Author: Shawn K. Quinn

An attempt to squelch

So, I would hope by now most of you saw my exposé on WordCamp Houston which wound up focusing specifically on the scholarship money (what wound up being $2,790.30, finally awarded in late January). If not, it’s still there, waiting to be read. Anyway, if you have read it, you might have thought I was done talking about that, the still-effectively-dead Meetup group, and certain people involved with same. Yes? Seriously?

Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not. I thought I was, but I’m not. And in a larger sense, I won’t be for quite some time. There’s more to be said. People want me to shut up, but that’s not happening. I will not be squelched.

First, I want to lay out some facts that some of you may not know and put them in context, mostly how they relate to this blog. My first posts to this blog were made on 2008 December 15, some four years and change ago. Over the next few months I rapidly settled into a groove of talking about current events and things that I found interesting, felt were outrageous, or maybe just pissed me off for one reason or another. Time went on, and I started taking on more and more politically-oriented topics. It could be said this is now a political blog which occasionally goes off on a technology or sports tangent now and again.

When someone becomes a public figure (whether all-purpose public figure or limited public figure), the threshold for legally actionable defamation against that person changes. To win a defamation suit, a private figure only needs to prove negligence. However, a public figure also needs to prove actual malice, which is one of two things: knowingly publishing a lie, or acting with a reckless disregard for the truth. I believe anyone in politics, not only as candidate, but also working in campaigns as a social media consultant, event planner, treasurer, campaign manager, or any combination of the above, would fall into the latter category of public figure. I believe anyone who has organized an event like a WordCamp would at least qualify as a limited purpose public figure.

If you read that and you’re thinking “holy cow, he just described Monica Danna” then you see where I’m going already. If not, then yeah, I just gave it away. That’s exactly where I was going. For those that are unaware, Ms. Danna was involved with Bill White’s campaign for governor in 2010, as well as her father’s campaign for Harris County Precinct 1 Constable in 2012.

If I was talking about any other campaign treasurer or campaign manager, whether it be in Harris County, some other county in Texas, some other state in the US, or even some other country on this great big rock we call planet Earth, there wouldn’t even be an issue.

“But wait a minute, Shawn, those campaigns are over, so why don’t you stuff a sock in it already?” I hear you asking. Not so fast. It seems reasonable to me, at least, to infer from the past that Ms. Danna will, at some point in the near future, be a part of a political campaign again in some form.

So now maybe you’re saying: “Okay, Shawn, so how about you stuff a sock in it until she’s actually involved with a campaign again?” Well, I would, but there’s more to it than that. By her involvement with WordCamp Houston 2010 as organizer, Ms. Danna also made herself a limited public figure for the purposes of the Houston WordPress community. The WordCamp Houston 2010 keynote as recorded on UStream (now only available via the BitTorrent magnet link if you want to download a copy, as the Ustream copy is now long gone) is ample evidence of that, by itself (notwithstanding at least two breakout sessions where she spoke at the event, which we don’t have video of for whatever reasons). It also happens that the poor handling of the scholarship money, lack of communication, and dishonesty would be at least somewhat relevant to judging the trustworthiness of a political campaign treasurer, and by extension the candidate’s judgment.

It doesn’t end with WordCamp Houston 2010. Ms. Danna was also caught writing a review on Yelp of one of her clients, Azur Salon. I wish I had reported it sooner than I actually did, but yes, I’m the person who reported the review, which has since been taken down for “violating [Yelp’s] Content Guidelines or Terms of Services.” Posting a review with an obvious conflict of interest is arguably the biggest no-no possible on Yelp, and is a textbook example of unethical practice of public relations.

