On a more conceptual level, this does worry me though. It enshrines the admins as drivers of policy and staff direction which, while I’ve vaguely heard was the intention from the get-go, feels unhealthy and unsustainable for the site in the long term.

There is a draft which further explains the policy process in general, but to clarify, the original aim of the team structure was not that administration is the only place policy can come from. The idea is that administrators are policy experts, and either drive new policy themselves, or are resources to help other staff members in developing their own policy. Ensuring they have the information they need, access to members of staff who they need to talk to, and helping working through issues like conflicts with other policies or teams. The requirement of working with administrators is not that admins have a veto over all proposed policy, but that all proposals, even those admins disagree with, have gone through due diligence that avoids any big problems or incompatibilities.

Regarding your point about admins being a minority of staff, I have two comments.

Firstly, the original design worked because admins were not supposed to also be captains. By not needing to spend any time on executive duties, your full-time work, even if you're Reserve, could wholly dedicated to writing new policy or guiding other staffers through policy. We are obviously very far from returning to this ideal, and if you have any ideas about how to help move us towards that, I'm glad to hear them.

Secondly, the goal is to not funnel or gatekeep policy. In some ideal world, 100% of staff would be fully knowledgeable and competent with policy matters, but outside of that, there needs to be some minimum group of staffers (whether they're called "administrators" or not) who have that knowledge and can help ensure policy does not cause preventable problems. As part of fixing our administration with regards to policy, we also need to set up a process by which staffers can become educated on our policy and can help fulfill this role (which is also an administrative promotion track).

Overall, I am definitely with you in wanting to reimagine administration. We've had an issue in the adcap era where admins are just "the people at the top", exactly like in the olden days before Moose and Troy came up with the team structure, and we can learn a lot from the fixes they made in that era, and ensuring that any proposed policies which seem like reforms don't actually entrench problematic structures from that time which are potentially non-obvious now, since the team structure is not a new initiative.

I still think it would be better of people just bucked up and used the channel this sort of thing is meant for

I am just not inclined this is a sustainable way for things to work, I think we need to make structural changes. To fix longstanding problems we need to iterate, that is, discussing problems, proposing solutions, implementing something, evaluating how it worked, and iterating again. Administrative isolation is a wider problem, and will need to be resolved from multiple angles, of which this policy is one proposal.

I understand the concern regarding formalizing a separation. My main concern is that presently this separation already exists, and that by creating an intermediate space we can help break that down; setting aside the "just use #staff-discussion" anyways suggestion, are there other constructions you would support which would avoid formalizing this but would help bridge this gap?

For longer conversations this is a problem, but as stated in other posts - the solution is for those to be either threaded or on 05

I'll discuss this more on the other proposal, but O5 is a different kind of platform from chat that I don't think is specifically relevant to what this proposal is trying to address. For conversations that are in #staff-discussion, it does not seem that threading is the rule rather than the exception (and they can be difficult to discover because things scroll off screen). I'm also not sure there is a great way of bringing admins' attention to a topic for discussion that doesn't require an @Admin ping for every discord thread created. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what exactly you're envisioning when it comes to use of #staff-discussion for mundane, but admin-originating policy discussion.

As mentioned in my response to hungrypossum, the #admin-policy-feedback channel is intended to pair with the read-only channel, so there's a clear place to discuss items there.

this is… honestly worse than if it was just a duplicate of #staff-questions. you end up with admins discussing policy in one channel, then the rest of staff discussing it in another channel at the same time — this seems not ideal and i can't see it being anything except detrimental to the whole separation/isolation thing

On a more conceptual level, this does worry me though. It enshrines the admins as drivers of policy and staff direction which, while I’ve vaguely heard was the intention from the get-go, feels unhealthy and unsustainable for the site in the long term.

