A few keen eyes will realize that the most recent Soapbox post was nuked off the face of the earth. This was not an accident. I had a brief call with Zach within 24 hours of it going live to discuss Soapbox and its place in the community. It was a good conversation, but it boiled down to a few main things. Let's discuss them.

I am biased with my level of access

Thanks to my close relationship with HQ, I often come across information that should be kept private. That leads to a conflict of interest. I already commented on this in my personal channel for this question:

Anon: Rowan, will #soapbox share leeks?

Me: I mean, there is a bit of nuance to it, so don't expect me to be dropping leaks from internal channels, but the community has brought together everything on Soapbox. The only new information dropped was that the Fire Department cases were shared.

What I predict Soapbox to be is less of a "haha hq is doing something stupid, lets all dunk on them" but more so of #happenings, but it in real time and about the stuff that the community actually cares about.

• •If that involves a data breach and bringing some facts to the table rather some back channel speculation, so be it.
• •If it is quoting HQ members when they make promises, so be it.
• •If it is being critical at times, so be it.

To sum up, my policy on sources is that anything I get that someone without my access could not access is off-limits. However, if someone else in the community reinforces the claim publicly, that is fair game as the information is no longer contained to internal channels.

Conduct is a gray area, and it would be better for the new administration to handle it rather than a third party

Evan Streams (@eps on Slack) is the new community manager for Hack Club and will also be making some changes within the Fire Department. The community at large has yet to get much information on what this will look like, and thanks to the rules above, I am not going to disclose much, but it is better to leave it to the professionals.

The subject of the previous post should have been kept private

This was a recurring argument. I still stand by the fact that this was a fair game, as the individual was made aware that the situation would be made public; however, other involved parties expressed concern. This also loops back into why reasons for conduct actions are commonly not shared, as it creates a record. If you were a future employer, seeing a random blog show up that criticizes some of your actions is not a particularly good look.

People look to you as HQ comms

To Zach, his first impression was that Soapbox would seem like HQ sanctioned publishing to an outsider. This is also not helped by me being relatively active in the community and working closely with HQ on many matters. I can plaster “independent” on the front page, but given that I'm the owner, it can still largely be seen as HQ-affiliated.

How should Soapbox continue?

One of the things I love about modern journalism is that anyone can become their own news outlet. I think that carries a lot of power. Traditional outlets are often slow to report on important matters, harbor other biases that frame them in particular ways, or completely leave some events in the dark. Platforms like Telegram and Twitter have shifted this balance. Anyone can start publishing. Of course, this has its downsides of misinformation at times, but it is successful in some cases in bringing transparency.

The vision for Soapbox came many moons ago during some #meta debate, but I felt there was a lack of information being shared with the general public. Most people will only learn about what's going on when a friend tells them or when a #meta thread makes enough of a mess. This is partly due to what I feel is bad PR from HQ. My solution was to create a source that surfaced the content that active community members really cared about. It was initially supposed to be a Hack Club version of Telegram channels like Middle East Spectator, a constant feed of interesting news for a target audience. For the few days it was active, I think it executed on that goal well. It was supposed to combine random messages from HQ members in #hq, #community, #meta, and other related channels into an easy-to-digest feed.

Enough about motivation. The agreement after the call was to take down the previous post and stay away from conduct-related matters. This is fair. He suggested that if Soapbox became a personal blog of cool things happening in Hack Club, that would be perfectly fine, but that is not the goal of Soapbox. Conduct is a very touchy subject. After the call, I will also make my own call to stop publishing, as the risks of potential topics outweigh the benefits.

One thing I would love to see is another community member take up something like this. I think the community really needs a central source for information that is unaffiliated with HQ and publishes content that carries weight with someone who really cares, rather than an equivalent of state-run media that just lists current programs running. I have gone ahead and published the source code for Soapbox on GitHub if you would like to fork it and use it for your own purposes: https://github.com/3kh0/soapbox (go drop a star if you are kind)

Thank you for participating in my little experiment. It was fun while it lasted. At least I can say I know my way around CloudFlare D1 now :)

• •Rowan

"A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity." - Dalai Lama