Firing Community Managers: Stack Exchange is not interested in cooperating with the community, is it?

Question

Less than a month ago, there was some settling of the incident with firing Monica. It's obvious that there was not a lot of approval from the community on the course of action chosen by SE, or the settlement.

Today, we are seeing a new wave of SE actions targeted on work with the community: firing / letting go / agreeing to separate (the actual term is unknown and can remain unknown forever) two very knowledgeable and very trusted community managers: Shog9 and Robert Cartaino:

• Shog9's tweet about suddenly being in need of new job
• Robert updated his profile indicating he is no longer with the company
• Thank you, Robert Cartaino and Thank you, Shog9! – meta posts from the community

The following change in SE staff happened shortly after this event:

1. Jon Ericson left his position as a Community Manager (but explicitly said that "I made this decision in December and it's not correlated with the recent CM team changes". Jon wants to apply for the moderator diamond back and continue participating). His blog post indicates that his decision to leave was connected to the incident with firing Monica.

The following moderators resigned shortly after this event:

1. resigned: nhinkle on Super User
2. resigned: El'endia Starman on Christianity (explicitly stating that firing CMs was the final straw)
3. resigned: Hatchet on Language Learning (explicitly stating that firing CMs was the final straw)
4. resigned: Madara Uchiha on Stack Overflow (explicitly stating that firing CMs and the lack of resolution with Monica were the final straws)
5. resigned and deleting accounts: Web Head on Arts & Crafts
6. resigned: dmckee on Physics
7. resigned: StrongBad on Academia and Expatriates (irreconcilable view on the role of the community and SE policies)
8. resigned: Mad Scientist on Skeptics and Biology
9. resigned: David on Blender (Shog and Robert were the last nail and final straw)
10. resigned: iKlsR on Blender
11. resigned: anongoodnurse on Parenting (explicitly stating that firing CMs and the CEO's blog post were the final straws)
12. resigned: DJMcMayhem on Code Golf
13. resigned: lois6b on Stack Overflow en español
14. resigned: James on Worldbuilding (explicitly connecting the resignation with firing CMs and the preceding events)
15. resigned: Tim B on Worldbuilding (explicitly connecting the resignation with firing CMs and the preceding events)
16. resigned: Sam I Am on Politics (explicitly connecting the resignation with firing CMs and the preceding events)

The following moderators suspended their activity shortly after this event:

1. suspended activity: called2voyage on Space Exploration and Astronomy (explicitly links the suspension with firing CMs and preceding sad events, has since resumed moderation activities)

Timeline:

2020-01-13: Firing (for the lack of better term) of community managers Shog9 and Robert Cartaino. Shorty followed by an official dry reply

2020-01-15: George Stocker starts a GoFundMe campaign to thank Shog9 for cultivating Stack Overflow

2020-01-16: Official policy on limiting featured ing the moderator resignation notice to only 24 hours. Rendered inactive on 2020-02-10.

2020-02-10: Update of the official policy on handling featured posts. While the previously introduced 24-hour policy (see item above) is rendered inactive, the new policy covers a much wider range of cases when and why the post can be unfeatured or deemed unable to be featured

2020-02-20: Teresa Dietrich, the new Head of Product and Community, has posted a message (and response, of sorts) to the community.

At the bare minimum, as a result:

• Area 51 does not have any active moderators (Shog9 and Robert were moderating it)
• Ask Patents does not have any active moderators (Robert was moderating it)
• Computer Graphics does not have any active moderators (one mod last seen Oct 2019)
• Worldbuilding has only one active moderator left
• Expatriates has only one active moderator left
• Christianity has only one active moderator left
• Arts & Crafts has only one moderator left
• Code Golf has only one moderator left

---

I wonder:

• if there is any plan on the SE's side to actually be involved in the building of the community
• who is now responsible for community building and interaction of community/moderators with developers and upper management
• if the remaining CM team will be re-staffed since it is already heavily understaffed in my opinion
• if there is an intent from the company to at least thank the CMs that served Stack Exchange many-many years, even if it is a dry lawyer-written "thank you"

I am devastated. Both as an SE user and as an SE moderator.

Answer 1

You all should know that this is very hard for us. This is what I am able to share:

As you have seen, today there were some changes on the Community Team. Out of respect for their privacy, we aren’t able to comment on any specific current or former employees.

