Just brainstorming: I imagine we could eventually have infrastructures for dealing with such situations better.
Right now this sort of work requires:
Figuring out who in the organization is a good fit for asking about this.
Finding their email address.
Emailing them.
If they don’t respond, trying to figure out how long you should wait until you post anyway.
If they do respond and it becomes a thread, figure out where to cut off things.
If you’re anonymous, setting up an extra email account.
Ideally it might be nice to have policies and infrastructure for such work. For example:
Coded practices and norms for responses. Organizations can specify which person is responsible and what their email address is. They also commit to responding in some timeframe.
Services for responses. Maybe there’s a middleman who knows the people at the orgs and could help do some of the grunt work of routing signals back and forth.
I think part of the problems you point to (though not all) could be easily fixed by just simple tweaks to the initial email: In the initial email, say when you plan to post by if you don’t get a response (include that in bold) and say something to indicate how much back-and-forth you’re ok with / how much time you’re able/willing to invest in that (basically to set expectations).
I think you could also email anyone in the org out of the set of people whose email address you can quickly find and whose role/position sounds somewhat appropriate, and ask them to forward it to someone else if that’s better.
Just brainstorming:
I imagine we could eventually have infrastructures for dealing with such situations better.
Right now this sort of work requires:
Figuring out who in the organization is a good fit for asking about this.
Finding their email address.
Emailing them.
If they don’t respond, trying to figure out how long you should wait until you post anyway.
If they do respond and it becomes a thread, figure out where to cut off things.
If you’re anonymous, setting up an extra email account.
Ideally it might be nice to have policies and infrastructure for such work. For example:
Coded practices and norms for responses. Organizations can specify which person is responsible and what their email address is. They also commit to responding in some timeframe.
Services for responses. Maybe there’s a middleman who knows the people at the orgs and could help do some of the grunt work of routing signals back and forth.
I think part of the problems you point to (though not all) could be easily fixed by just simple tweaks to the initial email: In the initial email, say when you plan to post by if you don’t get a response (include that in bold) and say something to indicate how much back-and-forth you’re ok with / how much time you’re able/willing to invest in that (basically to set expectations).
I think you could also email anyone in the org out of the set of people whose email address you can quickly find and whose role/position sounds somewhat appropriate, and ask them to forward it to someone else if that’s better.