Lest this be dismissed as an isolated incident, some time after the Yelp review was pulled, Ms. Danna chose yet again to break common-sense PR rules against conflict of interest, this time on Google+ with a review of Primer Grey (evidence available on request), which her former company Colab shared office space with up until its demise about a year ago. As critical as I have been of Google at times in the past, this is one case where they have earned praise, as my report of this TOS violation was acted on within two business days. A true PR professional would know this was a conflict of interest and unethical to post, even if not codified as against the terms of service, content guidelines, etc of the service in question. (Unfortunately, my situation at the time precluded keeping a close enough eye on the non-compliant Yelp review to get an accurate time of action relative to my report, so I can’t make a fair comparison.)

I have acted with a careful regard for the truth, I have never intentionally published a lie, and I have always been willing to correct errors in fact. You can look as hard as you want for negligence, you won’t find it here. You certainly won’t find actual malice, but you’re welcome to look. I honestly feel like I would have been sued by now were there grounds for a lawsuit.

Make no mistake about it, I have the right to say what I did about Monica Danna. In a more general sense, I have the right to talk about anyone of a similarly high profile. I believe the public has a right to know that someone who has held themselves out as a professional event planner fell far short of that, at least based on my experience. Also, the public has a right to know that this same person felt completely comfortable taking a political campaign treasurer position while still sitting on event proceeds earmarked for award as a college scholarship, with a pattern of conduct that (at least to me) appeared highly suspicious and indicative of a plan to “take the money and run” at some point (no offense intended to Steve Miller Band fans).

Further, I have the same right to talk about Chris Valdez, who has worked with Ms. Danna regularly in the past. Mr. Valdez’s day job at Primer Grey revolves around the trust of clients to keep their websites secure and available (i.e. online and serving only the content they are supposed to be, not malware). The public has the right to know that the security of the wordcamphouston.com website was neglected while business related to the event was outstanding, and that for at least five months the website showed a malware warning screen in Firefox. While I am willing to concede that Mr. Valdez keeps a somewhat lower profile outside of the Houston WordPress community, I believe within it his profile is high enough to be considered at the least a limited purpose public figure.

I have the same right to talk about Christopher Smith. My reasoning for asserting my right to talk about Mr. Smith, however, is a bit different and comes in direct rebuttal to fraudulent assertions he has made as the nominal “organizer” of the Houston WordPress Meetup. On one hand Mr. Smith said “this is your Meetup group too.” That was in 2011. Fast forward about a year and Mr. Smith thinks nothing of going AWOL for most of a year and not leaving a competent and willing co-organizer in charge who is willing to actually announce legitimate, confirmed meetups to the rest of the group. Yes, my name was on them as the person who first entered them on the Meetup.com website. But that’s completely irrelevant for whether or not they should have been announced. Mr. Smith’s profile is also high enough to be considered a limited purpose public figure.

Honestly, it says a lot about the character of Mr. Smith that he is willing to just all of a sudden come back to a meetup group he abandoned for nearly a year, and worse, return like it’s only been a week or two. If the group truly belongs to the community, Mr. Smith would have resigned as organizer by now. Paying $19 per month to Meetup.com does not make one a leader. In fact, in this case (like many others that happen on Meetup.com), just paying the organizer dues and remaining absent was one of the worst things Mr. Smith (or anyone else in the organizer position) could have done to the Houston WordPress community. A responsible organizer would have stepped aside within the first six months, and let someone else take over. (This is, coincidentally, just what Jenia Lazslo did when she could no longer run the group.)

What really makes my blood boil, however, is that this is a guy that wanted to run WordCamp Houston in 2012! Worse yet, WordCamp Central almost let him! Get real! (I’m glad nobody gave him a venue. Personally, I think we are better off as a community not having had a WordCamp in 2012, than having had one under Mr. Smith’s “leadership.”)

If Christopher Smith, Chris Valdez, Monica Danna, or for that matter anyone else out there, feels their safety is threatened by my revelation of uncomfortable truths, such as lies told to and unethical actions towards the community, the logical thing to do in response is to stop lying and/or start acting in a more ethical fashion. If the meetup group truly belonged to the community, and was not just an extension of the personal ego of Christopher Smith, I’d still be in it. It’s so obvious that my removal from the meetup group online was retaliation for speaking out and letting the truth be known about unethical, unprofessional, and unbecoming conduct by Mr. Valdez and Ms. Danna.

