These are notes from a call on July 2nd, 2021, which was run to address questions/concerns from community members about Zephyr.
Hey everyone, I’m going to host a call to talk about the Zephyr at 5 PM ET for anyone who would like to join (1.5 hours from now). I just had a good call with @sarthak and we thought it’d be good to do an open call for the community.
If you’ve had concerns, feel things weren’t fair, or that HQ hasn’t been acting with the best intentions, please consider joining. I am sincere in my desire to make Hack Club as good as possible and would appreciate a chance to hear from you, share more about how we’ve been thinking about things, and hopefully come to amends. Please trust me that joining will not cause any direct or indirect backlash from me or any other staff members. I really, genuinely, want to speak with you.
I’ll post the Zoom link here at 5 PM ET. You can also DM @sarthak if you’d like to get a calendar invite with the Zoom link ahead of time. I wish I could do later tonight, with more notice, but I have some existing Hack Club commitments we have to schedule around. And we can’t do next week because I will need to fully focus on finalizing the Zephyr’s schedule. Hope to see you soon!
Benjamin S: Confusion around how people were selected, specifically how 'who needs it the most' was decided
- A lot of personal factors that may be at play aren't things that people generally share publically
- HQ said that the registration of interest wouldn't be a huge factor in decisions so I didn't make a big deal of it - I would've written more if I knew that it would play a bigger part in the decisions
Zach:
- 6 people involved with decisions - Sam, Matthew, Claire, zfogg, zrl, Max
- Invitation decisions included different factors for each individual
- People weren't ranked by on Slack activity/tech ability etc.
- We didn't place emphasis on the interest form because we didn't want people to just BS on an application like college apps
- We had daily 1-1.5hr meetings discussing registrations of interest and deciding who to invite
- The end goal is to see who would get and contribute the most to the trip and to Hack Club - because of this, many awesome people didn't get an invite
- "Great communities are built on great leaders"
- Invitations or lack thereof are not judgements of character
Kunal: What constraints led to the 2-week invitation process? Zach:
- We need to get names locked in ASAP since confirmation that this could even happen was only received for one of the routes 4 days before the announcement, so we're already under a bit of a time crunch
- We also need time to be thoughtful with decisions while dealing with travel restrictions/vaccinations/other external factors
- 200-250 hours was spent between the 6 of us on evaluating individuals
Mukul: One thing that didn't feel great for me was inviting people who didn't register their interest - did this happen? If so I think HQ could have done a better job of communicating that registering wasn't the sole way to get onto the Zephyr
Zach:
- It was my call to extend invites to 1-2 people who didn't register. They ended up not being able to make it
- We did that because some people may feel like they may not be worthy to join, so they wouldn't even consider filling out the interest form
- The invites were extended at the very end of the invitation process, registrations were the main pool for extending invitations
- We thought there was already some precedence for this with other programs
- Everyone currently on the Zephyr filled out the interest form
Mukul: It might have been good to be more upfront and do a better job of communicating that to help people understand your rationale
Zach: I agree we should have been clear on that from the get go, but it was a decision made later in the invitation process which was somewhat overshadowed by other things that needed to be handled
Jason: I think a lot of people felt that they had a fairly high chance of being able to go on the Zephyr because they were active in the community. I think some of the messaging around zephyr wasn't ideal for what is inevitably a limited experience
Zach:
- I've seen a few confessions about this, and this is a difficult problem that I've been thinking about as well
- All of our messaging made it clear that only 42 people would be able to come because of physical constraints - if we could bring more people we would
- We aren't revealing the number of people who registered interest because we don't want people trying to calculate a percentage of how likely they are to be invited - that's not how this should work, and we don't want people not to apply just because they thought it wasn't likely that they'd get in
Jonathan: Is there any way that people who didn't make the Zephyr can help take some pressure off HQ?
Zach:
- I'm not asking for sympathy, but empathy
- There are a lot of ways we can improve and it really helps to hear feedback from people
- It would be great to see more people coming together and running online events - we already have a group of hackers who are already working on launching summer events this week
Hugo: It would be great to have more staff support for online events this summer
Zach:
- It's just not feasible in terms of human resources right now since everyone is working on Zephyr
- We've had to bring on a few people to help with Zephyr logistics
- We'd like to hire more people but it's difficult because of costs, and most applicants can get much better compensation/benefits elsewhere so attracting talent is difficult
Jason: I've seen some people say they wanted to see updates from the Zephyr on Slack, other people said they didn't want to see them - how should invitees go about discussing Zephyr or sharing pictures on Slack, if at all
Zach:
- I think it's a great idea to share the experience with everyone on the Slack, we want this to have an impact on the community as a whole
- Be considerate of others and don't brag or flex