SPEEDruns not SAFEruns
Thanks Sumi!
Concerns are often abstract and people tend to not be able to pinpoint the issues enough to actually voice the concern in a wholly constructive manner, so you have to dig through the perceptively hostile words and try to figure out what they're actually concerned about. Some small percentage of people will always be intentionally hostile and nothing will change that. The large majority just have some concerns they don't know how to express concisely, and the sum of how you handle those generally valid concerns has an effect on the perception of the community at large.
Going back right after a marathon handling all the feedback and acting on the important parts while planning the next marathon is far from easy. Keeping a floating budget so you have money in case you need it is an operational necessity. Staff getting paid for their time will always be controversial to some. Dealing with runners being salty because 80-90% of submitted games have to be rejected due to a finite amount of time in a marathon is a pain. Needless to say, I don't envy your position.
If staff wanted to get in contact with a small number of speedrunners who were about to miss a deadline that made life inconvenient for event planning purposes, there are two popular websites with contact mechanisms that you would probably find 99% of speedrunners on. Yes the runners missed a shifting deadline, and in my opinion staff was reasonably negligent about going through sensible means of notifying a trivially small number of people. The vaguely stated concern by the community is that due diligence wasn't done by staff to contact people. "Why didn't you check your e-mail?" - "Why didn't someone on staff tweet at me?" It's so trivial. It's reminiscent of the fees companies get you with when you pay your bills late. The general perception is that staff wasn't concerned about some runners not making the schedule due to a functionally pointless detail in registering. Is that perception a valid concern?
Just as a data point, I personally check my e-mail like once a month. I almost never get anything useful. Most people don't check gamesdonequick except if they want to refresh submissions or register. (For context clarification, I did not submit runs this GDQ.)
This one is maybe a bit more nuanced. Public facing staff are shielding non-public facing members from having to deal with the headache of PR. I don't know if there is a better way to do it, but most people don't really want constant Twitter backlash in their lives. A few people get stuck with it, enabling other people to do their jobs better. Apparently the cited statement was never updated to not include Mike. This is probably because the information is so asynchronously listed in various places, that staff doesn't actively see that it's out of date. It was intended to be correct at one point in time. Gamesdonequick doesn't have a forum for feedback, and SDA does, so it's somewhat of a technical limitation. There are probably better ways to organize this information. I think the concern is valid, but the cited example may not be the most practical to act on. I have no idea what a half-decent way to handle games selection is, but there's at least a tangible reason it's abstract for right now.
Constructive thought: If the general perception of locking threads is that it shoots down discussion, another way should probably be found to handle these threads. It might be useful to make a new forum for community created threads and archived old marathon threads. Maybe threads here can only be made by staff. This forum is cluttered. It's also hard to find pertinent information when it is sometimes on the 4th page of a forum thread.
I trust that staff has been doing fine organizing the behind-the-scenes of the event, and at the end of the day, logistics are usually pretty good. The submissions and registration timeline has been late, which does come at the expense of some attendee's flights. Handling community concerns and feedback has been rough, and it is a recurring issue. It's a small portion of what you do, but it's all people will see until the event starts.
An event organizer, a PR manager, and a tech person have very different skillsets, and for people participating in PR or public interaction on behalf of the group, the connotation of responses in handling criticisms and the perceptions given are everything.
Going back right after a marathon handling all the feedback and acting on the important parts while planning the next marathon is far from easy. Keeping a floating budget so you have money in case you need it is an operational necessity. Staff getting paid for their time will always be controversial to some. Dealing with runners being salty because 80-90% of submitted games have to be rejected due to a finite amount of time in a marathon is a pain. Needless to say, I don't envy your position.
Quote from Cool Matty:
7 runners were cut for the cutoff. The information was provided to runners in the following ways:
If staff wanted to get in contact with a small number of speedrunners who were about to miss a deadline that made life inconvenient for event planning purposes, there are two popular websites with contact mechanisms that you would probably find 99% of speedrunners on. Yes the runners missed a shifting deadline, and in my opinion staff was reasonably negligent about going through sensible means of notifying a trivially small number of people. The vaguely stated concern by the community is that due diligence wasn't done by staff to contact people. "Why didn't you check your e-mail?" - "Why didn't someone on staff tweet at me?" It's so trivial. It's reminiscent of the fees companies get you with when you pay your bills late. The general perception is that staff wasn't concerned about some runners not making the schedule due to a functionally pointless detail in registering. Is that perception a valid concern?
Just as a data point, I personally check my e-mail like once a month. I almost never get anything useful. Most people don't check gamesdonequick except if they want to refresh submissions or register. (For context clarification, I did not submit runs this GDQ.)
Quote from Duke Bilgewater:
the staff list in the AGDQ 2016 directory thread is a good start, but saying things like "on behalf of Mike Uyama and the Games Committee" is intentionally vague
This one is maybe a bit more nuanced. Public facing staff are shielding non-public facing members from having to deal with the headache of PR. I don't know if there is a better way to do it, but most people don't really want constant Twitter backlash in their lives. A few people get stuck with it, enabling other people to do their jobs better. Apparently the cited statement was never updated to not include Mike. This is probably because the information is so asynchronously listed in various places, that staff doesn't actively see that it's out of date. It was intended to be correct at one point in time. Gamesdonequick doesn't have a forum for feedback, and SDA does, so it's somewhat of a technical limitation. There are probably better ways to organize this information. I think the concern is valid, but the cited example may not be the most practical to act on. I have no idea what a half-decent way to handle games selection is, but there's at least a tangible reason it's abstract for right now.
Constructive thought: If the general perception of locking threads is that it shoots down discussion, another way should probably be found to handle these threads. It might be useful to make a new forum for community created threads and archived old marathon threads. Maybe threads here can only be made by staff. This forum is cluttered. It's also hard to find pertinent information when it is sometimes on the 4th page of a forum thread.
I trust that staff has been doing fine organizing the behind-the-scenes of the event, and at the end of the day, logistics are usually pretty good. The submissions and registration timeline has been late, which does come at the expense of some attendee's flights. Handling community concerns and feedback has been rough, and it is a recurring issue. It's a small portion of what you do, but it's all people will see until the event starts.
An event organizer, a PR manager, and a tech person have very different skillsets, and for people participating in PR or public interaction on behalf of the group, the connotation of responses in handling criticisms and the perceptions given are everything.