I've been following this conversation with some confusion. As a long-standing member of the community, it has been a source of some annoyance to me that across platforms the same people are consistently self-selected. It would benefit everyone if you would occasionally put out calls for volunteers instead. Not only would this greatly increase transparancy, it would also allow the many other community members who would love to participate the chance to become "trusted volunteers" or event mods, enabling them to get that experience that they are presently effectively excluded from. Of course I appreciate that it is your right to assign whomever you want to whatever task you choose. However, I also feel it is a shame to tell people to just leave when they do not agree with your decision-making processes, rather than reflect on if their points may have validity or indeed reflect wider community sentiments.
I'm going to adress your message in parts.
"It would benefit everyone if you would occasionally put out calls for volunteers instead."
I'm sorry, Anon, but this is where we're fundamentally going to disagree.
While we do understand why some people might prefer and adopt this approach on their communities, we're not comfortable putting out open calls for just anyone to join the team, and this is a very deliberate, very well thought-out decision on our part.
Modding these events involves a lot more than people often realise. It's countless hours of work, a million group chats, video calls, planning, spreadsheets, graphics, scheduling, problem-solving, and decision-making (sometimes hard, stressful decision-making) behind the scenes. While this is a hobby and something we do in our free time, it's also something we care deeply about and invest a great deal of energy into, and we want it to succeed and keep being fun for us.
Because of that, we prefer to work with people we know, trust, and get along with. Bringing complete strangers into all that is not something we're interested in doing at this time. We're spending dozens or even hundreds of hours working on this events, so, to us, trust and compatibility matter a lot when choosing the team.
We would like to kindly remind you, also, that Moony's Midlife Crisis Fest and Miscellaneous Marauders Fests are not formal organisations. We're not a government organisation or business and we're not providing a public or paid service. These events started because a handful of friends thought it would be fun to organise fandom activities together. We were friends first and mods second, always.
"Not only would this greatly increase transparancy, it would also allow the many other community members who would love to participate the chance to become "trusted volunteers" or event mods..."
You know, ironically, 100% of the people who now help run our events were once community members participating in them. We got to know them over time, became friends, and eventually invited them to help because we felt they would be a good fit. For many of them, MMF was their first moderation experience. In fact, it was ours too. So we are giving people this chance, as you suggest. Just not through an open call.
That's how we prefer to operate, and that's how we intend to continue operating. Modding can be rewarding, but it's also stressful and time-consuming, and we want to share that workload with people we know and enjoy working with, so that it remains a positive experience for everyone involved.
We're also struggling to understand why an open volunteer call would make you feel less uncomfortable, if your problem is with people who are not the mods reading your fic before reveals. The volunteers currently helping us are people we know and trust enough to share this bit of responsability. From our perspective, sharing it with complete strangers simply because they responded to an application would be far more iresponsible and reckless on our part.
We do (sort of) understand your point that the same groups of people often end up organising events. However, that is simply not true. It may be true for our events, yes, but we are absolutely not the only group organising events in the marauders fandom. We only started doing this a bit over a year ago, this fandom is 20+ years old. Many have come before us, many will come after. Even currently, at this moment, there are dozens upon dozens of events that are organized by other groups of people, just to name a few: Padfoot Fest, RJL Fest, Moonwater Big Bang, Rosekiller Big Bang, Dorlene Big Bang, R/S Big Bang, Black Brothers Fest, Rare Pairs Fest, Animagi Week, etc, etc.
We do not, by any means, in any shape or form, hold the monopoly on fandom events. MMF exists because a group of friends decided to create something together, as we're sure is the same case with most of the other events we mentioned. Matter of fact, nothing is stopping you, dear Anon, from gathering up your own group of fandom friends and start to organise your own server and your own events, modding them as you think is right -- open calls for mods and all.
"I feel it is a shame to tell people to just leave when they do not agree with your decision-making processes, rather than reflect on if their points may have validity or indeed reflect wider community sentiments."
To that, we would gently push back on the assumption that disagreement means we haven't reflected on the feedback.
We regularly receive feedback, discuss it internally, and make changes when we believe those changes would improve our events. In fact, we mentioned an example of that on our last answer. We decided to bring in help to aprove the fics because of a feedback we recieved. We were wrong, they were right and we changed the way we do things because of that.
But reflecting on feedback does not necessarily mean agreeing with it.
In this case, we have considered the concerns you've raised and have reached the conclusion that we simply disagree. We believe that working with trusted volunteers is the best approach for our team and our events at this time.
You're absolutely entitled to disagree with that decision. However, if you really do, and the way we choose, and will continue to choose, to run our events makes you this uncomfortable, then participating in our events may not be the right fit for you. That's not meant dismissively. It's simply an acknowledgement that not every event will be run in a way that every participant prefers, and other events might be a better fit for you.
We believe we've explained our reasoning as clearly as we can, and our position remains unchanged.
