The following is based heavily upon the original recap team proposal, found here. Thank you to Yossipossi for laying the foundations of this proposal. Thank you to
OCuin,
gee0765, and
OptimisticLucio for being my co-authors on this proposal.
As you probably remember, about a month and a half ago a proposal was made to establish a new staff initiative to publicly recap the significant goings-on in staffchat for the purposes of accountability, transparency, and communication. This is a modified version of that policy with the same purpose, but with a number of changes having been made to create the best possible policy and compromise for both sides of the issue.
1a. A new, independent staff team known as the Recap Team will be created in order to achieve increased accountability and facilitate certain aspects of communication between staff and the SCP community. This team will not be closed, and new members may be recommended to the Captain and/or Vice Captains by either staff or non-staff. Nominations will be reviewed by both team leadership and the team at large prior to a decision being made on their inclusion, whether through an internal vote or through executive decision by the captain.
1b. In order to determine the initial roster of this team, recommendations will be accepted from both staff and non-staff users. Staff may recommend non-staff that they feel would be fit for the team, and non-staff may recommend staff that they feel would be fit for the team. Upon this team being approved for creation, users who were recommended several times will be shortlisted. All current non-staff who are admitted to the team will be elevated to Junior Staff.
NOTE: The Addendum at the end of this proposal contains additional details regarding the admission of non-staff to this team and their elevation to JS.
2. The Recap Team is to watch staff discussion channels both on Discord and IRC, and make summaries of any non-trivial events which occur. They will then format these into concise but detailed reports. Each recap will encompass a full month, partially in order for them to be released prior to and linked within the monthly Site News.
Trivial information that will not be included in reports may include miscellaneous discussions not related to staff duties, members of the site, or the site itself. This may also include things such as requests for pages to be unlocked, non-disc threads for minor issues, etc. Ultimately, whether or not something is trivial will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
3. Certain information may be expunged from the recaps. Information that may be expunged may include personal or sensitive regarding individual staff members (such as IRL events, compromising data, or information able to doxx people) or information which may be harmful to a user on the wiki (such as rule violations or official complaints in #site17 for all staff to see).
The team will judge which information must be expunged from each recap. However, once a recap has been compiled and polished, it will be passed through AdCap on the first of each month, who will have 72 hours to request expungements, with justification for each request. This justification will not be on the public recap, but it will help recap team understand the requests. If the team decides an expungement by adcap is unnecessary, it can be overturned with the consent of at least 60% of OS+ members of the team.
After being passed through adcap, the recap will be made public to all staff, who will have four days to request an expungement (or other change in the way the information is presented) for a reason related to personal comfort, safety, or another similar reason. However, if the Recap Team has a genuine concern that such a request is a misuse or abuse of the expungement tool, they may address this concern both with the staffer making the request and with Adcap. The requester will be granted an opportunity to justify and defend their request, and if a joint review between the Recap Team and Adcap comes to the conclusion that the request is justified, it will be granted. If a decision cannot be reached by the time the recap should be posted, the expungement will be granted, but will be internally documented for consideration in future cases of suspected misuse. All requests for expungements should be strongly considered before concerns are raised with Adcap. This review procedure should only be used in extreme cases, as it is likely that most requests would be fairly obvious and easy to distinguish between genuine and malicious. Consequences for expungement misuse and abuse will be determined by the recap team and relevant authorities on a case-by-case basis.
4. The team will aim to publish their reports monthly to 05command by the 8th of the month. These reports may be delayed up to the release of the monthly Site News in order to allow conversations taking place over multiple days to conclude, so that the entire discussion can be contained within one recap.
Recaps will be posted in staffchat at least 24 hours in advance to being posted on 05 so that non-recap, non-adcap staff may read them over and may have an opportunity to request last-minute expungements if necessary. If 60% or more of staff at large consider a recap inaccurate, more discussion must occur in order to produce a recap that is agreed to be accurate.
Repeat.
Addendum: The following is not to be considered an integral part of this proposal and should only be voted on as a potential addition to the Recap Team's capabilities. The above proposal may pass without this amendment.
Should the addendum pass, Junior Staff members of the Recap Team will have access to view, but not speak in, staff channels which are normally restricted to OS+, and will be able to contribute to recapping these channels. OS+ channels would still be recapped by OS+ aboard the team if this addendum does not pass. However, the addendum will provide an additional level of accountability to the staffchat recaps, as OS+ channels will not be solely recapped by people who could benefit from excluding certain information that might otherwise be included.
Due to increased sensitivity concerns that the passing of this addendum may raise, its ratification will also allow for a confirmation vote (similar to a promotion thread), in which all current non-staff candidates will be voted on by staff as a body to determine which candidates are fit for limited access to sensitive channels.
As stated in the original proposal, these recaps will likely follow a similar format of operation and presentation to that of the Admin-Captain Recap (or AdReCap) system, with an example presented below:
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.
Also stated in the original proposal, and something that I would like to repeat here, is that this is not a cure-all for the problems with staff transparency that exist at current. However, I believe it is the first step in a longer path that will ultimately lead us to a better place when it comes to accountability, transparency, and communication.
This discussion thread is meant to act as a final check for whether the team should be enacted with this policy, and the procedures outlined within, as its guiding principles. Any suggestions, comments, or criticisms of the policy should be voiced so that they may be properly addressed prior to a vote being held for the team's creation.
This discussion is open to all staff, including Junior Staff. If non-staff users wish for their input to be heard on this thread, they may reach out via PM, or they may use the mainsite mirror of this thread, found here.
This thread will expire in: