Proposal for another way to deal with misconduct
Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2021 3:31 am
In the Zoom panel on diversity and racism in quizbowl, I remarked that in order to more effectively deal with misconduct, we needed more resources, rather than to simply make more demands on our existing ones. Quizbowl is decentralized and lacks a governing body, so there is no single effective way to deal with misconduct or any central authority that can tell everyone how to respond. The closest thing we have to this is the misconduct form committee, which contains representatives from several major quizbowl organizations (NAQT, ACF, IAC, PACE, and the admin of the main Discord server), but there are many things in quizbowl which do not fall under those organizations’ authority, such as housewritten tournaments. An FAQ on the misconduct form’s processes will be released soon, so I will not be explaining the form in full here.
Please note I am only speaking for myself, and I am not an expert on the misconduct form, nor have I ever represented it.
Last night, I brainstormed another potential way to deal with misconduct, which I would appreciate community input on: I am proposing a way for people in administrative/authoritative positions (e.g. TDs, heads of clubs, head editors of sets, etc.) to inquire whether there is a misconduct report on the people they work with, and any consequences which have already been enacted for them. Note that the misconduct committee does not decide what consequences there should be for misconduct reports, but they distribute the report to relevant parties. I’m not super pressed about the exact form of communication for inquiries—I envision it as an administrator emailing the misconduct committee or filling out a Google Form, but there are certainly other options—since I’d rather know if the broad, high-level idea is viable first, though I welcome input on it nonetheless.
Here is one hypothetical example of how it would work: I am a head editor of a set who has assembled a list of potential writers and editors, I email the misconduct committee to ask if there is a report which recommends against allowing them to work on sets or for them to interact with any other individual on my list, and they email me back confirming yes/no.
Additionally, I suggest creating a public log (such a spreadsheet) tabulating who has sent an inquiry, under what capacity (e.g. “I am a TD asking about staffers for tournament X”), and whether they’ve received a response, to increase public transparency.
One of the flaws of the setup of the current misconduct form is that communication is a one-way street: the committee or reporter can send the report to other people they think should know about it, but it is difficult to predict every person you think should know about the report in the present and future. (For example, if I did not want X person to interact with me, I cannot predict every quizbowl space I will ever inhabit at the time of filing a report, and thus decide every person who should see that report.) My proposal relieves some of that burden in that it opens up communication to go both ways: if someone in an administrative position is concerned about perpetrators of misconduct in the space they administrate (which you hopefully are!), they have a way to find out if anyone they’re working with is a perpetrator. Many people in quizbowl often work with / play with / etc perpetrators of misconduct without realizing it, in great part because there is no clear way to find out they are a perpetrator.
Issues
1. There needs to be very clear policies on two things. I would appreciate input on both.
a. Who can send in such an inquiry, and under what circumstances. This is to prevent, for example, perpetrators of misconduct trying to learn more about the reports on them (in cases where the reporter doesn’t want them to know about it), but also, not literally everyone in the quizbowl community needs to know about the specifics of all misconduct everywhere. I obviously don’t speak for victims everywhere, but I do not want people who have never interacted with me or a person I’ve reported on, and who will never be involved with either of us in any capacity, to know about my report. Such inquiries should be sent with the explicit intention of making sure you’re administrating a quizbowl space to be as safe as possible, not to potentially sate another person’s curiosity.
b. What information they would receive from such an inquiry. As mentioned previously, the misconduct committee does not decide consequences. I think for several scenarios, it should be pretty straightforward: for example, if a major organization represented by the form has banned X person from staffing, local TDs running tournaments independently of that organization (such as housewrites) should also ban X from staffing. However, this does not encompass all scenarios, and not all forms of misconduct deserve equal consequences: for example, a teenager who cheated at a tournament does not deserve the same consequences as someone who committed sexual assault. Input on what “should” happen as a response to misconduct—i.e. what warrants appropriate consequences—is appreciated as well, and an important conversation to have.
There’s also the question of how much an administrator should know about misconduct: in my previous head editor hypothetical, the response was simply “yes, this person shouldn’t be allowed to work on your set” vs “no, they’re fine,” but should they know more—why they’re not allowed, for example, or how long this ban lasts (many bans, such as player bans, are temporary)? While I’m happy to discuss what a response from the misconduct committee to any inquiries should look like, I would like to emphasize the expectations for this should be an extremely clearly defined policy, no matter what those expectations end up being.
