Our side of the story
Posted on 8 March 1999, 16:37 GMT
This message is posted on the ticalc.org news system, and will be sent to Dimension-TI and the TI-Files for posting on theirs, if they are interested in showing our side of the story.
So. To the point. Why was Bryan dismissed? Well. First of all, it was not because of the TI-Files "incident". Nor was it because of the recent backlogs in the filearchives. Nor was it because of any other member of ticalc.org.
To put it all together very simply, the reason was a complete refusal from Bryans side to cooperate on the staff.
Now for some details.
As Bryan mentions in his mail, we had a change in staff structure last autumn. However, we do not share Bryans view on what the situation was before. According to Bryan, the situation was that everybody was equal. According to the rest of us, it was just "he who yells highest and most often gets it his way". Also, Bryan stated that nobody could tell others what to do. Yet, this is exactly what happened. People were not "told" what to do. But they were nagged on until they did. We did not feel content with that, and felt the need for a change.
In the beginning (a long time ago...), the flat system worked fine. Everybody was able to discuss things through until we got do a decision. This no longer worked.
To replace the old "flat system", we (mainly me, Chris and Isaac, the oldest members of ticalc.org) designed a proposal for a new staff structure, to keep things more structured than before, and hopefully bring back some of what we had lost. As Bryan said, this was posted on our internal mailinglist for discussion. Nobody (including Bryan) disapproved of this original proposal, which only listed sketched positions and not whom we recommended to hold them. A few changes were made per requests from the rest of the staff, but this was mainly very minor things. After this, we sent out the "second proposal", which included our recommendations for the initial holders of the posisions. Bryan was, as you all have heard, not nominated for "coordinator", but "only" for news system, PotM manager, File Archive and at least one "upcoming section". This proposal was met from Bryan, with general complaints on a lot of points. Some of which were the same points that he earlier approved on. The discussion went on for a few weeks, and everybody posted comments. Including the "new staffers". Not all comments were posted "in public", because anything written there was usually hevaliy bashed down on. Eventually we held a vote, and a clear majority decided that this new system was what we wanted.
Thus, the new system was implemented. In the beginning, this meant almost nothing to the existing staff, except the amount of bashing on the internal mailinglist dropped rapidly. Also, in order to fill all the posts listed in this new structure, we hired Nathan Haines to handle the support mail. Nathan was hired on a 30 day trial basis, which he passed easily by doing a great job in handling the help mail, which had fallen behind for months before his hiring.
As we had agreed on before the initial vote, a new vote for both the system and the coordinators was held in late january 1999. The vote consisted of two questions, "Should our new staff organisation be kept" and "Should the current coordinators be kept". The current coordinators were NOT entitled to a vote on the second question, in order to keep the system fair. Though we will not disclose who voted what (secret ballot - which is common procedure), I can tell you that pretty much everybody voted yes on the first question. Some of the coordinators voted yes there, others abstained from voting in order to make it even more fair. On the second question, everybody except Bryan voted yes. To the story is that some staff members changed their votes after they had been sent the complete original proposal (which they had not read, because they had not been on the staff long enough). But this did not change the outcome of the vote, it just made it clearer.
This should hopefully explain the issues raised by Bryan about the new staff structure and about the voting. Now for the real reason Bryan was dismissed.
The rumors say that the TI-Files incident does or does not have anything to do with it. Well, the TI-files incident does not have anything directly to do with it. The fact that we had to lean on Bryan very hard for a long time in order to make him apologize for it does. It is part of the reason, but in no way the whole story.
As far as I can recall, it has not happened more than a very very few times in at least 6 months that Bryan has backed down from a point. In our opinion, a site like this can only be run if the staff-members cooperate. And cooperation is based on compromise. And compromise requires people to back down from their standpoints. At several points, discussions brewed down to just throwing insults around. Or whenever somebody made a "bad comment" on one of Bryans sections, the result would be "but [insert somebodys name here] hasn't updated in a long time". Some people were "afraid" to post to the internal list, because they knew that they would get sawed off at the feet by Bryan. The general atmosphere on the staff list was not a friendly one, and we feel that we cannot operate under such conditions. This was not all Bryans fault, but in just about every case it started with Bryan.
On several occasions, Bryan either threatened to, or did, take over other members sections because "they weren't working fast enough". However, as soon as somebody even mentioned that he might need a backup (not to mention if somebody said it was time for the backup to step in) on the filearchive section (or any other of his section), things rapidly turned ugly.
Over the time he has been on our staff, we have also received a large number of complaints about his behaviour on the IRC. Channel-takeovers and generally bad behaviour against newbies have been the major reasons. When you are a staffmember of a TI site, whatever you do in the TI related IRC channels will be associated with the site you work for, and this is not what we wanted. This alone would not in any way warrant a dismissal from the staff, but it doesn't exactly strengthen the position in front of the other issues.
Finally, about the way that Bryan was dismissed.
First of all, let me say that this was not a "moments choice". A lot of people requested that we dismiss him after the TI-Files incident. Internally, such requests were voiced even earlier than that. Several times over, we decided "Bryan deserves another chance", and told him what was required to do so. One of the times, it was the apology about the TI-Files incident. Other times, it was just about cooperation.
We were happy to see that Bryan, after a lot of leaning on him, decided that he should apologise. And we are even happier to see that he now beleives it was the right thing to do.
However, we repeatedly saw no movement towards a more cooperative attitude. The posting of the "file archive procedures" that Bryan did this february, was one of the few things he did. Chris did not, however, ask him to do that during january. It was a part of the original new staff structure proposal that was sent out in october last year. Nevertheless, while some of the comments on this proposal were out of line, all were not. But they were all met with the same irresponsive stubbornness from Bryans side.
After many of these repetitions, we decided we had no other choice than to let Bryan go. After this decision, things moved fairly fast. I beleive it took about two or three days. During this time, only the coordinators were informed. The actual disabling of his account was done at a time when Bryan was usually on-line, at around 02:00 GMT (21:00 EST). As Bryan said, it was unusual that he was not around by then, and I beleive this is one of the things that led to the confusion. A mail was sent to Bryans personal non-ticalc.org mail address. The fact that he did not read this mail "by default", which we did not know, was probably another.
Right after the mail was written to Bryan, a notive was posted on our internal mailinglist. A bit later, it was posted on the main site. We were very surprised that Bryan did not act, and now we know why - he simply was not there. However, we had done our best to time it to some point when he was usually on-line. Our staff is spread throughout many timezones, and this kind of coordination is very hard. It is one of the things we have always had trouble with, and probably always will.
After the dismissal, some of our "junior staff members" expressed concerns about why this had been done. However, after the coordinators had explained what had happened, they all beleive that what we did was for the best of the site. It was not an easy decision, but it is what we all beleive is for the best of the site. If this results in a "boycott" of our site, then it's out of our control. We hope this does not have to be the case, and that people will continue to use our site, as well as others.
Magnus
(With, I beleive, the support of the rest of the staff)
