On 3/4/2010 1:41 PM, D Garcia wrote:
I'm sorry you believe that DP has nefarious intent in responding to a situation where a volunteer believed they had no recourse.
I would never suggest than anyone at DP has nefarious intent without incontrovertible evidence, and I do not do so now; I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's razor.
Since I can't believe that you think ignoring that issue would have somehow been better, I am forced to conclude that your only concern is the spin you've tried to put on it.
First of all, I don't think it is the responsibility of anyone at Distributed Proofreaders to make sure that any particular volunteer is satisfied. I'm confident that Mr. Adcock is a competent producer of e-texts, and if you were to have told him, "look, we're doing the best we can here, but if you want to pick up the project on your own here's where you can get everything we've done up until now," that would have been sufficient. However, I certainly don't believe that ignoring the issue would have been a better option; instead I believe that addressing the issue head-on would have been better. There is an adage in Washington that "sunshine is the best disinfectant." Likewise, I believe that transparency is the best defense. First of all, we must recognize that the problem that Mr. Adcock was complaining of was /not necessarily/ that two of his projects remained in the Post-Processing queue for an unduly long time. Rather the problem he identified is that somehow the current production processes allow /any and all/ projects to become backed up in that queue. Given that problem statement, I would have liked to have seen something more like one of the following responses: 1. "There are no problems with the processes at Distributed Proofreaders. If you don't like the way we do things here, you don't have to participate." or, 2. "We recognize that there is a problem but we can't seem to agree upon the cause. We'll keep you informed as to the results of our inquiry. In the meantime, here's where you or the public-at-large can retrieve /all/ of the pieces of the stuck projects so you can take one and move it forward outside of the aegis of DP if you like." or, 3. "We recognize that there is a problem in our production process and we think we have identified the cause, which is [fill in the cause here]. As of yet we have not agreed on the best way to reform the process, but we'll keep you informed as to our progress. In the meantime, here's where you or the pubic-at-large, etc..." or, 4. "We have identified a problem in our production process, and believe it can be resolved by [fill in the proposed resolution here]. Please be patient while we see if this proposal resolves the backlog. If it does not, we will resume our search for the underlying problem, and in the meantime, here's where you or the public-at-large, etc..." Instead we saw a response more along the lines of: "We can not confirm or deny the existence of any problems in the production processes of Distributed Proofreaders, nor can we confirm or deny that we have identified any of the causes for these problems which may or may not exist. We may or may not have agreed upon what may or may not be a solution to these unidentified, alleged problems, but there is a possibility that we might change our process in unspecified ways. Or not. But as a special favor to you we will extract the two projects you are interested in to route around the damage, which may or may not exist, and process them using an entirely different procedure so that you will be satisfied." It seems to me that this kind of response is designed, in fact, to ignore the issue at hand, which is that changes need to be made at D.P. to increase the throughput of e-texts. Now it very well may be that this problem has already been recognized by The Powers That Be, and that a solution will be in place Real Soon Now. In that case, wouldn't it have been better to just say so?
Congratulations on winning a bet for me that someone would attempt to do exactly that. :)
I'm always happy to help. ;-)