Before I wind up this post, I’m going to address something brought up by some friends recently. One of the comments on a prior related post was read to imply by its wording that volunteers should be given a “free pass” to do a poor job. I can’t confirm that’s what the original poster meant at the moment.

Let’s consider a similar, hypothetical situation: A professional truck driver with a CDL (commerical driver’s license) is driving his/her personal vehicle (say, a mid-size sedan) as a volunteer for a non-profit. During his volunteer duties, this driver gets a traffic ticket. In Texas at least, the driver would be stuck paying the fine as CDL drivers aren’t allowed to take the driver safety course. In some others states the driver may even be looking at immediately losing his/her job for a while due to a license suspension. Is it unreasonable to hold the driver to the same higher standards of any other CDL driver even though he/she is a volunteer in a non-commercial vehicle at the time of the accident?

Another similar situation: While driving home from work, an off-duty professional EMT happens upon the scene of a traffic accident before the (paid) EMTs arrive. He/she is of course protected by the same “Good Samaritan” laws that you or I would be. Is it unreasonable to hold the EMT to a higher standard than you or I would be held? (Certainly, a “screw it, I’m not on the clock” mentality is unacceptable at least this case.)

How about a CPA who also serves as a volunteer treasurer for a non-profit? Is it acceptable for the books to be off by a few more bucks because the treasurer is a volunteer? Is it not unreasonable to expect better from someone whose day job is attention to financial details?

You get the idea. I don’t think it should be all that different for event planners and public relations counsel working in their field as volunteers.

In closing:

I restate and renew my previous objections to Christopher Smith, Chris Valdez, and Monica Danna holding themselves out as Houston WordPress community leaders, and I ask should cease doing so immediately.

I believe it is not appropriate for Christopher Smith, Chris Valdez, or Monica Danna to be organizing, sponsoring, presenting at, or volunteering at WordCamp Houston 2013, or for that matter, any other WordCamp anywhere else for at least the immediate future.

My attendance at Houston WordPress community events of which the aforementioned trio are nominal organizers should not be construed as endorsement of their past, present, or future involvement. My absence from those same events, on the other hand, is likely due to retaliation for spreading the uncomfortable truth (especially when I have announced my intentions to attend). As a notable exception to this rule, tonight I was unable to attend due to an entirely unrelated reason. It was my intent yesterday morning (Wednesday, 2013 May 8) to be there yesterday evening.

The truth is that I care a lot more about the Houston WordPress community. My involvement with the Houston WordPress community goes back to at least 2009 November 30 — weeks before Ms. Danna even thought of organizing WordCamp Houston 2010, weeks Mr. Valdez joined the organizing team, and months before the meetups began. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only remaining community leader who can claim involvement going back that far; everyone else has left Houston, left the local WordPress community, or both.

Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable. One reasonable response, when one finds the truth about oneself to be uncomfortable, is to change the truth going forward. It is certainly not a reasonable response to try to squelch the truth.

I will not be squelched.

[Edit 2021-08-24: Ustream was bought by IBM long ago and they have apparently wiped most archived content.]

Red Medicine and the no-shows

Since the dawn of the World Wide Web, no longer have restaurant reviews been the exclusive domain of professional restaurant critics. Services like Yelp have enabled reviews of restaurants (and other establishments), both for better and for worse, by average customers.

But, suddenly some no-show customers at a Beverly Hills restaurant found the shoe on the other foot. This story on KGTV (San Diego ABC affiliate) made a lot of waves, because this time Noah Ellis, the owner of Red Medicine, tweeted the full names of several no-shows after getting sick and tired of losing money from people either missing their reservation or cancelling at the last minute.