A group of probably never more than 10% of staff, and the most overworked and generally less engaged (as a result of being here for a much longer time - this isn’t a problem or an accusation though) 10% of staff at that continuing to take this spearhead for site policy is a recipe for stalled policy and stagnation. We can see this in several projects taken on by the Admin Team or by individual admins, then spread too thin, fail to make progress, while still under ‘dibs’ so nobody else can progress them either. We’ve definitely made massive leaps in this recently, as we can see in large swathes of policy being headed by us little folk, but this works in conflict to how Adminship’s been described to me in the past, with policy supposedly supposed to go through admins/admin contacts without fail.

With this policy only furthering this idea of admin primacy in policy, we need to discuss admin’s role in a rapidly growing staff on a rapidly growing site, as the current status quo is a recipe for burnout and disengagement from our most important members of staff.

Thankfully, we have a 45 day pause where we aren’t doing much coming up, and I think this would be a perfect time to discuss admin’s role on staff in conjunction with this policy. It’s a conversation we’re going to need to have eventually, and with both this policy going through and the voting hiatus I can’t think of a better time to have it.

Some admins have time constraints or other factors that preclude the kind of extensive time investment needed to engage with #staff-discussion, which would preclude them from participating in administrative work if non-sensitive matters was carried out there. (I've mentioned this issue a number of times, and it's something I want to improve as part of integrating administration better with staff as a whole).

I feel like the issue here is less with the state of staff-discussion and moreso with the admins who feel like they need to read the entirety of the channel's backlog to participate in it.

The majority of conversations that occur in the channel are fairly short and to the point, but you are right that there are a lot of them. That's why most staffers don't feel the need to backlog all that much unless they join mid-conversation or someone asks them to look for something specific. Most of the time, you really don't need to, and you can trust that if you missed something said earlier, someone else will tell you so.

For longer conversations this is a problem, but as stated in other posts - the solution is for those to be either threaded or on 05, hopefully the latter option. Those conversations happen once every few weeks, regardless, so it's not like it's a constant issue that blocks anyone from participating.

I know that what you said does not apply to all admins, and there are a handful who do regularly participate in staff-discussion, but regarding the admins who refuse to leave the metaphorical room, the better solution is to trust other staffers to catch you up (if needed) rather than micromanage the entire chat log.

Also:

As you know, #staff-discussion is a very busy channel, and it's difficult to follow any particular topic.

So make a thread for any important topics that admins don't want to get buried. People are doing this, but not enough.

That said, with those examples provided, I'm more amenable to the idea. FWIW I was never rejecting the notion that this was a transparency change at all, just that it was primarily a transparency change, as it was framed in the initial post and in the replies. I think it would've been much easier if we started by agreeing what it was mostly for rather than the slightly-misleading transparency point, which led to the ultimately-irrelevant argument that genuinely sensitive things would go into the sensitive chat anyway. Waste of our time.

I agree that we need to improve the state of #staff-discussion, but in the mean time simply chiding administration for not engaging with it as-is is not going to result in it actually being used for routine discussion.

I still think it would be better of people just bucked up and used the channel this sort of thing is meant for, but there is a limited amount any one person can do there. To add on to this, I want to echo Lucio's point — this does have a (possibly unintentional) effect of codifying the separation. Administrative isolation is a wider problem, and I don't want anyone to be laboring under the delusion that this can be solved with one channel. While I can definitely appreciate that this proposal shows there is a desire to bridge that gap, I think that part of the aforementioned gap comes from treating admins' contributions as fundamentally More Important than wider staffs, which creating a sequestered space for it kind of inevitably does. Lucio is right; on some level, real lasting change can only come from you guys telling each other to do the uncomfortably, sucky, hard thing and take matters to #staff-discussion or O5command when they should be taken there.

