"We want more transparency from staff" would get replies of "thank you for telling us that this is what you want, we will work on that", but then there would still be issues of staff pushing forward making decisions without updates or giving an opportunity for input. This would, inevitably, cause a response of "where's the transparency we asked for?" and create a further perception that staff was not listening or only saying what they felt was the "right" answer at the moment.
First, to get it out of the way, I want to ask for specific examples of issues that you believe need to be more transparently presented or communicated with the community. We can’t make active changes without a specific direction.
We did discuss this in the SCPD discord when the townhall channel was active- what I was personally involved with involved transparency in regards to Disciplinary and Anti-Harassment Team stuff. Some of that was a clear misunderstanding on some users’ parts about how open we are with user history or appeals - I don’t actually recall who but I do distinctly remember somebody talking to me about how people couldn’t defend themselves from a ban, and that ban reasons weren’t recorded anywhere. I spent about 13 or 14 hours total over the last 3 weeks chatting in SCPD and don’t feel like searching through all that to figure out who so whatever, it doesn’t matter.
Point is, this was false - real quick, I’ll summarize how it works, in case other readers of this thread don’t know our process. See the footnote here.
This is not to imply *you* didn’t know this. It’s the fact that somebody I vaguely recall wasn’t a newbie wasn’t aware of 05’s Disciplinary section or how appeals worked, and this was deeply concerning to me. A section on ban appeals was recently revamped and added to the Site Rules, and I’ve privately been trying to figure out a way that Disciplinary/Non-Disc sections on 05 can somehow be more prominently displayed without like, creating an unnecessary focus. 05command is the public staff-only wiki for our policy and how-we-run-the-wiki discussion, and everything on it is viewable to anybody for transparency reasons. However, it’s still a workspace first, for staff to use. Maybe next time we update the front page.
Either way, the transparency of discussion regarding Disc and AHT stuff are both different discussions, which tended to get conflated in SCPD discussions I was in, but are both reasonable concerns.
Disciplinary discussion, like about how staff approaches somebody who’s causing issues or somebody who comes back with a ban appeal or whatever, is usually fairly dry and requires a level of nimbleness and freedom of conversation. It’s often an active discussion, and can often involve the review of assorted logs and memories of events involving the users. My personal concern (not in a professional capacity and not the team’s official stance) is that if we were to have these discussions on 05command, it could often come off as dragging users through the mud with multiple staff members giving their opinions to one another about how to proceed with discipline and how relatively severe behaviour was.
For AHT, which is a separate team from Disc, logs and reports and discussion are kept private exclusively to protect victims of harassment. However, the opaqueness of the process and perception of AHT bans were concerns from several users (and validly so), and required a significant amount of discussion, both internally and externally. We’ve since enacted new policies regarding transparency, including new policy on summarizing harassment bans more effectively and clearly on 05, and editing/expanding on past ban reasons. I’m actually a huge fan of the new process.
The above were the major points of concern that were raised to us, or at least the major ones I spent much of my time discussing. They were very specific points that were raised, and for AHT we made major changes once we figured out a healthy balance between the anonymity of victim privacy and open communication for reasoning behind AHT bans. When clear and material suggestions for new points of transparency come up in the future, I’m more than happy to work with the rest of staff to figure out how to meet them.
Concerns raised about the tone and/or unintended implications of the way a staff post or message was written would, without fail, be met with "that's not what we meant" and an expectation that this solved the problem. Concern were being raised because it was understood that the tone and/or implications were unintentional on staff's behalf, but could come across badly. The staff response to being told that something could be interpretedly badly was an insistence that it wasn't meant to be bad. To me, it felt a lot more like the response was to prove that staff wasn't wrong, rather than fixing the source of potential issues.
This is the kind of concern that should be raised to Team Captains (of users that communicate poorly, inaccurately, or with really bad tone), or Admins. Within the townhall there were issues regarding coherency between statements or how staff came off phrasing-wise, but I believe some of that was because of the sheer hours-long discussions and back-and-forths being undertaken and the large number of staff involved. People misword things under those conditions, and until the latter half of that period of time staff weren’t doing a great job communicating among *one another*. It’s the same problem that companies resolve by having a spokesperson.
