My Two Knuts (long)

[Amy Z]

Laura wrote (great posts, Laura):

> Contrary to being pissed off, I'd like to thank you for your input, 
as 
> an explanation of this sort is exactly what I'd been looking for 
from 
> someone from "the other side" (or, at least, the middle ground) in 
the 
> conflict.  Thus far the admin team (as an official body) has been 
very 
> tight-lipped about the whole affair.  Not that I blame them 
exactly, as 
> a "WELL, she did *this*!" post from the admin team as a group would 
> hardly be seen as dignified or appropriate.  However, this *does* 
leave 
> general list members with only one side of the story, and the 
general 
> impression that poor Cindy is getting clobbered by the nasty and 
> despotic list elves.

<snip>

> I'm still not sure banning her from the list is the appropriate 
action 
> in these circumstances.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't list 
> policy in the past been to place offenders on moderated status 
before 
> ousting them from the list completely?  Assuming that Cindy has 
been 
> acting in a way that deserves censure from the admin team, why 
should 
> her case receive special treatment?  Also, her actual "rule-
breaking" 
> on-list has been, IMO, minimal.  Forwarding Ali's personal email to 
the 
> list at large was *definitely* wrong, and discussing list policy 
> on-list was (maybe) wrong, but other than that, her behavior does 
*not* 
> seem outrageous, at least, IMHO, from the POV of the general list 
> membership.  

Yep, there you have the history in a nutshell.  Here's what happens:

Cindy becomes impossible for most of the other Moderators to work 
with, and after months of effort (no doubt with plenty of missteps on 
their part--they weren't perfect), they say to the rest of the Admin 
team, "we can't work with Cindy."  Because they don't want to have a 
huge war on the Mods-Elves-Geists list, with he said/she said, and 
because they think the rest of the admin team will trust their 
judgment, and because it's gratuitous to list someone's offenses the 
way I'm doing here, they *don't* give their side.

The rest of the Admin team is thrown into turmoil.  Yes we trust the 
other Mods' judgment, but we also trust Cindy.  She's always seemed 
so reasonable, so open to other views.  How could anyone deem her 
impossible to work with?  Surely this is a case of poor Cindy being 
clobbered!  Weeks of painful wrangling ensue.

Over time, Cindy becomes impossible for most of the other Elves and 
Geists to work with.  Most of them, like Joywitch, realize that her 
version of the story contained significant untruths.  But Cindy has 
left the team and the team is reevaluating all sorts of rules for 
itself, including how one joins, leaves, or returns to it, so Cindy's 
not there and there's no need to say anything to anyone else.  

However, Cindy *has* been granted by the then-facilitators of the 
Mods-Elves-Geists list, Joywitch and Amy Z, who think it's a place 
she can employ her considerable talents and get a lot from the HPfGU 
community.  Bad move.  At first, to most of the people working on the 
FAQs, Cindy seems like a model HPfGU member, and administrator of the 
FAQ process.  But she has in no way let go of her desire for revenge 
against her once-fellow-Moderators, nor of the habits that make it 
very difficult to deal with any kind of disagreement with her, and 
over time, she becomes impossible for many of the people on FAQ to 
work with (caveat:  here I'm going purely by the things posted here, 
as I have no insider view of FAQ since June).  

So, that's three times Cindy has infuriated a group who was trying to 
work with her, while the people outside the circle can't see what the 
problem is.  

And now what is she doing?  The same thing she did a few weeks ago:  
dragging OTC through her disputes with the people who are trying to 
run the list.  Group number four.  And people here are responding 
EXACTLY the way I and many others responded when she was kicked out 
of the Moderators:  some trust the people who have drawn the line 
with her, while many others say "Huh?  Cindy?!  What's wrong with 
Cindy?  She's so smart, and nice, and reasonable."  (Blessedly, when 
she went ballistic about Amanda and wanted an APOLOGY for having been 
mistakenly held to a rule that was no longer in existence, the no-
politics rule, at least one person not on admin saw right through it 
and said so on the list.)