This tweet:

All the nice guests who wonder why restaurants overbook and they sometimes have to wait for their res should thank people like those below.

and this quote from the owner (which came from the KGTV story) should give you some idea of the frustration level involved:

The (expletive) who decide to no-show, or cancel 20 minutes before their reservation (because one of their friends made a reservation somewhere else) ruin restaurants (as a whole) for the people who make a reservation and do their best to honor it. Either restaurants are forced to overbook and make the guests (that actually showed up) wait, or they do what we do, turn away guests for some prime-time slots because they’re booked, and then have empty tables.

And if that’s not enough this LA Times article has this quote from a competing chef:

[A competing chef] said he usually responds to no-shows with “Cursing, a lot of f-words and other kitchen-speak. It’s the equivalent of being stood up. Not that I’ve ever been stood up. But I can imagine how it feels with how many no-shows and last-minute cancellations we’ve gotten.

And then, days later, this article on grubstreet.com details that at least one of those no-showing had a death in the family which she found out about less than a half-hour from making the reservation, and that she had only called in the reservation at 6pm for dinner at 7:30pm. According to her, staff at Red Medicine had her cell phone number and never called to see what had happened, and it was (understandably) the last thing on her mind to call and cancel the reservation.

(For the moment, I’m going to set aside that this is the same restaurant that once refused service to S. Irene Virbila and her party, and posted her picture, back in late 2010. As it happens, I blogged about that one too; if you want my post about that incident, you’re welcome to go back in the archives and read it.)

I can see both sides of the story here. Since I’m not a restaurant owner, first I will approach this from the point of view of a restaurant guest (which I have been many times, though not often at the level of restaurants similar to Red Medicine).

I think a death in the family is a valid reason to skip a restaurant reservation. For me, hearing a relative had just passed on would certainly ruin my appetite. If I had made a restaurant reservation at 6pm, and gotten that call around 6:20-6:30pm, it would depend a lot on circumstances if I was able to keep my thoughts in order long enough to remember to call to cancel; I might be able to, and then again I might not. Certainly, though, if the restaurant has my phone number and call to ask where I am, I’d tell them why I wasn’t able to make it. So if the woman’s story is true, then Red Medicine’s staff really dropped the ball and made an already bad situation even worse for at least one potential customer.

We don’t know the stories behind why the other six no-shows didn’t honor their reservations, and in all likelihood, we probably never will. I’m going to go out on a limb, though, and assume that the others had reasons which were much less serious than a death in the family. If it was simply a case of someone else in the party having reservations elsewhere, that’s a no-brainer: I would call and cancel as soon as I know. Even if it’s something like accidentally losing the credit/debit card that I was going to pay for dinner with, or problems with the vehicle I’d be driving down there (let’s face it, Red Medicine’s clientele don’t hop the bus down there), I’d rather call and cancel than just no-show.

From a restaurant owner’s point of view, perhaps more could have been done so that things didn’t get to this point. I certainly would want to know why people are no-shows at my restaurant so often. Maybe Noah and his staff already knew or at least already thought they knew. While I’ll probably get my share of flames for just trying to see Noah’s side of the story, it’s entirely possible this has been an ongoing problem they have been trying to resolve for months or years.

That said, there’s enough controversy about this that this isn’t something every restaurant owner should seriously consider. Red Medicine got at least three one-star reviews on Yelp in retaliation that I saw (and no telling how many others which will bubble up to the top once the reviewers better establish themselves), one of which suggested the restaurant should consider converting to walk-ins only. While I’m sure the reviewer meant well, that kind of a change either goes very right, or very wrong. Most places which require reservations require them because otherwise they’d lose many more customers without them, since many are bound to give up on a restaurant as the odds of getting a table equal and then become far worse than winning a decent amount on a scratch-off lottery ticket.

Only time will tell just how right, or how wrong, this move was. One thing’s for sure: if I get to visit LA and dine at Red Medicine, I will honor any reservation I make. The last thing I need is bad publicity.

What does the NCAA really stand for?