To illustrate this I can go through some recent topics of discussion within admin chat:

• Starting work on drafts for these policy threads
• Activity status of two staffers
• Working on drafts for the policy threads
• Wikidot issues
• The Russia discussion that later also happened in staff chat
• Pre-launch policy thread discussion
• Concerning behavior by a user
• Post-launch policy thread discussion

Most of this is non-sensitive and does not need to be in a sensitive channel. And as you can see, a lot of this really is policy, or at least policy-adjacent. Hopefully this is useful as an example to illustrate why I think this proposed policy is helpful.

This is an ease-of-use change, but it is also a transparency change. We could continue discussing all of this in admin chat like we have been, that doesn't pose a problem to us. But it benefits staff as a whole if discussion happens by default in the public channel, so if it happens to concern someone, or a staff member has a question, or additional information, then they aren't left out of the loop there.

I agree that we need to improve the state of #staff-discussion, but in the mean time simply chiding administration for not engaging with it as-is is not going to result in it actually being used for routine discussion. As I mentioned above there are material reasons that is not the case, and while improving #staff-discussion is one aspect of a solution, breaking apart the overly-secret admin blackbox is another.

This is correct. The reason for the creation of the policy discussion channel that all staff can comment in is to provide a space to discuss what admins are openly talking about, but without crowding out the public read-only admin channel.

You misunderstood our point — that without examples thereof, we're more inclined to think that the lion's share of administrator work that happens in administrative channels is already too sensitive for wider staff, which is why it's there to begin with. Creating these channels wouldn't change that reality. Most admin-level stuff would fall into the sensitive channel (so no outward-facing change there), and the stuff that would go in the channel people can see — could just go in #staff-discussion anyway. I think it would be much more practical and efficient to just keep the sensitive stuff in the admin channel as is, and encourage non-sensitive stuff to be moved to the appropriate existing channel rather than create new ones.

The way I see it, this isn't actually a transparency change; this is an ease-of-use change for admins to make it easier for them to discuss policy without the hustle and bustle of #staff-discussion. The transparency is just an appreciated adjunct. Now, I have no issue with making it easier for admins to take part in policy work, but I'd just rather do it in a way that isn't A) redundant and B) actually changes the process in some meaningful way, rather than just create a room to do it in whose primary attribute is "not #staff-discussion".

edit: hit ctrl+s lol

I agree that default use of sensitive channels is a problem. Moose and I have discussed a sensitive discussion policy to codify what exactly sensitive channels are, and mechanisms to ensure that regular discussion does not end up accumulating there. I think it makes sense to work on that as one of the next policies to roll out.

I dislike the current admin-captain arrangement, which iirc was a compromise at the time. Now that the adcap channel is largely unused compared to its former state, I think having it be js+ or os+ like other staff spaces makes a lot more sense than having it be mod+.

Anyway, like gee, I can't imagine there's a particularly large overlap in the Venn diagram of "admin things other staff can see" & "admin things other staff can't comment on".

This is correct. The reason for the creation of the policy discussion channel that all staff can comment in is to provide a space to discuss what admins are openly talking about, but without crowding out the public read-only admin channel.

As mentioned in the main post, too much administrative business is hidden away unnecessarily, and given that administrators need to focus and assist with policy first and foremost, this influenced the choice of channel name (#admin-policy-discussion). Given that other staff could read the discussion but not comment on it, but may wish to also participate in the discussion, the idea was to create a channel especially for that purpose. #staff-discussion, as mentioned, is currently far too noisy to be useful as a place for admins to consistently see responses or commentary about what's being talked about in #admin-policy-discussion.

If the purpose is feedback on admin-level policy discussion only, then I'm ok with it.

Right, this is the only intent here. I don't think any admins feel that an "appointment system" makes any kind of sense for interfacing with staff, especially since we're too isolated and need to better integrate our communications there.

If the argument is "well admins should only conduct business in #staff-discussion", I think it's important to understand why this is not already the case. As you know, #staff-discussion is a very busy channel, and it's difficult to follow any particular topic. (This was the intent behind the #staff-discussion thread proposal, though this seems unpopular, and I'll comment on the proposal there). For admins who are active but cannot devote inordinate amounts of time to reading through all of backscroll, this is not a useful place to hold administrative discussion, since it will be lost or very difficult to find.