If history continues to unfold as it has consistently done, in a 
couple of months the people who are now defending Cindy will 
understand exactly what the others were complaining about.  They may 
send sympathetic and apologetic e-mails to those people, but the 
damage will have been done.  They, the latest defenders, will now be 
on the growing list of people whom Cindy deems Ever So Evil, but 
others won't get it at all, because they will only know Cindy's side 
of the story. 

Or maybe, if the Admins give their side and let Cindy give her side 
and everyone's allowed to give every piece of evidence and opinion 
that's on their minds, others *will* eventually get it, but OTC will 
be limping and bleeding the way the Mods and the Admins were by the 
time they recognized that the only ways to have a peaceful 
relationship with Cindy were to (a) do things her way or (b) be in 
separate rooms.

BTW, Cindy is *not* in a separate room right now.  She is still a 
member of this list, and I assume that the fact that she hasn't 
responded onlist means that her posts are moderated, though maybe 
she's busy or choosing not to post.  If it's the case that she's 
moderated, yes, it may seem unfair that she isn't having her say--
that's EXACTLY what happened each time before.  "Everyone should have 
their say."  But--and I know this from trying to lead an open and 
accepting community in my RL--every once in a while a community deals 
with someone whose way of having his or her say is to gossip, spread 
lies, tell each faction what they want to hear, and generally play 
everyone off each other until the community is in shreds.  And when 
the leaders of a community recognize that they're dealing with 
someone like that, they have a responsibility to the community to 
shut him or her out.  Some people will punish them for it (in this 
case, all anyone can really do is bitch to them and/or leave the 
list).  But it's what's right for the community. 

I punished the Moderators, myself, not by kicking them out--no one 
did that--but by letting them get sick of being jumped on and 
eventually leave.  And now they have the sad satisfaction of knowing 
that I and the others who blamed them or let them be the fall guys 
finally get it.  I get exactly why Cindy was impossible to work with, 
and I wish I'd gotten it from the first moment they said it.  But I 
had to learn it the hard way.  I really, really hope the 
administrators can learn from history and act on what they know is 
fair, not what will *look* fair to those who can't possibly know the 
whole story.  

Cindy will go on lobbying people offlist, which has always been her 
modus operandi, and that's her right, and it's the lobbyees' right to 
believe her version.  But the administration can't lay out the entire 
battle without re-creating the battle and leaving OTC as bloody as M-
E-G once was.  As a matter of fact, I fully expect that they're going 
to tell me to stop sending things like this or face moderated status.

> from my POV, it pretty much 
> looked like the admin team was threatening to BAN Cindy from ALL of 
> HPFGU if she "air[ed] disagreements with list administration again 
on 
> OTC."
> 
> Given this information and the "no list policies" rule, the 
question in 
> *my* mind (and, I'm sure, the minds of many other listies), is if 
> publicly disagreeing with the list administration could get *me* 
> banned, and what this means in relation to my membership in HPFGU.

Don't sweat it, Laura or anyone.  The issue isn't this single, 
trivial matter at all.**  See, the thing is, we don't have a list 
rule like "be nice" or "tell the truth" or "don't pick fights."  So 
you can't kick Cindy off for failing to stick to those reasonable, 
but unwritten, expectations.  You *can* kick her off for a seemingly 
minor offense such as posting list policy stuff to OTC.  Think of the 
feds sending Al Capone to Azkaban, I mean Alcatraz, for tax evasion.  
It wasn't really the point, but it did the job.  (And no, I'm not 
comparing Cindy to a murderer.  It's just an analogy, and a good one 
IMO.)

Amy

**quite the opposite; *I* complained to the admins about the list 
policy discussions taking place on OTC a couple of months ago, and 
they said something like  "we're letting it go because it's a great 
discussion and really useful to the lists."  I do recognize that many 
people enjoy them--they just give *me* ulcers, but as you can see, I 
have just a *bit* of history with them and was glad to leave all 
things administrative behind last summer.  But once in a while I am 
so upset by what's going on that I have to speak out, and that's what 
I've just done.