Halfway won't be far enough

[branchandroot]

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.

Comments

[foxinthestars]

I wasn't even up to reading the post when I saw it come up on unofficialnews... (Although skimming over it, I don't even really remember the letter to the tag wrangling list it talks about; maybe it was in the middle of the latest round of "Category Change" discussion).

But it strikes me that taking to a soapbox about what channels and tones people should and shouldn't use to criticize you is in itself not something I would expect from a professional entity, profit or non.

[synecdochic]

oh my ever-loving god, that *letter*. the post is pretty bad too, but that *letter*, oh my *god*.

barring a few personality types who are going to be bitter and negative about anything, if you're seeing negativity bad enough to want to write a scolding mommying cult-of-nice letter to an entire group, in front of the entire group, instead of contacting people privately to try to get to the root of *why* they're so desperately unhappy and see what organizational changes you can effect to make them stop being so unhappy and negative, it's a *really bad sign*. and public scolding like that is almost always the worst thing you can do in a situation like that, because then people are unhappy, negative, and feeling micro-managed and condescended to like a two-year-old instead of being predisposed to figure out ways to make them feel not-unhappy. (not to mention, the nonspecifity means that now everyone's going to be paranoid and wondering whether the rebuke means *them*.)

praise frequently in public, discipline gently, in private, and with concrete specifics and suggested examples of ways that things should have been done instead. that's like management 101, people!

[quinara]

I don't really know what to say about "If you expect us to act like a nonprofit org, you have to treat us as a nonprofit org"... I mean, I couldn't be bothered to read most of that post because it was so impenetrable, but the idea of calling on all of fandom (basically) to reify the OTW's existence from the outside-in just boggles me. Surely if they were a (functional) nonprofit org then they would act like it in all instances, even if they were forced to act like a nonprofit org coming under fire from the blogosphere. You can't blame the users for throwing curveballs when all they've done is, well, use the system.

The call to treat the OTW like 'a nonprofit org' seems to me like a request to treat it like 'a successful nonprofit org' where all the offical channels etc. function correctly. As far as I'm concerned, that's not something a userbase awards a system out of good will - that's something that happens naturally when an organisation earns it.