We absolutely do want to improve the connectedness of administration with the rest of staff, and I believe this proposal is a good first step in that direction. When it comes to your concern that "Sensitive channels can very quickly turn into the default channel", well, this is already the case, and is something we should fix.

Anyway, like gee, I can't imagine there's a particularly large overlap in the Venn diagram of "admin things other staff can see" & "admin things other staff can't comment on". Stuff in group 1 should just go in #staff-discussion (and hopefully is already — right?), stuff in group-2 will just go into the sensitive channel with no difference. Of course, I could just be wrong here - and I think yes, examples would go a long way in changing my mind.

now, this is obviously an improvement over the existing setup. but, there's a few issues:
1) i don't trust that this will actually take much out from behind the blackbox. this isn't a vague 'i dont trust admins' comment - i simply don't understand how there'd be a significant amount of discussion in admin chat that's not too sensitive for other staff to see but *is* too important for them to comment on. like. maybe i'm missing something here but i feel like a good 80% of admin chat discussion will still be happening behind closed doors (i have pulled this number out of thin air it may be slightly inaccurate). i guess what would help here is a few examples of discussions which have happened in the existing admin chat that would occur in the open one if this proposal passes
2) this makes staffchat permissions kinda super insane lol. mostly because of how this interacts with adcap - we've got admin + captain chat only visible by moderator level staff and above, but admin chat (previously more exclusive) is now visible by all staff, including js? obviously the stratification we have rn is unnecessary but having weird complex shit like this doesn't seem ideal either

[…] and more generally, as a direct line of communication with the administration when needed

Any reason why this can't happen in the preexisting staff channels - like #staff-questions, which actually is for asking more experienced staff questions? Agreeing with Lucio on this, admins should be reachable in all work channels, and I feel that making another channel specifically for this would add another wall between admins and non-admins, instead of making all of staff more connected. If the purpose is feedback on admin-level policy discussion only, then I'm ok with it. Giving it a broader scope would just make it a "you have to make an appointment go through this channel if you want to see an admin" channel, which doesn't sit well with me.

Adding these channels, on their own, will not solve the administration's distance from the rest of staff. If half of the admins are holing up in a room, the solution isn't to add a window to the room so we can all see how they're holed up in there. It'll help close the gap, certainly, but the only actual fix to this issue being other admins convincing them to leave the room.

Sensitive channels can very quickly turn into the default channel if people refuse to step outside and no one else calls them out on it, which I hope will not be the case, but felt it would be necessary to mention.

I am always in favour of more transparency. There might be some implementation issues, but the idea is good and if there are problems with implementing this we can tackle that bridge when we get to it.

In the original design of the team structure, the primary purpose of administration is to manage and assist with policy. However, due to compounding difficulties in staff-wide policy discussion, admins have been increasingly cloistered from the rest of staff since that time, with the current admin chat being used for almost all administrative business, rather than the limited use role it had back then.

As such, we are proposing new channels in staffcord to improve transparency, help intra-staff engagement, and better facilitate the administration's role in policy:

• #admin-policy-discussion: Read-only for JS+. A location where administrative staff discusses most site happenings, events, and policy. The goal is for this channel to replace most of the current functions of #current-admins, with the latter beginning to shift into an #admin-sensitive type channel.
• #admin-policy-feedback: Open for JS+. This is where staff can ask questions or discuss items that occur in #admin-policy-discussion, and more generally, as a direct line of communication with the administration when needed. Regular discussion should not be here but should be in staff discussion or another appropriate channel.

Additionally, to facilitate staff's migration during this period, we are suggesting the following temporary channel, to be archived at the end of the period:

• #policy-overhaul-discussion

Mainsite Mirror: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-14564024/discussion-staffcord-channel-creation