meta on the AO3

[ratcreature]

There are honestly people who are still surprised/disappointed that the OTW decided on the meta on AO3 issue without broader input/discussion first? (In the comments on the announcement post.) Seriously? Even though the OTW board in the past has said explicitly that the org never builds policy in public because "policies are difficult enough to draft and revise even in private with a small team of participants".

Comments

[parhelion]

Me, I'm way more worried about OTW's ability to change their mind or find a third way if the results of their decisions don't work out well. And I think the jury is still out on that which, in my opinion, is okay at this point.

(Also, I dislike trying to solve an actually unrelated 'limited resource' problem by denying something to some currently excluded group. If the ability to search and tagging polices need fixing, do what Astridv did and talk about fixing those rather than denying fun to some other bunch of fans, is my opinion for what it's worth.)

[ratcreature]

I'm not all that invested in the meta decision outcome either way, but how it was reached is just kind of symptomatic. In my view they seem to manufacture problems for themselves, because a good number of people are continually disappointed by their processes, because they seem to say one thing (at least sometimes), i.e. pretend that they are going to decide XY in a transparent and participatory fashion (this time for realz!), and then act in a different way (oops sorry we meant the OTW subgroup Z decided this together with technical specialist group W and input from legal advisor V, but you sure can comment when we worked out all the kinks and we totally value your diverse rainbow voices <3!).

Whether I agree or disagree, I just find this far more aggravating than dealing with a group that based on whatever internal decisions they make offer some service that I like and might support, and I'll just have to deal with its structure and decision, but at least they are plain about what is and what isn't open to user input and influence.