We’re seeking to align the company so that it can continue growing in 2020 and we continue to be committed in investing in the community and ensuring that it has a seat at the table as we keep moving forward. These changes are a part of that process.

Answer 2

I write this post with tears literally in my eyes.

Though it pains me deeply to leave my communities, especially Mi Yodeya which I cherish and have helped build for close to nine years, I have decided I must leave the Stack Exchange network.

I became a user on my first SE site in 2011 when Mi Yodeya launched. For most of the time since then I've been an enthusiastic participant and power user on the SE network. I evangelized SE to friends and colleagues. I almost became an employee. The SE platform did, right, things that other sites did wrong. It was a great place to be, and I built strong community connections and learned a lot. Over time SE the company paid less and less attention to us, which was sometimes frustrating, but we got by even with benign neglect.

Then things began to change. In spring 2018, a single blog post scared someone at SE enough to kick off a new "welcoming" initiative. I was concerned by how they approached it but wanted to believe in the goal nonetheless. A few months later, in October 2018, a single angry tweet prompted hasty changes and public criticism in tweets from employees, which led me to write Dear Stack Overflow, we need to talk.

I remember somebody at the time saying something like "she's too invested in that relationship; he's just not into her". I wasn't listening. I was too into SE, even as others began to leave.

I really wanted to believe that SE wasn't that bad, just a little misguided. SE whispered sweet nothings in our ears, made promises to us that I desperately wanted to believe. I stayed, blind to the warning signs.

Things did not, in fact, get better. Already an employee had admitted that the company was no longer paying attention to feedback from core users, and in July 2019 another advised employees to avoid meta because it upset them. We users were in a relationship with someone who had checked out, stopped listening, seemingly stopped caring about us.

I stayed anyway, because I really love my communities (and maybe I'm too susceptible to the sunk-costs fallacy). When I saw that post in July, a part of me thought we could nonetheless still effect change, could help get things onto a better, collaborative path. I thought we users could mend the rifts in our collective relationship with SE despite evidence that SE wasn't interested. I didn't see the warning signs because I didn't want to see them.

As a dedicated user, I stayed in an abusive relationship for the sake of the kids. I told myself that it would be ok in the end, that it didn't hurt that much, that it was only a bruise.

Sometimes it takes a powerful blow to finally wake up. For me that blow came two weeks ago today.

On January 13, SE abruptly fired Shog9 and Robert Cartaino. Shog9 and Robert, along with Jon Ericson who left a few days later, were long-serving community managers who really get the communities. They were our champions. What we didn't know until recently is that they were being hobbled, forbidden to do what they do so well, forbidden to help us. They, too, were helpless, and Shog and Robert paid a dear price.

We can only expect the rate of damage to accelerate. As a long-time user, I remember what was and know what could have been. Today, our communities are being deeply harmed instead of being helped and supported. It's worse than just being abandoned; we are not allowed to govern ourselves and not allowed to be helped by the dwindling community team.

The company has chosen to go down a very different path from the one I thought we were on. I have lost any hope that this will change. I've passed through denial, hurt, anger, and bargaining, and have now arrived at tearful acceptance. I can't change this. It's painful to keep trying. I give up.

I dearly love my communities here, but, sadly, I can't bear to stay on Stack Exchange any longer.

Our communities are much more than the platform that hosts them. The people are what matters. I hope I can stay connected to the fine people of my communities even if I don't do it here any longer. SE wasn't the first Q&A platform and it won't be the last. Just as Stack Overflow was created out of dissatisfaction with another platform, other platforms will be created out of dissatisfaction with SE. I hope to see y'all in a better place, one we'll build together putting communities and people first. I'll refrain from specific links here after seeing an employee spam-delete a post on Writing Meta about another site, but -- look around.

I've added contact information to my profile, and I've posted some information about my future plans. I won't be deleting my accounts.

Be kind to each other. Protect yourselves. Remember Shog and Robert, maybe even me. Let's stay in touch.

Answer 3

We’re seeking to align the company so that it can continue growing in 2020 and we continue to be committed in investing in the community and ensuring that it has a seat at the table as we keep moving forward. These changes are a part of that process. (source)

In other words, you feel that the best way of ensuring that the community has a seat at the table is to remove two of the people the community trusts best. The people we actually believe when they tell us things, those who made us feel heard.

