Thank you to everyone who's commented on
my previous post on the OTW and Money, especially everyone who recognized how actually painful and difficult a post that was to write. Hearing multiple people say that was remarkably validating.
I'm pulling some stuff out of the comments of my previous post, because the conversation got heated enough that I had to turn off anonymous comments and freeze some threads.
Explicit ground-rules: No name calling, no
ad hominum attacks, and if I feel like you're not interested in a good faith discussion I will start with freezing threads, but may execute my judgement with regards to banning specific commentators.
The Appointment
I elided the stuff that happened after Sanders was removed from her Board candidacy because a post that started out as an attempt to just talk about the attitude towards money in the OTW had grown to ~5700 words with all the context I needed to add. And also because I'm concerned about the future of the OTW, not relitigating old grudges
But that incident has been brought up repeatedly in the comments now, so here we go.
After the Election was concluded, there was one more open seat on the Board, due to the unexpected resignation of a Board member with two years still left on her term. The Board has the right to appoint members to fill vacated seats like this one without going through the elections process, and we chose to do so. We appointed Andrea H, one of the outgoing Board members to the two-year term. Andrea had run in the recent election, so we knew she was willing to stay on the Board.
Our reason goes right back to that "The OTW has no institutional memory" problem.
The OTW Board is set up to have rolling elections so that there are always experienced Board Members around to work with the incoming Board. However, at that point the Board had had so many resignations that this was fundamentally not working as intended, and the 2016 Board was set up to have nobody on it who had joined earlier than 2015.
I was leaving at the end of 2015 no matter what happened, but the Board members who were meant to be staying on for the 2016 term wanted someone around who had more experience then they did. And so we voted Andrea into that vacant seat.
Was this the right choice? I don't know. I've offered our good faith reasoning and you can believe it or not. I will say that in a functioning Organization it wouldn't have been a terribly controversial decision, but we were all aware that we weren't in a functioning Organization at that point, so we really probably shouldn't have been surprised by the reaction.
That said, the accusation that this would have led to her holding two Board seats at the same time, and thus having extra power to prevent the new Board from making decisions is frankly
baffling to me, and the fact that anyone thought that could or would happen is a pretty good indicator that we'd already lost the trust of our membership and nothing we could have said in our defence would have mattered.
It's extra baffling because even if you think we had planned to have her serve two seats at the same time (which again, why??? I genuinely do not see a benefit to this), those two seats would have been on the existing 2015 Board, not on any future Board with newly-elected members, so this hypothetical double Board posting would have served none of the vague nefarious purposes we were being accused of having.
The Confidentiality Breach
One of the reasons we were accused of unethical behaviour was that it turned out Andrea had come in last in the 2015 Election, a fact we had no way of knowing before it was thrown in our faces.
The reasons we didn't know? Sharing that information was (and still is) explicitly against the OTW Elections Committee Confidentiality Policy.
Per the
OTW Elections Confidentiality policy active at the time:
Results Data must be kept in Elections Locked Spaces until the Elections Chair has made a formal announcement of the results to the Board and the membership. If the software determining results returns any form of ranking successful candidates, at no time may those rankings be disclosed to anyone not directly working with the software, including uninvolved Elections Staff and the Board.
Emphasis mine.
There's no wiggle room there. What the Elections Chair did by disclosing that information both internally and externally was a direct violation of the Confidentiality Policy they had agreed to upon taking their position and in an even remotely functional organisation it would have cost them that job.
We already knew we couldn't trust the Elections Chair, particularly regarding confidential information, but the fact that she broke confidentiality that blatantly and with full support of the incoming Board members still shocks me.
The question of why we didn't clarify any of this at the time keeps coming up and I have two questions in return.
- How do you know we didn't try to explain ourselves through the proper internal channels?
- And what part of anything I have described above makes you think the majority of our volunteers and members would have believed any public statement we made?
After Sanders' firing and before Andrea's appointment, we did in fact offer to discuss our rationale and decision-making with the Chair of the Elections Committee. The relevant email thread included the OTW Legal Committee and outside Legal counsel because they had been involved in advising us on our decision.
This was a clear offer to give the Elections Chair more information than could be made public, because of their role in the OTW, in an effort to explain our actions and with the hope of working with them to clarify our public messaging. The Chair of the Legal committee informed the Chair of Elections that some parts of the conversation might be confidential because legal advice is confidential by default.
The Chair of Elections informed us that they were unwilling to have any conversations with Legal counsel present because they wanted to be able to post anything we told them directly on their personal social media.
At that point we replied with the same boilerplate language we'd given them before. It was clear there was no conversation to be had.
The Handoff
An anonymous commenter on my previous post said,
Here's what helps with institutional memory: documentation, clear processes, and handoff. Not this petty nonsense.
I was in fact trying really hard not to be petty, but if petty nonsense is what you want, I have some great petty nonsense for you.
At that time, at term turnover the OTW email archives and chat rooms were purged and all information deleted from OTW servers. Prior to 2014 Basecamp chat documents were also purged. I'm using past tense because I don't actually know if this is still policy.
I went into my email just now and found the relevant announcement that went out in late 2014.
At the end of each term, Volunteers & Recruiting organizes and completes the end of term purge of data from organization tools. The purge of mailing lists and Campfire transcripts will begin on December 28, 2014 at 0001 UTC to be completed by January 1, 2015. Please organize with your staff and archive any necessary information in your section of the wiki before 0001 UTC on December 28.
We will not be purging Basecamp in 2014. However, we encourage everyone to look over their area, archive completed items (including writeboards, to-do lists, templates and files) on the wiki and remove the items from Basecamp, and delete anything that's no longer necessary for day-to-day work.
I can't find the 2015 email. Either I've deleted it at some point or it didn't go out until after our resignation.
This data purge especially included the Board email lists and chat rooms. Board discussions are often confidential and they are specifically confidential to the people having those conversations, not to all Board members present and future. This means the people involved in the conversations are able to save records of them, but people who were not part of those conversations cannot independently access them.
Resigning before the official end of the term and having no Board carryover limited our time to do that documentation, but we did what we could and we contacted the incoming Board and offered to discuss handoff with them.
The incoming Board refused to respond to our emails. Any of our emails.
We had documentation of our decisions in the form of
the minutes of each public Board meeting. And to the best of my knowledge, closed and confidential minutes are accessible in some form to future Boards. It's just the conversations before the decisions that are not.
We really would have liked to have done a proper handoff, where we showed the new Board where to find that information and answered any clarifying questions. That option was denied us.
Since the incoming Board had supported Elections in breaching their written Code of Conduct. There was no way in hell we weren't making sure the record of our confidential decision-making wasn't purged from OTW servers before we left. We contacted VolCom and made sure the Board mailing lists and Campfire chat were purged before our stated resignation date.
As an aside, at one point it was actually unclear if the outgoing Treasurer would be able to resign with the rest of the Board, because the incoming Treasurer had failed to respond to her emails asking for the information needed to transfer the Treasurer role to them. Resigning without doing that handoff and thus leaving the OTW without a Treasurer for some unknown length of time would have put the outgoing Treasurer in breach of the OTW bylaws.
Final Thoughts
I realised something when writing this post that I couldn't quite articulate when writing the previous one.
At a certain point some of us chose to prioritise our commitment to our confidentiality oaths and our Fiduciary Duty and Duty of Care to the OTW above our personal reputations within and without the OTW.
At the time I thought that was a worthy exchange. I was willing to sacrifice my reputation if the result was institutional change to the OTW. The most heartbreaking revelation of the current conversations has been the confirmation that we needn't have bothered. Absolutely none of that institutional change seems to have survived us.
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