An Official Statement and Apology to Akimoto regarding Promotions

An Official Statement and Apology to Akimoto regarding Promotions

DrBleep 13 Oct 2021 22:46

This is a formal apology to Akimoto on behalf of site administration.

A number of errors in communication and diffusion of responsibility on our part led to Akimoto being removed from consideration for promotion. Specifically:

• On Thursday, 2021/09/30, Bleep announces the candidates for Autumn promotions based on captain submissions which had occurred over the previous week. Soon after this, concerns were raised about DrAkimoto, and the previous actions regarding this are mentioned: questionable trends with writing that could potentially represent red flags for a staff member's approach to marginalized users or sensitive discussions. Modern_Erasmus had previously declined to promote Akimoto based on the raised concerns. Whether Akimoto has addressed these concerns is not seen, but admins are unable to find communicated records of discussion from Modern_Erasmus regarding this.
• Consideration was not given to also consult LadyKatie on the matter, as admins did not know that LadyKatie co-nominated Akimoto with Yossi, due to miscommunication and a form issue.
• Agreement is reached that this should be brought to Yossi's attention, in case this had not been previously surfaced as a concern, or if he had additional information regarding the concerns.
• Despite the consensus, no action to contact either IO captain is taken, though the matter is polled a few times in admin chat with no response.
• On Thursday, 2021/10/07, Bleep notes that promotions are about to go up, and makes a final inquiry about the Akimoto matter. As it had not been previously addressed, a rushed effort is made to quickly resolve it:
• Moose chimes in, suggesting aismallard (as someone who had recently asked about the matter before Bleep) to inform Yossi. Consideration was not given to also consult LadyKatie on the matter.
• aismallard, in an unrelated voice call with Yossi, quickly mentions the concerns to Yossi. Feeling pressured by time, aismallard conveys them in such a matter implying that the admins want Akimoto's promotion rescinded. Yossi assents, interpreting this as administration vetoing the promotion nomination.
• aismallard relays the assent from Yossi to administration, who interpret Yossi's response as them voluntarily withdrawing Akimoto's candidacy. Consequently, Bleep removes Akimoto from promotions thread and posts it to O5.
• Akimoto messages Yossi asking why his promotion nomination had been removed. Yossi, believing Akimoto's candidacy had been vetoed by administration, relays that to Akimoto, who then responds with their intent to resign.
• Yossi relays this to aismallard, who informs the other admins. Some responses to the news include that Akimoto chose to resign rather than address the concerns. Administration does not request full logs of this conversation. Yossi is unaware that admins were fine with Akimoto's promotion proceeding, but wished that concerns were discussed directly with him as part of that process.
• Several administrators state that they would have rather seen this matter resolved by promotion vote, with the concerns public.
• The next day, Friday 2021/10/08, Lily asks why Akimoto was removed from the promotion thread, which starts a discussion there about the action that had occurred the prior day.

As a consequence, Akimoto was removed from the promotions list. This was not our intent, but that intent was not sufficiently communicated, and not all involved parties were consulted. We apologize to Akimoto for the harm and disrespect he experienced. As a member of our staff, and a member of the community: he deserves better from us.

Here are the actions we intend to take to rectify these errors and help ensure they don't happen again:

• Akimoto has been directly contacted, and received an informal apology from one of his captains.
• Administrators will be sending a private apology to Akimoto, and offering him the option of having admins hear out concerns he has with this process and/or administration.
• Akimoto will be added to the current list of promotion candidates, the timer will be reset to 7 days, and all parties will be asked to edit their existing votes to reflect Akimoto being added.
• LadyKatie has been apologized to by multiple members of the admin team for not being contacted.
• Admins will make it clear to staff that we do not believe it is ever appropriate for administrators to push team captains to rescind any nominations, just as administrators very much did not wish to push Yossi to rescind Akimoto's nomination.
• A core cause of this problem was administration not reliably assigning responsibility for issues, causing issues to either get dropped, or rushed at the last minute. Both occurred here.
  • • As such, admins have begun discussions for formal task tracking such as setting up a Jira, assigning responsibility for handling investigation into internal staff matters, and the potential establishment of an intra-staff team to handle administration issues of this caliber ranging from investigation of potential problematic staff behavior to creation and assignment of purview responsibility.
• We apologize to all promotion candidates, the IO captains and Akimoto for the nature of these miscommunications.