I haven’t done a good sports-related post in forever. Apparently, it takes a broken leg to get me interested in college sports. I’ve learned more about how the NCAA started than most college fans probably want to know, and I’m shocked by what I’ve found out.

This ThinkProgress article on Kevin Ware’s broken leg takes a pretty big swipe at the NCAA. It quotes a story from the 2011 October issue of The Atlantic at length, which while being over a year old, is still quite timely and relevant:

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed … to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

…The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. …

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Now, think about this last paragraph in the light of such things as the Texas “No Pass No Play” rule, which came into effect in 1985–and has had unintended deleterious consequences, I might add. (Without going off on too much of a tangent, let’s just say youth gangs don’t care what’s on the last report card.)

The rule was originally intended to decrease failing grades by eliminating “distracting” sports, mainly for students in football, and mainly those who failed two or more courses. (If memory serves me correctly, the news exposé at the time brought to light students who failed four or more courses.) Instead of a rule focused strictly on the biggest part of the problem, the Texas version of the rule lets any teacher who can find a way to flunk a student have complete control of whether or not that student is in any extracurricular activities. Yes, there are (or at least were) teachers who will get “creative” and round down a 69.9 average so the student gets an “F” instead of a “D”. Bam! Game over. No sports, no band, no choir, no part in the school play for the next six weeks. I was stuck in “cadet band” one semester because of this, and I got a failing grade in band (68) during a grading period as a result due to the ridiculous number of demerits that being in “cadet band” set me up for. The school counselor, not surprisingly, didn’t believe me. (This is why I quit school band after that year.)

So, back on topic… any way you slice it, the bit about not meeting the academic standards of their peers is definitely hogwash today. Being on the football or basketball teams is not an excuse for having lower grades and honestly, I don’t realistically think it ever was.

The article from The Atlantic goes into detail about just how the NCAA has resorted to selling game broadcast videos and made other merchandising deals in apparent exploitation of the athletic students it should be protecting. A small portion of this:

All of this money ultimately derives from the college athletes whose
likenesses are shown in the films or video games. But none of the profits go to them. … Naturally, as they have become more of a profit center for the NCAA, some of the vaunted “student-athletes” have begun to clamor that they deserve a share of those profits. You “see everybody getting richer and richer,” Desmond Howard, who won the 1991 Heisman Trophy while playing for the Michigan Wolverines, told USA Today recently. “And you walk around and you can’t put gas in your car? You can’t even fly home to see your parents?”

… “Once you leave your university,” says [Ed] O’Bannon, who won the John Wooden Award for player of the year in 1995 on UCLA’s national-championship basketball team, “one would think your likeness belongs to you.”

Later on in the article comes a huge indictment of how the NCAA defines amateur status. I obviously can’t quote the entire article here but this should give you some idea what’s at stake. We have, on one hand, the NCAA, which has gone from its original mission to what is in effect a near-monopoly on college sports, using this flimsy excuse that college athletes are amateurs to first, exclude them from worker’s compensation claims, and second, to keep them from even negotiating with professional sports teams at all without risking their supposed amateur status.

The idea that (most) college athletes are amateurs is absurd. College athletes are paid when they get an athletic scholarship. (The walk-ons might be true amateurs, thus the “most” above.) The NCAA is truly treating college athletes like professionals by licensing their likenesses and, worse, not paying them for the privilege. The Olympics abandoned amateur status requirements back in 1986, for better or for worse. On top of this, it strikes me as just plain silly to rule players ineligible just for testing the market by negotiating with a professional team–even if no money changes hands.

This would be less of an issue if not combined with the most utterly short-sighted and galactically stupid limit of one year on scholarship commitments. Add this all up and you have the following: college athletes are at the mercy of their coaches and pretty much commit to playing their sport of choice for all four years to have a chance to graduate, if their coaches will let them. If the coach decides to cut an athlete the following year–boom! It’s either don’t graduate, hope to qualify for a Pell grant, or take out student loans.