More generally, though - staff nearly always double check with other staff and get review on non-boilerplate staff posts. And even if they don’t, mods and admins have the ability to have other staff edit their staff posts for tone or clarity. It happens all the time, and it’s not uncommon for them to be changed after feedback by other staff or even non-staff. I’m having this exact post reviewed by Zyn and others, and sent a few PMs recently I needed to get checked by other staff first. We don’t want to miscommunicate or insinuate negative implications, and part of a requirement of staff is to be reasonably open to conversation like this.
There were questions about why the process of choosing liaisons seemingly did not line up with the process that was explained to users. The initial staff replies failed to discuss that the process for choosing liaisons was not just volume of support for the liaisons, which was the answer being sought. Instead, responses were about why the specific liaisons were chosen (despite users questioning the "how" of choosing and not the "why"), or prompting people to bring their concerns to staff about the chosen liaisons being fit for the position (despite users stating that they had little issue with the ability of people who were chosen).
In our haste to get the liaison system up and running by the time the town halls themselves were, we ended up forgetting that not every part of our thought process is evident to everyone else. This is something we’ve done before and is a large part of why the Town Halls are happening in the first place - we're constantly trying to improve this. We're learning a TON with this first town hall and know how to more cleanly handle the next.
While the process for choosing the liaisons absolutely includes taking into account community support for a potential candidate, we also tried to pick candidates who we felt were able to best represent different demographics of the community. Kaktus, for example, is a long-time user who has been part of the wiki longer than some (if not most) staff members. Rounderhouse is an admin to our sister wiki as well as being present in a lot of unofficial SCP-related social areas. PlaguePJP was chosen to hopefully represent the newer members of the community as they haven’t been present as long as the other two chosen candidates but still garnered vocal support.
We made sure that the candidates we chose had at least some vocal support - we were never going to throw just anyone into the position. Ultimately, there’s not even a reason you have to use these candidates as your third-party poster. You can confide in anyone you trust and have them post for you, and they can be up front about it or not. The liaisons are simply a system put in place in order for it to be a more ‘official’ avenue of anonymous posting, and so some less-connected users might have a person to reach out to if they don’t otherwise know how to connect with us.
As for HOW we chose these particular liaisons, a huge chunk of the staff team (pretty much everyone present to do so) discussed each candidate at length amongst each other and decided based upon the factors above, over the course of about three or four days.
I think all of these issues boil down to a failure to change mindset. It's easy for anyone to say that they will make changes. It's much harder to actually make those changes. I think staff does want changes that will improve this site, because to become a staff member requires a genuine love for the site itself. The problem is that there's not enough of a desire to change how staff functions across all members of staff. It isn't enough to have a few people, or even many people, who want things to change. It requires everyone be willing to make the changes on a personal level. It means that all staff members need to be willing to change the way they think, be willing to be challenged and hear the things they don't want to hear, and be willing to change what they say, do, and think.
Unfortunately, this is a slow process. Fortunately, it can start as soon as right now.
I agree. I *also* believe that it’s a presentation problem. It’s difficult for most members to see how staff function, because a creative writing website is not set up in a way that prominently displays inter-staff discussion or major changes. The sheer volume of other content (read: fiction posted) completely drowns out the level of content posted to 05command. The main wiki does not have a place to clearly display staff discussion (and I don’t think it should; that’s not what anybody comes to SCP-Wiki for), and 05command is completely open for reading but is designed for the utility of the staff’s usage rather than prominent visibility to non-staff. (For people who don’t know how - 05command.wikidot.com -> sidebar -> Staff Forum -> there you are)
So while we HAVE made a *lot* of changes in how staff approach their work, new staff policy, editing of old policy to be more effective and streamlined, have new staff members promoted and added four times a year, and keep records on basically every major decision, it simply isn’t super visible.
I would like to take the opportunity to directly state that anytime a reader has any question at all about staff work or how a topic is approached or how a discussion went down/is going, they are always, *always* welcome to ask and someone will totally tell them what’s up. We keep no secrets outside of anti-harassment stuff, and our readers are always welcome to ask how things are moving. I encourage this mindset in my peers, for us to always try and meet readers’ concerns halfway and in good faith. It helps the wiki be a better place, right?
It’s a constant process. Always improving and growing.