I am honestly fascinated by the idea that someone in the company really felt that would be a helpful message. I've heard of spin, but this is really one of the worst examples I have come across. It's like someone going on a shooting spree and killing people to protest against violence.

It's your company, you can do what you like with it, but for the love of $deity, stop insulting us! Just say you had to fire folks, but don't try to spin it as being part of "investing in the community".

Answer 4

This action and the response from SE are an insult to every meta user's intelligence. I refuse to accept that someone would actually think that firing the people that could hold this community together after all that's happened would be the right move into investing in the community.

I don't know why you folks at management are doing what you're doing, but it feels to me that you're no longer interested in working with the community at all, that you're actually trying to dynamite whatever scraps of trust we had in you, and that you're going to get rid of us and see if you can keep the machine rolling after ditching the engineers.

Now what I would like you to do is to stop lying to us, and tell us that you want to ditch us ASAP so everyone can move on from this endless tragedy.

Answer 5

We’re seeking to align the company so that it can continue growing in 2020 and we continue to be committed in investing in the community and ensuring that it has a seat at the table as we keep moving forward.

Bummer.

And I just decided to get up, and leave my chair at Stack Overflow. Last summer, my plan was to double my reputation to at least 250 K there. In the meantime, I learned to two things:

• that approximately, 100K reputation that a user "produces" on Stack Overflow "translates" to 30K USD or more of "value/income for SE Inc (see here)
• that I really lost all interest of helping you, SE Inc. to "grow" their income.

So, unfortunately, I feel the urgent need to repeat something I hated writing last year:

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By increased work quotas. Would it not in that case be simpler
for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

"The solution", a poem by Bertolt Brecht

---

_{Note 1: whether that 30K USD number is realistic or not, that isn't the crucial point. I am sure I created plenty of value, also by the moderation efforts I provided.}

_{Note 2: actually, I didn't lose my motivation accidentally. SE Inc. killed it. And nothing I heard them say 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days ago, did help to bring it back.}

Answer 6

It isn't.

There was no statement from a higher up to this thread, not even saying "That's our internal thing and we won't discuss it publicly, we'll do this and that to improve community", or no statement at all (company shouldn't discuss employee terminations after all, but it'd be nice to show some community building plans, if any exist). The ones at the top don't respect meta as the place to come under your own name, answer questions and show leadership.

Instead, a message drafted by PR (a mediocre one, if I may add) was relegated to the staffer to post as an official response. Feels as if anyone participating here is treated as a second-order citizen. The era in which Jeff comes in front of the community and actually communicates with the very people who made this site possible is long over and remnants are being cleaned up. Meta is not being used, much less lead by the ones with the most responsibility in SE, it's merely a task in a CM's workday. We're not getting any answers here; here may not even exist in a few months. It's a new business plan and a new hierarchy — for what I know, maybe the most viable one.

---

I was never particularly involved with main sites, besides regularly lurking, exploring HNQ and participating in chat until a few years ago, only occasionally answering even more occasionally asking questions (mainly in SO), so using these sites as the marvelous internet resources they are and not contributing to it guilt-free won't be much of an issue for me. Seeing some others more valuable community members turning neutral/hostile to SO will be far more devastating, possibly making this platform valuable only for its archive of knowledge.

But if we could stop getting bullshitty intelligence-insulting PR responses every time someone evaluates there's a crisis in the making/going on, that'd be cool.

Answer 7

I wish I could say I didn't see this coming. But I did. Not exactly this, but the continuation of a series of mistakes.

How did we get here?

Mistakes happen, nothing new. But when they do, they have to be fixed; otherwise new mistakes tend to accumulate over the old ones. This is what is also happening here. Mistakes were made, but they were never properly fixed. What has been fixed, or at least what was attempted to be fixed, were not the original mistake(s) but some further mistakes that piled upon the original one(s). And as we can see, this kind of approach does not work well and new mistakes will keep piling up.

How can I be so sure?

Besides my own subjective feelings, there is also an objective measure. What is more plausible, that the long term moderators and employees, people that contributed to building this place from the ground up, proven pillars of the community, have suddenly collectively lost their marbles and began misbehaving to the point they had to be somehow removed, or that something else is deeply wrong?

We are all different people here. With different perspectives and different opinions. But no matter what we individually might think about particular topics, one thing is certain - nobody actually likes the general direction in which SE is going.

The current situation reminds me of an old joke:

A guy was driving on a highway listening to the radio. Suddenly, the music was interrupted with urgent warning that one lunatic is driving on a highway in the wrong direction.

