"a poll for the community at large" Where did this happen?

This might cause some confusion. Not everybody who agreed with the strike went on strike. And not everybody who went on strike agrees that all matters have been resolved. Also, the users and moderators who went on strike were not really an organized collective. I don't think it's at all safe to assume that all of the volunteers are just going to get back to work.

Indeed, @ouflak, but it's worth noting that the coordinated call to strike has ended. Everone is still free to make their own call on if the resolution was satisfactory or not, but the semi-organized, coordinated group of people who called for a strike are no longer making that call.

@ouflak The strike had only a small amount of organization. As stated in the question here, and basically everywhere else, it's is up to each individual to make the choice for themselves as to if they feel the current situation resolves issues sufficiently for them to feel comfortable returning to contributing in whatever capacity they choose. The votes and resumption of community projects indicate there's wide support for returning by the vast majority of people. There are, however, some people who will choose to continue striking or to leave entirely. That is, as it should be, their choice.

I wasn't aware there was a vote.... For folks who use the site heavily, but don't participate in the Discord, was there a notice of these polls? I certainly would have participated, but simply didn't know.

@RandomPerson The poll was taken on Discord, where striking moderators/curators/users were coordinating and discussing things throughout the strike.

@AMtwo - there was a notice in the TL for moderators to check Discord. There was not a general notice for everyone else, but the Discord is where all of the coordination and discussion happened for the strike, and is prominently linked in several posts about the strike as well as linked from the open letter. Stack requested that we refrain from performing strike coordination on the SE platform. There was also a ping sent out that notified everyone with access to the strike coordination channel about the poll.

@AMtwo Furthermore, the link to discord had been prominently featured for days already on the open letter.

Based on what has bee said multiple time - no one has the right to tell others to stop - the line "As of Monday, August 7th, 2023, the call for a strike has ended, and involved groups and individuals are resuming operations. However, each individual " should be more clearly written has "As of Monday, August 7th, 2023, the call for a strike has ended, and the involved groups are formally resuming operations. However, each individual"

Probably also worth noting that not everyone who voted, joined the strike; and vice-verse, not everyone who joined the strike, voted.

I'm still disappointed that the call to action for "what's next" wasn't included in the Meta post about the outcome of negotiations. Even a mention of "We'll be discussing what we do next on Discord" would have been helpful. I'm well aware that the Discord server exists, but even if I were a member, I'm not sure how I (or anyone else in a similar spot) would know to go look for a poll.

@Mast the problem isn't knowing that the Discord server existed, but rather that there was a specific action that ~1500 people who signed the strike letter wouldn't know was happening. The method of the open letter to start the strike worked incredibly well. I would have liked to see a similarly well-advertised method for calling an end to the strike.

I agree that it would've been good to get more input, @AMtwo, but I'd counter the statement that the open letter was what started the strike. The open letter was coordinated, organized, written, and edited through the Discord server. The post here on MSE announcing the strike was as well, and so was the update post that followed a week later. The Discord server has served as our coordination hub for the entire duration of the strike and is where all of the significant coordinated decisions were made.

@Mithical I just think that skipping the step where you solicit input from the wider group would have been important. If this were a labor union (which, I know it is not), there would have been a vote by full membership. The nearest thing to "full membership" is folks who signed the open letter.

@Mithical Simply replace "to start the strike" with "at the start of the strike" or "to start the public strike action." The open letter was obviously an integral part of kicking off the action. I'm doubtful that the 130 community poll voters accurately represents the 1600 letter signatories. I, for one, was carefully following this answer as I'm not a Discord user & was hoping that a call to action for a vote would have been there.

Voting too often leads to bikeshedding. We elected representatives for a reason, this is how they did it. All things considered, I think they did well enough not to complain about the details.

@AMtwo Re: "even if I were a member [of the Discord], I'm not sure how I would know to go look for a poll"; the poll was announced to server members with a server-wide "ping", that is, every user involved in the server received a notification about the posting of the poll, unless they explicitly opted into suppressing such server-wide notifications sometime prior. Speaking from experience, I wasn't following the server very closely at all, but still received and was able to respond to the poll because of that very notification.

I do have to agree with AMtwo, here. I'm not going to delve too deep into this, but it is a bit ironic that we accuse SE of not collaborating with us, when we fail to notify everyone involved in the strike, about a vote on the matter.

Eh, everything is chaotic the first few times. I'm sure after a few more strikes all the kinks in communication will be ironed out... /s

I have to agree with Andreas. Those pools were done in a way that locked out the vast majority of the community. In fact, the links to those pools don't work at all, so, we can't even see the results of the pool. That's a complete epic fail. Next time, please do a lot better. There's websites like strawpool, where you can create a publicly accessible pool.

Thee post announcing results of negotiation currently has 520 upvotes and 6 downvotes. I would assume than anyone who was not satisfied with those results would downvote that post.

