I admit up front that I’m going all paternalistic on the Dawkins Forum people, and Imma gonna let you finish your imminent self destruction and all, but first I wanted to use this moment in time as an object lesson in communication.<\/p>\n
A letter was recently posted somewhere by the RDF forum staff to Richard, and most of this letter was reposted in a comment on this thread by Peter<\/a>.<\/p>\n When I read it, I laughed and cried and hacked up my coffee all over the keyboard, which is a problem because we are almost totally out of espresso here and that coffee was needed. So, I sent my family on a mission to get some more coffee, and decided to do a first-cut rewrite on the letter.<\/p>\n I assume that the purpose of the letter should be to convince Richard Dawkins to bring the staff to the table in the conversation about how to make the transition, to listen to their ideas (which I understand have already, in part, been posted) and to welcome them into the process as continuing volunteers.<\/p>\n The letter does in fact make this argument, but it also does some other things. You can assume as a staff member that Richard either trusts and\/or likes his main people or not and that your yammering about how evile and unfair they have been to you is not only a distraction from the point of the letter, but a clear indication that the staff are not really ready to help. This yammering is, rather, a clear indication of the staff’s need to make sure that blame is squarely placed where they think it should be placed. Most of the verbiage and effort expended on this letter focuses on that goal. The best possible outcome from that is distracting the person to whom the letter is written. The worst outcome is probably en-maddening him, and verifying that the staff are not really worth engaging with.<\/p>\n This leads to another element of the letter that is more subtle. If the staff are really correct about how badly handled this has all been by Dawkins’ people, then there should be a certain amount of screaming and yelling and rending of cloth over Dawkins’ management style. But there is not. As the lady in the commercial says, “You don’t get a discount for agreeing with me.” … especially when the letter is all about making sure there is lots of blame stirred up, mixed with sticky glue, and smeared all over the places it seems to go. Sycophants can only get so far because, well, they don’t get much respect.<\/p>\n All I did to this letter was to delete all the arm waving about who did what and how horrible everyone is, changed a few words here and there, and more or less left what I assume to be the key message intact. If I were me, and not Dawkins, I’d look at these two letters and think … “Yeah… if these forum staff could truly rid themselves of the blame-smearing yammering part, they’d be great. They are making great points, but the whole problem is that these points are embedded in this harsh and useless cultural baggage.”<\/p>\n I understand why the letter was written as it was, but my advice is this: Yes, write a letter like this if it will make you feel better. Then edit the arm waving out of it. Then edit it again for style and to make sure your key points are very clearly and well stated (and don’t let the yammering back in when you do that).<\/p>\n Then read it over and tweak it.<\/p>\n Then red it over and tweak it again.<\/p>\n Making the argument is often a matter of refining both the argument and the presentation. Rarely does adding self victimization, outrage and large booming sounds help.<\/p>\n So here is the original letter as posted here by Peter:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \nDear Richard,<\/p>\n We hope you will find time to read this letter, which is from all the forum staff.<\/p>\n We are all deeply saddened that the forum will be deleted in 28 days time. In just over 3 years, it has grown to become the busiest atheist forum on the Internet. On average since last October, the forum has been getting 3,000 posts per day, of which about 2,000 per day are focused on science, reason and your work. The front page average is a fraction of that at 200 – 300. The social posts on the forum only comprise about 1\/10 of all posts per day so there is a great deal of substance being discarded.<\/p>\n Staff were told that the science and reason forum content would be migrated to the new site and we offered to help with this. Then 2 days ago, we were told that there was a change of plan and all the forum content would be deleted in 30 days. Members have been told that they can copy their posts and repost them on the new site. This is complete nonsense because it isn’t individual posts that make up the forum, it’s the discussion threads that are significant and members don’t have the ability to migrate whole threads across. That’s what the staff were going to do for them. This is now not going to happen and over 3 years worth of threads debunking creationism & woo, challenging theism, supporting new atheists etc will be wiped out.<\/p>\n Andrew and Josh have now announced that the forum has been made ‘read-only’ due to the inappropriate actions of staff. This is ‘spin’ at its finest as it fails to acknowledge that their own inappropriate actions resulted in this debacle in the first place. The announcement that the forum was shut down because some staff posted the letter sent to them and made some public complaints is nonsense. The letter was exactly the same as the one posted publicly to the members with the addition of letting staff know that their services wouldn’t be required at the new website. They also told staff what they shouldn’t do: We decided to post this letter on the forum as it explained succinctly that staff wouldn’t be required and also let people know that they shouldn’t expect staff to take any action on their behalf. Andrew and Josh removed the Since their announcement, you have made one yourself entitled “outrage” which contains copies of some insulting comments about Josh. None of these comments came from the RD forum. They were all posted on various other websites after the forum was locked. Someone has harvested these quote-mines from other websites and presented them to you as justification for locking the forum. Your announcement also contradicts the admin announcement which says that the reason the forum was locked was due to the staff.They are also saying that they aren’t trying to stop people from going off into other forums but right from the start, they prevented members from having any links\/information in their signatures and changed the PM system to make it virtually unworkable so that members can’t contact each other easily.