the smooth set-up they have going. And I want you to talk about that, too, because that's good! That's one less thing to worry about, one more bit of evidence that however bad the structural damage turns out to be, the foundations are still sound. One more thing we can learn from.
I don't blame anyone for things that happened when they were unknowing. What I ask now is that you work with me to make things known, to expose those gaps, to bridge that awareness. I want to shine a light on the OTW, what it is, and what it has been, so that we can see what we're truly working with. Please, if you love the org, if you want to see it succeed as badly as I do... work with me. Talk to me. Don't turn away from this. If you were helped, remind me why the org is good. If you were hurt, I'm so sorry someone wasn't there for you then. All I can do is be there now.
I don't believe that the OTW is irretrievable. But that's a condition that will be true if the org maintains its status quo, which includes this culture of silence about the internal workings of the org, bad or good. Break the silence. If this is an organization and an archive of our own, let it be for the voices who have been ignored for far too long as well.
I will be doing my best to keep a list of posts of people who have spoken up on these and related matters, and their topics of discussion, here. I provide my comment section for anyone who wishes to discuss things in it. If you're concerned about maintaining anonymity, I am sorry that I do not have the reliable capacity to moderate anon comments, but if you would like to have me present your story for you, I have created a gmail account, inanabundanceofcaution @ gmail.com. I can only post what is sent to me, not verify it, and I cannot provide a promise that no eyes but mine will see it; again, a realistic and honest assessment of my physical capabilities means that I may have to ask a close friend (not azarias, for a few reasons) for help separating spam from sincere responses.
https://221loislane.tumblr.com/post/720525024411484160/an-account-of-the-current-otwao3-allegations
An overall summary of the situation.
https://chestnut-pod.dreamwidth.org/141175.html
Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW
A speculative overview of the potential organizational problems the OTW faces. Extensive discussion in the comments, some highlighted by the post.
https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1669350441971494914
https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/797384.html
A discussion of some of the many problems with the OTW's handling of CSEM&CSAM concerns. The second post is a mirror of the contents of the first.
https://twitter.com/varlinheau/status/1669705921956651011
A former PAC member speaking out in support for azarias and rahaeli's posts and comments.
https://tei.dreamwidth.org/317019.html
A former PAC member discusses their concerns with the OTW's current fiscal strategy, which may be suffering from the same communication problems.
https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/598577.html?thread=3668924977#cmt3668924977
A highlight of a former volunteer's experience in the CSEM spam attack in 2022, taken from here. transformativeworks.org, the platform they chose to address these concerns on, does not easily allow individual comment linking, necessitating I link it here rather than in the "failures of communication with volunteers" section.
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You also made that rejected fix for it, right? That thing absolutely baffles me. Over two years ago, someone walked in and handed them a complete patch for a persistent major problem, and they actually turned it down on the basis that someday they're gonna completely rewrite everything and make it perfect then, once they figure out what that even means. I wonder what method they're even using to determine that? It's certainly not user experience surveys/polls/discussion forums. I genuinely don't know where anyone in the org gets their data on user needs from.
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Yes, this is right. Thank you. This is the part of the story where someone calls out "Damage report!" and it comes filtering back through, Hull breach on decks 3 through 7, life support out in Engineering, casualties on decks 8 and 12, shields holding at 58%, warp containment field holding...
I'm not a volunteer and I never have been (I've never quite made it happen, and the vague sense that all is not well that I've gotten from others has probably discouraged me from applying) but from what I've seen in other orgs, yes, this is right. We have to talk about it. Right now it feels both opaque and worrying. Thank you for calling for damage report, and reports on what's still sound too.
I love fandom and I love AO3 and it all matters so much to so many of us. I hope we can do this.
❤️
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I'm not sure why the resistance to clearer communication practices is so enshrined, at this point. So many of the things that chairs/Board bitterly complain about in terms of their jobs could be reduced with better overall organizational structures, so you'd think they'd be willing to at least try -- worst-case scenario, they get a hell of an I Told You So. As-is, I'm unsure if they know what a Project Manager does. I've gotten the impression some people on leadership positions think it's a role that naturally wields executive power, which I'm sure has gotten a good laugh from any Project Managers reading this, or perhaps just a weary sigh.
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TL;DR: The dysfunction was baked in from the start.
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I have one thing to add to my PAC impressions, which maybe azarias can gut-check. In
And one of the specific things that frustrated me was that the lack of volunteer oversight meant that, well, people on PAC needed to be really certain of their colleagues' trustworthiness, because it would be very possible for a bad actor to fuck shit up for a while without being caught! (For obvious reasons I don't want to lay out exactly what those ways are in public, since they presumably still exist, besides what we already know has been done by a bad actor somewhere within the org.)
So during my time there there was a recruitment drive, and we could volunteer to be on the committee that evaluated applications, which I did. I happened to have two friends apply that round, people who I had known for several years and knew to be truatworthy and organized. And I don't want this to sound like a butthurt "how could anyone reject MY friends!" complaint! I mention it because in a context where a) we really need warm bodies taking tickets, and b) many accepted volunteers drop off quickly before actually putting in much work-- you would think that the goal would be to accept as many people as possible who didn't show obvious red flags, and then continue to evaluate, correct and monitor them over training and beyond. But instead, the evaluation of applicants just seemed... kind of paranoid? It seemed like we were looking for the tiniest of hints that someone might be a bad actor or doing it for the wrong reasons, and in so doing finding plenty of probably meaningless reasons in nitpicking word choice to reject people. And in two cases I knew the stuff was meaningless because I knew the applicants in question personally, but I'm sure there were way more cases where someone who might have been good was thrown into the "what if they're a malicious anti trying to infiltrate? Better not risk it" pile. (Not a real pile, obviously, but that was my impression of the underlying thinking.)
So the fact that there's so little official oversight leads to a situation where volunteer numbers have to be kept artificially and harmfully low-- IIRC, I think my entering "class" had three people in it? Maybe there were more accepted who dropped out before training, idk, but I think of those one is still there, I stayed about a year and a half, and one dropped out after a few months. And it's just not enough!
And obviously more people requires more organization and oversight, which requires new processes and tools, but... yeah, that's the point!