Found out late last night that NaNoWriMo -- the originators of National Novel Writing Month -- have pulled the plug on their website.
One of its board members posted this video to YouTube on April 1 (an odd day to do so indeed):
The video does address, albeit briefly, the two elephants that have been in NaNoWriMos's room for the past few years: Allegations that people who were grooming youngsters on other sites also had a presence in NaNoWriMo forums and such -- I don't know that there was any evidence of grooming at NaNoWriMo -- and the board's flip-flopping on the use of artificial intelligence as an "assist" in completing the novel-in-a-month writing challenge the group started on.
You'll see in the video, however, that this board member pins the site's demise on poor financial performance, though even that is lacking in quite a bit of detail. Many in the video comments take offense that the board member is pinning NaNo's demise on "the community," but without actual figures shared, it's hard to tell whether that's true or not.
As with all things, however, there's probably a grain of truth to it. I participated in NaNo for three or four years in the aughts and such, and never made a contribution to the site. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yet in this video, there's no accounting for how many employees the group has -- they mention pay and benefits as a major expense -- nor how much they were compensated. I don't know all the ins and outs of running a site like this, or a nonprofit like this, but if you're going to nail your community for not supporting the group through donations, you probably should have an honest accounting of how many employees the organization has and how much they're paid, and how much work they're doing.
In other word, transparency. It's lacking in this video, so it's easier to brush off the accusations of non-support from the community.
No comments:
Post a Comment