<\/p>\n Andrew and Josh could have handled this so much better if they had taken up the offer we made a while ago to advise them on how to make the transition. They don’t have any leadership skills or experience but several of us on the staff do this professionally and have years of experience managing change with large and diverse groups of people. This offer was ignored and instead, they have provided a textbook example of how not to do it. This also includes putting the blame on people for reacting badly to their ill-conceived actions. The fact that they either didn’t expect such a reaction or just didn’t care, serves to emphasise their ignorance of how to work with large groups of people and how to manage change.<\/p>\n We have all worked so hard to support your mission because we passionately believe in it. You and your work have been our inspiration to keep going on days when we were verbally abused and threatened by trolls. The staff are highly intelligent people but we were prepared to spend hours of our own time doing low-level and mundane moderating tasks to keep the forum organised, facilitate focused discussions and solve people’s technical problems. We were also able to use our skills and expertise in fostering a sense of community and ensuring that all people could post there, free from homophobic, sexist or racist abuse. That’s a significant part of why it has The Foundation’s decision to remove the forum is one we deeply regret but we acknowledge that as volunteers, it’s not our concern. However, we could have used our skills and expertise to help develop the new discussion area, transfer content over and manage the transition for the membership as smoothly as possible. Andrew and Josh rejected that offer and as we were told recently that we weren’t allowed to contact you about any forum At the moment, we feel deflated and dismayed while we watch the destruction of such a successful forum but despite that, we continue to wish you well and we sincerely hope that the new website is successful in achieving the Foundation’s goals, which is what were striving for with the forum.<\/p>\n Sincerely And here is the first-cut edited version:<\/p>\n Dear Richard<\/p>\n We are all deeply saddened that the forum will be deleted in 28 days time. In just over 3 years, it has grown to become the busiest atheist forum on the Internet. On average since last October, the forum has been getting 3,000 posts per day, of which about 2,000 per day are focused on science, reason and your work. The social posts on the forum only comprise about 1\/10 of all posts per day so there is a great deal of substance being discarded.<\/p>\n Staff were told that the science and reason forum content would be migrated to the new site and we offered to help with this. Then 2 days ago, we were told that there was a change of plan and all the forum content would be deleted in 30 days. Also, members have been told that they can copy their posts and repost them on the new site. However, we feel that individual posts do not make up the forum, but rather it is the discussion threads that are significant and members do not have the ability to migrate whole threads to a new location. This would have been done by the staff. It would now seem that 3 years worth of threads debunking creationism & woo, challenging theism, supporting new atheists etc. will be wiped out.<\/p>\n We feel that an earlier offer we had made regarding how to handle a transition to a new format is still a good one, and we are still very willing to engage in a conversation about how to make this transition, and to help in doing so. <\/p>\n We have all worked so hard to support your mission because we passionately believe in it. We feel, and it is generaly acknowledged, that our past efforts are a signfiicant part of why this has become the most popular atheist forum on the Internet, and a lively, challenging and supportive environment for atheists and skeptics. <\/p>\n The Foundation’s decision to remove the forum is one we deeply regret and we acknowledge that as volunteers, it’s not our decision. However, we are part of the community that made the forum possible, and the foundation could have used our skills and expertise to help develop the new discussion area, transfer content over, and manage the transition for the membership as smoothly as possible. That offer is still on the table. <\/p>\n At the moment, we feel deflated and dismayed while we watch the destruction of such a successful forum but despite that, we continue to wish you well and we sincerely hope that the new website is successful in achieving the Foundation’s goals, which is what were striving for with the forum.<\/p>\n Sincerely Of course, it is probably too late now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I admit up front that I’m going all paternalistic on the Dawkins Forum people, and Imma gonna let you finish your imminent self destruction and all, but first I wanted to use this moment in time as an object lesson in communication. A letter was recently posted somewhere by the RDF forum staff to Richard, … Continue reading An “Open Letter to Richard Dawkins” revised<\/span>
\n[snip – eg email Richard, inflame the users, start any petitions, relocate groups of users to other forums.]<\/p>\n
\nletter and they could have also removed the staff’s permissions as they said they didn’t trust staff anymore. They didn’t have to make the forum ‘read-only’ for everybody in order to gag the staff. The fact is that they needed the staff to deal with all the complaints that would inevitably have been thrown at the forum for the next 30 days. In other words, they expected the staff to give up their free time to act as police and lavatory cleaners for a month, without a word of dissent themselves, and then just stand aside and watch the forum they’d worked so hard for be deleted. Not much to ask was it?<\/p>\n
\nbecome the most popular atheist forum on the Internet because it’s a lively, challenging and supportive environment.<\/p>\n
\nmatters, we weren’t able to make that offer to you personally.<\/p>\n
\nThe forum staff <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThe RDF forum staff <\/p><\/blockquote>\n