In particular, I think there should be criteria on what sorts of reports need to be shared (instances of more minor misconduct, for example, may not warrant sharing) and a strong emphasis that an institutional response does not necessarily warrant a community-wide response of the same measures.
2. This is presumably more work for the misconduct committee, which is a small group of volunteers who have busy lives. While I cannot speak for how much work they are willing to do, I think that the community (and the committee) should be willing to allocate more resources and/or people to responding to misconduct if needed, especially since there have been so many past ineffective responses (or nonexistent ones) to misconduct. The onus should not (solely) be on 8 people to solve all misconduct in quizbowl; to that end, I expect this to be a partial solution, not a panacea.
3. To be a maximally effective practice, sending an inquiry should become a standardized and widely accepted practice (though it is hardly ineffective if not everyone adopts it). I don’t think this is an unrealistic expectation to place on community leaders—the misconduct form first came into existence when I had just graduated high school, and high school me would not have dreamed of such an option even existing, yet the form is quite widely discussed now. I didn’t think two years ago that adopting a code of conduct would be a widespread practice, but it is now. During the pandemic, we saw many changes to how quizbowl is played: the use of buzzin.live, measures to decrease cheating like required camera feeds and both hands on camera, and so on. I think we are capable of this change too.
I will add that I, and likely many others, would be more willing to participate in certain quizbowl spaces if we were given the assurance that the leaders of that space would make an effort to ensure others in that space had not committed major misconduct. For example, I would be more likely to sign up to do something if the person in charge said, “Before we get started, we’ll check that no one here has committed major misconduct,” sort of like how I am more likely to play an online tournament which has some sort of protocol in place against cheating.
I’ll close on this note: misconduct is everyone’s problem, and the solutions we have in place are not enough. That’s not to say existing solutions are so harmful or ineffective we should get rid of them, or that people like the misconduct representatives are terrible people with bad intentions who don’t do any meaningful work (I really appreciate them!), but we need more solutions. Simply reacting to misconduct is not enough. If you care about making sure others in the community are safe, you can’t just sit around, waiting for news of misconduct to reach you, especially because a lot of misconduct is never announced in widely read spaces like the forums or Discord (not even accounting for the many people who don’t check those spaces). Quizbowl’s decentralized community has no HR department that will tell you what to do or unilaterally ban everyone who has done something worth banning or whatever. You have to proactively take steps to ensure the safety of your space; making quizbowl a safe and inclusive place is your responsibility, and the responsibility of all of us as a community.
Please note I am only speaking for myself, and I am not an expert on the misconduct form, nor have I ever represented it.
Last night, I brainstormed another potential way to deal with misconduct, which I would appreciate community input on: I am proposing a way for people in administrative/authoritative positions (e.g. TDs, heads of clubs, head editors of sets, etc.) to inquire whether there is a misconduct report on the people they work with, and any consequences which have already been enacted for them. Note that the misconduct committee does not decide what consequences there should be for misconduct reports, but they distribute the report to relevant parties. I’m not super pressed about the exact form of communication for inquiries—I envision it as an administrator emailing the misconduct committee or filling out a Google Form, but there are certainly other options—since I’d rather know if the broad, high-level idea is viable first, though I welcome input on it nonetheless.
Here is one hypothetical example of how it would work: I am a head editor of a set who has assembled a list of potential writers and editors, I email the misconduct committee to ask if there is a report which recommends against allowing them to work on sets or for them to interact with any other individual on my list, and they email me back confirming yes/no.
Additionally, I suggest creating a public log (such a spreadsheet) tabulating who has sent an inquiry, under what capacity (e.g. “I am a TD asking about staffers for tournament X”), and whether they’ve received a response, to increase public transparency.
One of the flaws of the setup of the current misconduct form is that communication is a one-way street: the committee or reporter can send the report to other people they think should know about it, but it is difficult to predict every person you think should know about the report in the present and future. (For example, if I did not want X person to interact with me, I cannot predict every quizbowl space I will ever inhabit at the time of filing a report, and thus decide every person who should see that report.) My proposal relieves some of that burden in that it opens up communication to go both ways: if someone in an administrative position is concerned about perpetrators of misconduct in the space they administrate (which you hopefully are!), they have a way to find out if anyone they’re working with is a perpetrator. Many people in quizbowl often work with / play with / etc perpetrators of misconduct without realizing it, in great part because there is no clear way to find out they are a perpetrator.
