branchandroot: oak against sky (Default)
Branch ([personal profile] branchandroot) wrote2012-08-04 06:32 pm
Entry tags:

Halfway won't be far enough

Ah, the benefits of deciding to finish something else before writing about the latest note on OTW: other people have already stated my position succinctly in the first few comments.

Which is to say, saying that "If you expect us to act like a nonprofit org, you have to treat us as a nonprofit org" by offering constructive criticism via centralized organs of communication is assuming that the OTW has shown sufficient evidence of professionalism to justify such an attempt. This is, I will allow, a difficult thing to do, precisely because the organization has such a lot of deeply unprofessional and bad-communication history to overcome.

But that history isn't going to go away, and it's firmly attached to the organization's name and continuity. The fact that the complement of people in charge is somewhat different, now, than it was for years worth of deeply frustrating failure to respond to constructive and productive criticism does not erase those years or the suspicion they engendered. There may be more avenues of communication open, but they are still not being advertized as forcefully as they need to be. There may be changes in the internal structure of the org, but no one outside, and apparently precious few inside, of it can tell because those are not well publicized either. Except, I would note, in a lot of unofficial entries that do an end-run around the official outlets.

So, no. The members and contributors who have already given good faith and had it broken are not going to give it again easily. First, there has to be some more sustained demonstration that good faith will not be just one more heartbreaking investment of good emotion/time/money thrown after bad.

The most good faith the organization has earned back from me, so far, is to wait and see.
erinptah: Madoka and Homura (madoka)

[personal profile] erinptah 2012-08-06 04:10 am (UTC)(link)
Mmmmyep.

I do believe the workgroup when they say they want wrangler input...it just feels like they weren't prepared to accept it quite yet, or something, and did a panicflail when it turned out a bunch of us had opinions already.

Rereading the letter, it sounds like maybe there's an official What Gets Shared Between Channels policy that's blocking the wrangler/workgroup liaison from taking what gets said on the wrangler ML and copying it to the workgroup? Still, you would think the liaison could be empowered to say "hey, anyone who doesn't want their opinions here to be locked down under org privacy policies, just say so at the top of the email."

IDEK. It's a weird situation all around.
ruric: (Default)

[personal profile] ruric 2012-08-06 04:18 pm (UTC)(link)
Can I ask where is the person who is clapping with glee because of the the input from the wranglers? And is (hopefully) assembling it into a massive overview to post back to the list with a "this is what we think you've all suggested have we covered everything" email?

Because, Jesus, if I got that sort of input from projects I was working on I'd be rolling around in the corner in all the feedback making seal noises of joy!
erinptah: Madoka and Homura (madoka)

[personal profile] erinptah 2012-08-06 06:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm not going to give specific names because I'm not sure what privacy expectations individual people have for the ML :/ Again with a brief/general outline:

There was not, sadly, sealclapping. The initial officially-sanctioned message went something like "hey, we're doing this workgroup thing, and we just want you to know that we'll be consulting tag wranglers about it at some point!" Plus some examples of the kinds of issues they expected to be looking at.

That sparked a conversation over the next three days, which featured ~20 individual wranglers and added up to ~55 messages. During this time the official lines we got were the ones I characterized as (honest and well-meaning, don't get me wrong) panicflailing -- along the lines of "we only just started, we haven't even done anything yet, sorry the lines of communication haven't been great, we will definitely use all this feedback, check out the meeting minutes for details!"

Six days after the last message in this conversation, we got the letter on criticism, as quoted in [personal profile] ira_gladkova's post. I haven't seen anything else related on the ML since.
lady_ganesh: A Clue card featuring Miss Scarlett. (Default)

[personal profile] lady_ganesh 2012-08-10 12:41 am (UTC)(link)
NGL, by the time I left the tag wrangling group, that was exactly how I felt they felt about me, all the time.