An Apology from Staff to our Players

Durnic

Knight
Dear friends of Alliance Oregon,

The staff of the Oregon chapter would like to apologize for some insensitive actions taken recently. In a poorly-conceived - though well-intentioned - series of actions, we tagged a bunch of old photos with disclaimers. The result was three-fold: these old pictures started showing up on everyone’s feed, completely out of context; a number of people felt like we were calling them out as racists; and some were harassed over these photos.

Our goal was to protect players and create a safe and fun space for everyone. But in this world of cancel-culture, we needed to consider repercussions to the individual more carefully before acting and we failed to do so. We are sorry.

Going forward, we are making some changes:

We’re going to redouble our efforts to communicate as a team of staff members. The situation was the result of some enthusiastic staff members wanting to make things right and not communicating well with the rest of staff before acting. There was a false sense of urgency permeating the situation, which was then escalated, not de-escalated, by the few staff members involved. The resulting breakdown in communication led to this problem. We’re resolving to fix the issues that caused this whole chain of events.

We do anticipate posting a disclaimer about pictures, but it will be on our site as a whole, not on individual pictures. It will also be better tailored to provide necessary context for images that may be found on our webpages. We will not be singling out players or images when we do this. Our goal in this is to provide a framework for understanding the culture of the game at the time those images were taken, and to explain our growth patterns as an organization since then. Our goal is to address the organization’s evolving awareness and methods of of acting on these issues, not individual players.

We will also be creating some resources for players - both NPCs and PCs - to understand some of the difficult questions around fantasy settings and the racism in them. More on that soon. Our goal will be to educate everyone, ourselves included, not to call out people or punish them. We want everyone to be able to tell the stories they want to tell without fear.

Finally, our staff members will be undergoing some Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training to help identify our own fears and anxieties around race and racial issues. Our goal in this is to unpack why this happened and make personal steps to prevent it from happening again.

Thank you for your patience, and we hope you can find it in yourselves to forgive us. We were acting from a place of good intentions, but that does not excuse the results of our actions. We acknowledge that we made a serious mistake and will work hard to gain back the trust of the community.

Thank you and good day,

The Staff of Alliance Oregon
 
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