Issues
1. There needs to be very clear policies on two things. I would appreciate input on both.
a. Who can send in such an inquiry, and under what circumstances. This is to prevent, for example, perpetrators of misconduct trying to learn more about the reports on them (in cases where the reporter doesn’t want them to know about it), but also, not literally everyone in the quizbowl community needs to know about the specifics of all misconduct everywhere. I obviously don’t speak for victims everywhere, but I do not want people who have never interacted with me or a person I’ve reported on, and who will never be involved with either of us in any capacity, to know about my report. Such inquiries should be sent with the explicit intention of making sure you’re administrating a quizbowl space to be as safe as possible, not to potentially sate another person’s curiosity.
b. What information they would receive from such an inquiry. As mentioned previously, the misconduct committee does not decide consequences. I think for several scenarios, it should be pretty straightforward: for example, if a major organization represented by the form has banned X person from staffing, local TDs running tournaments independently of that organization (such as housewrites) should also ban X from staffing. However, this does not encompass all scenarios, and not all forms of misconduct deserve equal consequences: for example, a teenager who cheated at a tournament does not deserve the same consequences as someone who committed sexual assault. Input on what “should” happen as a response to misconduct—i.e. what warrants appropriate consequences—is appreciated as well, and an important conversation to have.
There’s also the question of how much an administrator should know about misconduct: in my previous head editor hypothetical, the response was simply “yes, this person shouldn’t be allowed to work on your set” vs “no, they’re fine,” but should they know more—why they’re not allowed, for example, or how long this ban lasts (many bans, such as player bans, are temporary)? While I’m happy to discuss what a response from the misconduct committee to any inquiries should look like, I would like to emphasize the expectations for this should be an extremely clearly defined policy, no matter what those expectations end up being.
In particular, I think there should be criteria on what sorts of reports need to be shared (instances of more minor misconduct, for example, may not warrant sharing) and a strong emphasis that an institutional response does not necessarily warrant a community-wide response of the same measures.
2. This is presumably more work for the misconduct committee, which is a small group of volunteers who have busy lives. While I cannot speak for how much work they are willing to do, I think that the community (and the committee) should be willing to allocate more resources and/or people to responding to misconduct if needed, especially since there have been so many past ineffective responses (or nonexistent ones) to misconduct. The onus should not (solely) be on 8 people to solve all misconduct in quizbowl; to that end, I expect this to be a partial solution, not a panacea.
3. To be a maximally effective practice, sending an inquiry should become a standardized and widely accepted practice (though it is hardly ineffective if not everyone adopts it). I don’t think this is an unrealistic expectation to place on community leaders—the misconduct form first came into existence when I had just graduated high school, and high school me would not have dreamed of such an option even existing, yet the form is quite widely discussed now. I didn’t think two years ago that adopting a code of conduct would be a widespread practice, but it is now. During the pandemic, we saw many changes to how quizbowl is played: the use of buzzin.live, measures to decrease cheating like required camera feeds and both hands on camera, and so on. I think we are capable of this change too.
I will add that I, and likely many others, would be more willing to participate in certain quizbowl spaces if we were given the assurance that the leaders of that space would make an effort to ensure others in that space had not committed major misconduct. For example, I would be more likely to sign up to do something if the person in charge said, “Before we get started, we’ll check that no one here has committed major misconduct,” sort of like how I am more likely to play an online tournament which has some sort of protocol in place against cheating.
I’ll close on this note: misconduct is everyone’s problem, and the solutions we have in place are not enough. That’s not to say existing solutions are so harmful or ineffective we should get rid of them, or that people like the misconduct representatives are terrible people with bad intentions who don’t do any meaningful work (I really appreciate them!), but we need more solutions. Simply reacting to misconduct is not enough. If you care about making sure others in the community are safe, you can’t just sit around, waiting for news of misconduct to reach you, especially because a lot of misconduct is never announced in widely read spaces like the forums or Discord (not even accounting for the many people who don’t check those spaces). Quizbowl’s decentralized community has no HR department that will tell you what to do or unilaterally ban everyone who has done something worth banning or whatever. You have to proactively take steps to ensure the safety of your space; making quizbowl a safe and inclusive place is your responsibility, and the responsibility of all of us as a community.