After the bombshell back in November of last year, that made everyone stop in their tracks, NaNoWriMo "closed shop" at the end of the month for some much needed re-organization.
A few days ago, Wrimos received the following email (transcribed in full below).
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Dear NaNoWriMo Community,
I write to you today with a warm hello from HQ and no small measure of excitement to finally announce changes we’ve been planning for weeks. We listened to a lot of feedback in November—some of it was hard to hear, but taking action to improve the organization was necessary. Since then, we’ve paused some of our standard operations in order to think through how to move forward, holding our mission in mind and community safety as priority number one.
NaNoWriMo’s charge is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We will be better-positioned to deliver this with wiser policies and stronger practices in place. To name a few:
We Will Stop Hosting Open, All-Ages Social Spaces
Site users aged 13-18 will be able to maintain accounts and use productivity and tracking features on our web app, but they will no longer be able to access our forums. Users under 18 will also be prevented from displaying their locations and writing session information, and from participating in regional spaces. Though younger members will be able to connect as Buddies with users they already know, our policy of hosting and moderating all-ages spaces will retire.
Forums Will Reopen with a Small Group Focus
We simply don’t have the capacity to provide effective, global, 24/7, multilingual moderation on an all-community "mega-forum". This is something that we may consider for the future, but is unrealistic for 2024. However, will gradually reopen regional forums and follow by opening affinity group forums and other smaller spaces. This model will allow us to continue providing social spaces while ensuring a greater degree of manageability.
· Regional forums will be moderated by Municipal Liaisons (whose 2024 onboarding process includes moderator training). It makes sense to us that the folks who know people in their region, who speak the language of their region, and who are local to the time zone of their region should moderate these spaces. It also solves the problem of our moderator team being out-of-sync with certain regions and out of their depth to moderate them.
· Other limited forums will be volunteer-moderated by folks who hold affinity to those groups. Reopening affinity groups is a priority. Anyone who is part of a group they believe should be formed as an official affinity group (whether or not it has been in the past) is welcome to suggest it.
· All-community forums will still exist, but they will be used on a limited basis. Community members will not be able to initiate threads, but NaNoWriMo HQ will. We are open to suggestions for threads, but we will only open a limited number and the ones we do open will likely close after a certain number of days. Our focus at this point is community safety and ensuring we don't have more threads open than we can reasonably moderate.
Our Volunteer Program Will Completely Change
So much of what we do is made possible by our hundreds of volunteers, who work diligently to support us from all over the globe. Yet, we have fallen short in supporting them and in safeguarding the integrity of their work. We have developed more rigorous training and staff-side support and will enforce identity verification and criminal background checks for all volunteers. Improvements in this area are long overdue.
A Mechanism to Certify Educators Will Be Implemented on the YWP Website
Our classroom feature will no longer be available by virtue of self-designation. Folks wishing to utilize this feature will be asked to certify as educators. We are partnering with ID.me to provide this functionality. This is yet another measure designed to protect some of our most vulnerable community members.
Let’s Talk About Timeline
We’ve done a great deal to move as swiftly as possible toward these changes. We’re at the tail-end of a selection process for background checking vendors. We’ve reworked our volunteer training and evaluated streamlined training platforms. We’ve worked with our tech team to roadmap back-end changes that are needed to support new measures. With the help of our legal counsel, five policies and four legal contracts have been revised. Nonetheless, there are enough moving parts and pieces that there won't be a central release date. Change will happen gradually in the coming weeks. To the extent that you may have further questions,
we’ve set up these FAQs.
Before I close, I want to acknowledge the sense of loss experienced by those who relied on programs we've temporarily suspended or permanently changed, and the abysmal November timing of it all. I also want to acknowledge our tremendous volunteers, whose overall track record of dedication and excellence was sullied by the actions of just a few. We are working very hard to ensure that we rise to the standard that our community deserves and rightfully expects. We are building a safer, stronger, more accountable NaNoWriMo.
In community,
Kilby Blades
Interim Executive Director
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