Hello all.
Recently, there have been concerns with how staff have been acting in the staffchat (both on Discord and in IRC, though the former more so) with the leaking of various comments by staff members belittling/being flippant of non-present users in private. Concerns about staff chat are not new, however, and this is merely a single incident in a much larger chain, which suggests it is reoccuring. Recent policy has not alleviated many concerns by users, as the issue of self-policing has come up by critics of staff. As a result, I would like to propose another policy I suggested one week ago, and have decided to propose enacting due to these intense situations.
1. A team of staff users (operating under Community Outreach but not controlled by it) will be compiled according to their trustworthiness in the eyes of the on-site community. This should be collected via consensus of accessible users and general critics of staff. We do not need to take an official vote so as long as a significant amount of people are made aware of who is on this team and there are no major objections. Staff are to have as minimal involvement in this selection process as possible. Staff can, however, make non-binding recommendations of users (including non-staff) in this discussion thread.
2. This team is to watch staff discussion channels both on Discord and IRC, and make summaries of any non-trivial events1 which occur. They will then format these into concise but detailed reports.
3. At the end of the week, the list of events is presented to the Admin-Captain Chat. They are to scan the list for things which cannot be included in the report (see below on what this entails), and remove them. However, if the team is of the majority opinion the expungement is not justified, they will have permission to reverse the expungement.
4. The team will publish the report each Sunday on 05command. Repeat.
Examples of information which will not be included in these recaps will include:
- Personal or sensitive information regarding individual staff members (such as IRL events, compromising data, or information able to doxx people).
- Non-staff discussions of miscellaneous subjects (such as casual, non-SCP discussion).
- Information which may be harmful to a user on the wiki (such as rule-breaking actions of a user being discussed, or a user making an official complaint in #site17 for all staff to see).2
After the Cerastes Disciplinary Threads, there was significant hostility between staff members, especially with individuals in the Admin-Captain Chat. After two staff-wide meetings, where details were clarified and policy suggested, the Admin-Captain Chat Recap (AdReCap for short) was put into place, and was significantly successful in regards to transparency.
The AdReCaps work similar to the system laid out above, with the exception that I have been solely running the recaps, and they are posted to staffchat instead of 05command. They have been operating without issue for nearly six months, and in the meantime two new individuals joined AdCap without making any complaints about its accuracy.
An example of an AdReCap is as such:
Topic: Collections | Apr. 16th, 2021
Important Notes: Collections was absorbed into MAST following approval from CO Captains and Sub Section Heads. The primary reason for this was to provide more resources and J. Staff, as Collections was stagnating in keeping up with tales.
The format of staffchat reports and what level of detail will be recorded is left to the discretion of this team once formed.
While this will not solve all the problems involved with staff transparency, I believe this will help, as it is a step in the right direction. I am hoping to propose more staff changes in the future to help with these problems further.
The topic of discussion is this: should we implement this team with these procedures, and if so, who do we wish to suggest to be on this team?
This discussion is open to all staff members, including Junior Staff.
