Hi Gregory, I will be running these workshops together with John, so I’d like to respond to your comments.
I think that it is fair for you to post your warning/recommendation but as far as I can tell, today’s CFAR is quite different from the organization that you say demonstrated “gross negligence and utter corporate incompetence” in the past. You say that the evidence is sparse that anything has changed and I’m not sure about that but I’m also not the person to make that case because I’m not CFAR—I’m a CFAR developer running a project with other CFAR developers and a couple of CFAR core staff.
I can only speak for myself as one of the co-leads of this project and what I can say is that we see the skulls. They’re a bit hard to ignore since they’re everywhere! But that is exactly why we think we have enough of an understanding of what happened and how to learn from it. We are very much aware of the previous mistakes and believe that we can do better. And we want to try because we think these workshops are good and important and that we can do them well.
I generally think that people and organizations deserve second chances but ultimately it is for the people to decide. We will be fulfilling our role as event organizers by mitigating risks to our participants, to the extent that we reasonably can (based on CFAR’s past mistakes and also based on our own experience and judgment). And our participants will decide if they trust us enough to come to an immersive workshop with a bunch of other humans who they will interact with for 4.5 days.
“We will be fulfilling our role as event organizers by mitigating risks to our participants, to the extent that we reasonably can (based on CFAR’s past mistakes and also based on our own experience and judgment). And our participants will decide if they trust us enough to come to an immersive workshop with a bunch of other humans who they will interact with for 4.5 days.” I was recently asked for recommendations of people who might like to attend. I would find it more useful to know what safeguards, if any, are now in place to avoid similar situations in the future. There feels like a big difference between consenting to attend an event with no safeguards versus one with them (EAG-style Code of Conduct, appointed persons to deal with concerns, etc.) If you have time, can you elaborate? Thanks very much.
Hi Gregory, I will be running these workshops together with John, so I’d like to respond to your comments.
I think that it is fair for you to post your warning/recommendation but as far as I can tell, today’s CFAR is quite different from the organization that you say demonstrated “gross negligence and utter corporate incompetence” in the past. You say that the evidence is sparse that anything has changed and I’m not sure about that but I’m also not the person to make that case because I’m not CFAR—I’m a CFAR developer running a project with other CFAR developers and a couple of CFAR core staff.
I can only speak for myself as one of the co-leads of this project and what I can say is that we see the skulls. They’re a bit hard to ignore since they’re everywhere! But that is exactly why we think we have enough of an understanding of what happened and how to learn from it. We are very much aware of the previous mistakes and believe that we can do better. And we want to try because we think these workshops are good and important and that we can do them well.
I generally think that people and organizations deserve second chances but ultimately it is for the people to decide. We will be fulfilling our role as event organizers by mitigating risks to our participants, to the extent that we reasonably can (based on CFAR’s past mistakes and also based on our own experience and judgment). And our participants will decide if they trust us enough to come to an immersive workshop with a bunch of other humans who they will interact with for 4.5 days.
“We will be fulfilling our role as event organizers by mitigating risks to our participants, to the extent that we reasonably can (based on CFAR’s past mistakes and also based on our own experience and judgment). And our participants will decide if they trust us enough to come to an immersive workshop with a bunch of other humans who they will interact with for 4.5 days.”
I was recently asked for recommendations of people who might like to attend. I would find it more useful to know what safeguards, if any, are now in place to avoid similar situations in the future. There feels like a big difference between consenting to attend an event with no safeguards versus one with them (EAG-style Code of Conduct, appointed persons to deal with concerns, etc.) If you have time, can you elaborate? Thanks very much.