I will probably revisit this topic at a later date. It will take me time to find suggestions on ways to fix the problems, because there are simply too many. But it’s clear to me that the NCAA as it stands today, stands for what is wrong with college athletics. We, the sports fans of the US (and the world), deserve better.

The great PyCon lewd joke controversy of 2013

This one hits remarkably close to home for me. It’s a storyline we’ve seen so many times: person A sees something done/said by person B and posts it to a blog/Twitter/Facebook taking exception to it, person B doesn’t like being called out, all hell breaks loose.

Here are the relevant stories and blog posts I found, in what I believe to be chronological order:

The storyline, for those who haven’t read it: Adria Richards attends PyCon, and has the unfortunate luck of sitting in front of two PlayHaven developers who make rather tasteless computer geek jokes about “forking” and “big dongles.” Adria posts a picture of them on Twitter with a description of what’s going on. PlayHaven doesn’t like having their brand attached to this kind of thing, and fires one of the developers. Anonymous, the group responsible for generally wreaking technical havok with DDOS attacks when something happens that they don’t like, decides to launch a DDOS attack (big surprise) against SendGrid. SendGrid fires Adria.

Adria’s blog post linked above describes that the decision to post what she did was carefully thought out. She even links to the PyCon code of conduct, which I’ll quote in part (from the short version):

PyCon is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form.

All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.

It’s obvious to me that the sexual jokes about forking and about large dongles very clearly cross the line. In fact, there is no way that any sane person can read the above parts of the PyCon code of conduct in a way where this kind of thing would be allowed. There’s no information on whether or not they were allowed to stay at PyCon from that point forward (possibly on purpose, more on this later). Certainly, there’s a strong case for kicking them out of the conference without a refund.

There are also people saying the PlayHaven developer who was fired shouldn’t have been. It’s really hard for me to agree with that point of view. He knew the rules, he broke them, he made his company look bad, he was fired. I don’t care if he does have three kids. Maybe his kids, once they grow up, can learn from their daddy’s mistake: break the rules, lose your job. Hey, I’ve been fired from jobs for smaller mistakes before, and I have a friend who was fired from a job for little more than getting hurt on the job (long story).

Adria shined a bright light on this flagrantly unacceptable conduct. Honestly, I think it needed to be exposed. This is 2013, and while some decades ago it may have been unusual for women to work in the technology industry, that is no longer the case. The only thing that could be worse than two guys making clearly inappropriate jokes at a tech conference, is having someone bring this conduct to light–and lose her job for it. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what has happened to Adria.

PyCon appears to want to address this type of situation going forward by placing an emphasis on confidentiality and privacy, which I disagree with in principle. I think the threat of bad publicity has done far more to raise awareness of this issue than anything done under the cloak of privacy and confidentiality.

I do realize Adria’s job is developer relations, and in that context, it’s unfortunate that SendGrid decided to say “[Adria’s] actions have strongly divided the same [developer] community she was supposed to unite.” It makes me wonder if perhaps there exists a population of (mostly male) developers at SendGrid that felt they have the right to make these kind of jokes. That’s the only way I can see Adria’s actions being divisive. If that’s the case, maybe SendGrid should be beefing up their sensitivity and harassment training. Certainly this would do much more for developer relations than firing an employee for speaking out against a flagrant violation of a conference’s conduct guidelines.

I’ll close with two of the better quotes from the two blog posts. First, from Adria’s:

The forking joke set the stage for the dongle joke. Neither were funny.

And second, from Steve’s:

Want to keep your job or save face after you’ve made sexist jokes at a tech conference?

Don’t make sexist jokes at a tech conference.

That sums it up far better than I ever could.

Editorial note: Taking the day off

This has never been an issue in years past, but I thought I would go ahead and make it official this year and going forward.

To help avoid reader confusion, Rant Roulette takes April Fool’s Day off. By the way, this is a really bad day to take anything seriously on the Internet and elsewhere, and that’s no joke.