Posted on behalf of STC President Hillary Hart.
I want to further clarify the position and actions of the STC Board after what happened on our website earlier this week. Yesterday’s blog was actually from the entire Board. Today’s message is just from me. I want to tell you what I knew, what I didn’t know, and what my duty as president constrained me to do.
A big part of the job of the STC CEO, Board, and staff is listening to members. And I want you to know that we really do try to listen, understand, and respond—although sometimes we don’t quite make the mark.
Another big part of the job is to shepherd and protect the Society’s resources—including the intellectual property and member services that your dues help to create. When I saw the tweets from two members who knew they were in the staging area of the development site, and didn’t seem to care about breaking something, I saw red. Why would an STC community leader mess around on our development site without communicating with STC? Sure, breaking things is a way of testing things, especially in a digital environment, but this looked unfriendly. Looked more like tampering than testing. My initial conclusion was that this was an attempt to further “delay” the production of the ambitious Web-redesign project STC has undertaken. I now believe that that perception was wrong, and I apologize for it.
Before all the facts were known, in order to protect the website, we issued the message last Tuesday. To explain why we issued the “delay” message, I posted yesterday’s blog from the Board. Did we over-react? Probably. It now looks as though nothing was broken on the site and the main delay is the result of having to stop the testing and create another Web space for the development site. We should be able to launch 1.1 on schedule in a couple of weeks.
And, as I explained yesterday, the development team did make a mistake—for a short while, a 404 page misdirected users to the development site. For my original assumption that users had hacked their way in, I apologize. It was indeed, for a few moments, too easy to get to the development site. Neither I nor the Board has any wish to vilify any members who happened to be mistakenly redirected there. For my part, I should also apologize for getting angry yesterday in some of my responses to angry comments on the blog.
Again—my job, the staff and Board’s job, is to protect the resources that your dues contribute to creating. All things digital may be in perpetual beta, but at some point those things are property that must be protected if your organization is going to continue to advance the profession of technical communication.
Actually, everything is probably in perpetual beta, including this job of STC president. I am learning as fast as I can.
I look forward to updating you in more detail early next week on the status of the site development.