The cross item, spawned from the jp2 campaign item

Dec 6 07:56 UTC 2003

Picking up from the discussion in the jp2 campaign item:

Dan (cross), I have to say that I am puzzled by your perception of the
character of mary's responses to your comments and actions.  I find her to
be a very compassionate, but very outspoken individual with little or no
compunctions about saying what she thinks, but also without a detectable trace
of vindictiveness or hubris about her.
I can only think that you simply did not carefully read what she said to you,
or that you responded to her comments defensively and without really taking
the time to understand what she was saying.  I think she was saying that she
wished you would have taken a more collaborative approach to dealing with what
looked like it might not have been a really cut-and-dried abuse case,
especially in light of your relative inexperience in balancing the concerns
that Grex staffers very carefully balance on a daily basis.

That may appear to be totally at odds with the point of adding new staffers
and energizing the staff with new blood, but it really isn't.  There's no harm
in asking first, even about things that seem clear, at least for a while until
the responses to those questions consistently agree with your own conclusions
about the appropriate actions.  This is essentially analogous to a
self-monitored training period.  Grex's management philosophy pretty much
seems to be that it is always good to check with people to make sure you're on
the right track, especially if you think you don't need to.

response 2 of 53:

Dec 6 12:12 UTC 2003

What "Abuse" exactly prompted locking out the accounts and the subsequent IP
banning?

response 4 of 53:

Dec 6 13:07 UTC 2003

The limit is not the number of mail messages but rather the size of the
bulk mailing.  That makes sense when you consider the issue is our limited
resources and how sending 500K of mail brings Grex to its knees. 

Our staff walks a fine line between setting hard and fast rules where
everyone gets treated the same (as in what Valerie did recently with jp2)
and trying to understand what's behind a problem and factor that into the
staff intervention (as in what cross did).  Most of the time individual
staff members make at least reasonable decisions but they always leave
themselves open to the opinion of other users and other staff members. And
as uncomfortable as that might be for the staff member involved, it's part
of the job.  Always was and will be. 

Now, here is where I think Dan went a little wrong.  He went past reacting
to the facts of an incident of system abuse into building theories about
who all was involved and their motivations and connections.  He then used
his staff power to lock accounts and tried to block the suspects access to
Grex.  And when it was shown his theories were incorrect he responded by
stating: 

  "I locked asddsa's account because I had reason to suspect
   he was the same person as dah.  Both their comments in the
   bbs (I infrequently see both them in party) struck me as
   juvenille and immature.  Their harassment of staff was annoying.
   Their continuing complaint about polytarp's account
   being locked was just stupid.  Forgive me if I couldn't tell
   Tweedle-Dee from Tweedle-Dum."  Coop, item 29, response #17

Maybe it's just me being Old Grex, but I found this response worthy of
criticism.  When you start using staff police powers based on assumptions
instead of fact, you open yourself up to having to say, "I was wrong and
I'm sorry", which is what the response should have been in this instance. 

I made four responses in item #17, and I won't bore people by entering
them again, but if you're into it they are responses #21, 66, 96 and 118. 

That Dan's response to my comments was to quasi-resign from staff
speaks for itself.  It takes some patience and skin to be Grex
staff.  And it takes some experience to be really good at it.

Dan, I hope this helps.

response 6 of 53:

Dec 6 15:33 UTC 2003

5: Well, that's really debatable.  It is possible for justice to be 
blind in the absence of highly specific rules, it's just not very 
commen.  In some ways, laying out a comprehensive set of rules would 
make Grex a lot easier to manage, but at what I think would be the 
cost of its character and driving philosophy.

This might simply be an example of the kind of growing pains small 
organizations always experience when they begin to become larger 
organizations, and the things that worked before just don't work as 
well anymore because of the greater difficulty of applying the 
priciples to a larger and exponentially more complex structure.

response 8 of 53:

Dec 6 15:58 UTC 2003

resp 3&4 It wasn't mass-mailing that caused the dah and asddsa accounts to
be locked.

re 7 Or unknown ones, as it may be.