drwex | It certainly has been a week

I'm having a hard time keeping track of what is and is not public about the Arisia situation so excuse me if I go light on details. It has been all-consuming, like living in an emotional tornado. Shit keeps getting picked up and flung crashing into other things. People are doing amazing things, while outside there are the disgruntled and unhappy howling for blood. My worry is that those howls are drowning out the voices of people who should have been heard in the past and were not, who are taking the time and risk to speak now.

It's hard to keep focus on anything. I expect to stand for election and bring at least three proposals to the November meeting. I have four more proposals I want to be working on, but that November meeting has to end and people have to do other things so these ideas are just sitting in a note where I won't lose them and we'll see. One of the people who's very much near the center of the storm admitted that he's spent more hours on Arisia things in the past weeks than anything else, including paid work and sleep. This isn't healthy or sustainable, but it gives you some indication of the lengths to which people are willing to go to make this happen, to fix what is broken.

Let me talk about that for a moment. I think three classes of things need to be addressed: people, policies, and procedures.

People: the resignation of the governing group was a necessary step. I am not happy about it, as I consider all those who resigned friends to one degree or another. I continue to believe that they, and other people involved in this, did not act with malice and in most cases made decisions based on what information they felt they had and the constraints they felt were on them at the time. Hindsight is splendidly 20/20, innit? However, impact matters more than intent and the buck needs to stop somewhere.

The Con also needs to clean itself of people who are credibly understood to be abusers, and dangerous. We've been not-good about that (see below), and we've been terrible about bringing in new people. Getting 50 new Corp members in a week is not something I think anyone would have anticipated and I'm somewhat worried about it (*) but I continue to hope my worries are unfounded. Yes, I can have both sides of an argument inside my head, thanks.

We need to strengthen some positions. The Watch (Arisia's at-con security-like staff) have not been properly trained, well-managed, or well integrated with the rest of staff. That's hurt the Con and attendees. Corporate committees often rise or fall on the strength of who leads them; we need to get better people in some of those places, too. In some cases "better" means "better trained"; in some cases it just means "not doing 50 other things so they're better able to focus".

Policies: On the one hand, Arisia's policies are miles ahead of lots of others. We regularly hear tales of conventions and SF/F or kink or other community events that don't have codes of conduct and don't have policies for dealing with misbehavior. If I compare our policies today to those of 10 years ago, it's night and day. The creation of the CoC was one of the things that convinced me to come back to working for Arisia again.

That said, our policies have been too opaque for non-insiders. People don't know what they can and can't expect, what their options are, and what the consequences of choices might be. I know for a fact that people have asked Arisians to take "no action" and then been unhappy/startled/upset when no action is taken. When someone asks for things to be "kept informal" they need to know that really means no formal procedures will be started and no formal record will be written.

We need to explain our policies a TON better and we need to write our policies in clear ways. We need to communicate them consistently, and with a mindfulness that not everyone has an insider's background or knowledge. I suspect before this blew up that >90% of people had little or no idea what the difference between Corp and Con was, even though we put statements on our site about the Con being a production of Corp.

There's now a one-click link from the home page to our reporting procedures that then links to other resources. This is nohow a complete solution, but it's a big start. Most of the proposals I want to bring have to do with improving our policies. We're also going to engage an outside agency to consult on this. A necessary step, imo, but it won't be fast and we need to extricate ourselves from the current mess first. Fixing policies is part of that.

Procedures: This is where we have failed the hardest, and hurt people for real. We have, in many ways, failed to walk the walk - to live up to our mottos and ideals. We say we'll do something and then we don't do it. Or we do it, then undo it. Or we take so long to do it that it loses effect and impact. The idea that "justice delayed is justice denied" is not just an empty slogan.

This is, in my mind, the hardest thing to fix. Earlier I talked about training. I think that can be a component of fixing procedures - just simply knowing there's a better way to do things. Training new people, and consciously shifting the culture as new people come in will also help.

Then there's, sadly, the fact that we now have a swathe of examples of our own mortality and fallibility. People will be asking themselves hard questions like "Is this another Crystal?" or "Is this another Maura?" We will doubtless make new mistakes, but having our faces rubbed in these mistakes will force change. For example, it seems to be accepted consensus that we focused too much on the initial intake and reporting part of things, to the exclusion of other equally (or more?) important things.

Of course, that loops back - when it becomes known that we failed at follow-up it makes people less willing to report. That's a thing that has to happen - we cannot fix our procedures without knowing where they've failed. I spent some time this week - probably not nearly enough - reading every account I could find of Arisia failing people. Partly because I want to understand more about how our procedures failed, and partly because I am thinking about the missing apology step, about which I will have more to say after I know whether I'm an officer or not.

(*) I think we need to be cognizant that evil mofos have weaponized outrage and used it against everything from Worldcon to Disney. But I don't think that's what's happening here. Ask me again in 10 days.

So that's been my week - how was yours?

If you're able to, please vote. If you're in MA please vote Yes on 3; my kids are depending on it.