@IsmaelMiguel The discord links require that you join discord.gg/YwfrSXd, a server that has been linked countless times at this point (including in the open letter). This is with the exception of the mod vote, as it's in a mod-only channel. It's where all the organisation has taken place, seeing as we haven't been allowed to do it on the platform, so it's also where it's been convenient to do polls

@Zoe That requires that we make an account to access the Discord server. And requires that we want to access the server in the first place. I'm not going to join it for personal reasons, but from the 1667 who signed the letter, 187 voiced their opinion in a server with about 1100 users. From 2/3 of the community that joined, about 15% of the people voted. That leaves behind 567 users who had absolutely no way to even know about the pool. This assumes that 100% of the users in the Discord server signed the letter. The number of people that couldn't vote is higher than the number of votes.

I saw the voting mentioned on this post albeit close to the close. The post carries the strike tag. I also saw it mentioned in a number of comments.

@IsmaelMiguel there's incredible difficulties behind notifying 1700 people on short notice without using some form of external service that people join. We can't manually contact that many people either. If you don't join, you're effectively opting out of certain notifications, and that's entirely on you. Again, not optimal, but it's the platform we picked when we couldn't use chat.SE and MSE for coordination. and even then, neither Chat.SE nor MSE lets us actually notify everyone; people also take breaks and don't pay attention. A high voting percentage is unachievable

If you want in on decisions, join the discord server. The people on the server will collectively make the decision on behalf of everyone not participating. If that group included you is entirely up to you

@Zoe A very small voting percentage isn't representative of the entire group. And as I stated, I don't want to join the Discord server for personal reasons.

Then you don't get to be part of the decisions. That's what happens when SE pushed the organisation off the platform. The strike being declared over by the organising core doesn't prevent individuals from continuing the strike either.

@QHarr That post seems like a good place to post your disagreement to end the strike. And some people are actually listing good points there.

@Zoe That an awful way to handle things. Either you join this specific place on another platform, or you're out.

It was made clear that we were not allowed to use SE platforms for strike organization or coordination. The Discord server has served as the base of operations since the start, and it's where major decisions were made - such as writing the open letter and the strike announcement, or voting for representatives. It's prominently linked and publicly accessible. I don't think it's unreasonable to use the pre-established base of operations to continue to make decisions.

Also, to be frank, this was somewhat of a formality. People were coming off of strike anyway, with mods resuming activity and bots going back on. The vote and the post help us maintain some semblance of cohesion, but the strike was effectively over as soon as the agreement was reached and announced.

@IsmaelMiguel how would you solve it? discord being the best and really only (non-SE) option for this use aside, there's always going to be a platform conflict. Unifying everyone under a single platform (when that platform has to be a third party platform) is an exercise in futility. Pick any other platform, applicable to this use or not; someone has a problem with it, or can't access it (particularly in countries like China with strict blocking of a lot of stuff), or both. There's no way to win, so the best available option (bonus points for already being established) is picked

@Zoe Same way as the linked question, a few comments before: post an on-topic question to request feedback on what people think of the progress of the strike so far.

That's why discord is used; it was established in 2019, and became a hub for meta discussions. When strike time came and, again, we were pushed off SE for organising, discord was available, and an applicable platform, freely accessible (though with an account, but that's standard on the internet nowadays), and ready to go immediately.

"Same way as the linked question, a few comments before: post an on-topic question to request feedback on what people think of the progress of the strike so far." - if we did that for everything, SE would recognise it as organising on the platform (which, again, we were explicitly told not to do) and shut it all down.

@Zoe An on-topic question, to request feedback on the progress done, and discuss anything related to the changes made during the strike (NOT ABOUT THE STRIKE ITSELF) wouldn't be "organising [sic] on the platform". You wouldn't talk about the strike itself.

Yet, that's exactly what these votes (and the ongoing discussions on the server) are. They're strike organisation. Updates are different, which is why it gets a mirrored post, but deciding whether to end the strike is strike organisation

@Zoe However, discussing if the progress, so far, of the decisions made isn't strike organization. But, I won't change my mind and you won't change yours, so, I'm just stopping here.

To clarify a bit about how these polls happened... Basically, we picked 3 people to negotiate on our behalf. This was done on Discord. If you're not on Discord, you didn't help choose those 3 people nor did you volunteer yourself for this massive undertaking. When their negotiating job was done, they came back to the group and said "Okay, we're done, here's what we got on your behalf". After a ton of time spent, lots of back-and-forth checking with everyone, etc. At that point, it was unclear what would happen next. Some people just went back to work.

Others suggested we should have some sort of group agreement or recommendation from the negotiators on what striking users should do, with the understanding that they're all individuals and would ultimately make up their own minds. They decided to put polls in two relevant places where all the discussions were happening to try to reach the people most involved, and that's what you're seeing here. Separately, there were discussions among the other interested groups (like Charcoal).

If you didn't join Discord to help organize and provide input along the way, I'd invite you to provide feedback here on Meta on the specific SE-related issues you're concerned about, but please don't complain about the work done by a few volunteers doing extra stressful extra volunteery work on this or Discord as a choice of venue for those conversations.