GOWT Reopens for Business

I received a form letter from GOWT this morning informing me that the forums were back online. I was already aware of the majority of changes made to GOWT - some of which necessitated my resignation from the Reorganization Committee.

I didn't really care for GOWT's version of the "Patriot Act" that I had to agree to before my forum account would be reactivated. If they had competent moderators and leadership lined up, they wouldn't have needed such a document. Fear does not inspire confidence. I found this line particularly odd: “This will allow a member to re-commit to serving the GOWT community in the proper way.” I’m not really sure I even understand what that means.

I like the new design of the forums. The new content areas will be great if they can find people willing to provide relevant content. It won't be easy finding volunteers who are willing to actually put in the work to keep it up to date. The forum guidelines were adapted from fark.com and are basicallly a wordier version of what we had before. The guidelines were never the problem. It was a lack of enforcement that caused our forums to descend into utter chaos.

I was disappointed to see that anonymous accounts were created for the administrators, webmaster, and moderators. These actions were taken so that members would not know who was responsible for doing what. The problem I have with this is that it violates the spirit of "openness" under which I believe GOWT was intended to operate. People who fail to take personal responsibility for their decisions and actions do not inspire confidence in their leadership abilities.

I was pleased to note many respected members of GOWT were appointed to the Leadership and Advisory Commmittees. Although many of them remained silent during GOWT’s troubled period, I believe they are good people at heart. Unfortunately a few bad choices were made as well during the committee selections. Since I can't remain silent on this issue:

I call for the immediate resignation of prontopup from the Leadership Committee.
I call for the immediate resignation of chibongo from the Advisory Committee.

If they choose not to resign, I respectfully request that their respective committees remove them.

Prontopup will leave when somebody hurts his feelings which usually occurs when someone disagrees with him or chibongo.

When GOWT's problems became visible to the majority of the members through our discussion forums in February 2007, Prontopup, chibongo, and cgeek immediately set to work forming Delta Area Geocachers whose forums came online in March 2007. Chibongo and cgeek, two members of GOWT's 2007 Executive Committee literally had to be drug back to fulfill their duties as GOWT's officers. As moderators, they failed miserably at maintaining order and in fact only acted when they personally were offended by posted content. Prontopup is merely a sycophant supporting whatever crazy position chibongo supports. Nothing can be expected to change in that regard and GOWT deserves better.

[Note: 12/19/2007 - I edited this article slightly to clarify some of my points.]