The guy in the car looks around: "ONE!!!! Not one, but hundreds of them."

---

It does not matter how he got there... it does not matter if it was an honest mistake or not... what matters is his incapability to take a step back and judge his own actions, his incapability to see his own fault.

---

Update:

In most recent timeline, some events are most surely just mistakes (or missteps), but the rest of what I call mistakes is most likely as-designed and intended. Stack Exchange is heading in drastically different direction from the original vision of building high quality library of knowledge. Now, it is all about making money, knowledge is no longer important, nor the library itself.

However, Stack Exchange is symbiosis between company and community. One cannot exist without the other. Either there is cooperation or there is no cooperation. But if there is no cooperation Stack Exchange (as we know it) is dead. I am not against company making money, on the contrary... But it is their approach to the people that seriously sucks... and oh, irony, they are actually trying to sell that as building more inclusive community... (probably just a PR stunt).

Library of knowledge is on its way to extinction. Whether or not SE will be able to make enough money and survive by selling other products... only time will tell. But effectively going into conflict with people that are your prospective customers is not the smartest move. Maybe they are thinking there is enough other users that basically don't care about everything that has happened.

Answer 8

As I've continued to say:

It's time to leave the Stack Exchange network.

This post only further fuels what I and many others are feeling about the direction Stack Exchange has been going recently.

This isn't the Stack Exchange network I signed up for, and it's not the Stack Exchange network I intend to stay in. It's time to send a message: Going down this path is going to lose the most loyal and trusted members of this network.

Answer 9

We’re seeking to align the company so that it can continue growing in 2020 and we continue to be committed in investing in the community and ensuring that it has a seat at the table as we keep moving forward. These changes are a part of that process. - Juan M ♦

Quoted for context, not necessarily because I'm passing judgement on the messenger.

However, I am passing judgement on Stack Exchange, Inc because having layoffs on a Monday is just gauche. Friday is traditional and Wednesday is very justifiable, but Monday seems like the company is either incompetent or is over-correcting due to other issues. Even more so given that it was roughly 12:00 EST when the news broke - I just hope nobody had to commute into work.

Given that these are respected Community Managers that are supposed to act as the interface between the company and the public, I'm going to assume that Stack Exchange, Inc just sees us as a profit center to be exploited. Having listened to the old podcasts when Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky where developing the idea and being part of the private beta test of Stack Overflow, I'm very disappointed with where the company has gone.

Answer 10

As a manager myself, I cannot help but be amazed and impressed with the extraordinary level of political incompetence on display among the management at Stack Exchange.

Since I've been contributing, and even before that, one of the attractive qualities of the community was the tolerance and respect that members had for one another. I had the impression that moderation of content was particularly delicate, the process was fair, and all attempts were made to avoid the ruffling of feathers. Then, like a bolt from the blue, Monica happened, and was promptly followed by dozens of the kind of missteps that will be written about in textbooks.

Community management is about managing politics. The contributors across Stack Exchange are smart and reasonable people. People here respect one another and are forgiving of one another. When the corporate management fails to live up to that basic expectation, it becomes an intractable problem.

I do not contribute to Stack because of the corporate leadership. If my contributions generate revenue and help keep the servers running and the lights on, so much the better. I contribute to help others find the answers that they need. I am disappointed that the responses of management have led to severe (and likely irreparable) harm to the community. The objective of reaching more people with good answers is diminished by their actions.

Answer 11

All Stack Overflow needs to do, is to own up to her mistakes.

I find it so baffling and beyond comprehension as to what's keeping them from it.

I might be being too cynic, but the simplest explanation would be that now it's an ego problem for the people top in the foodchain.

I think the community and SO need to start seeing a couples-counsellor.

Answer 12

We’re seeking to align the company so that it can continue growing in 2020 and we continue to be committed in investing in the community and ensuring that it has a seat at the table as we keep moving forward. These changes are a part of that process. (source)

I understand that sometimes companies need to reorganize, cut costs, etc. I don't have a problem with that. I even understand that sometimes those changes can be difficult and will not be well received by everyone. However, whoever wrote the last paragraph for Juan M. really does not seem to understand how much that paragraph can aggravate the community in which they claim they want to invest.

Answer 13

I'm not typically very active on meta and also a bit late to the party, but this one amuses me. Really.

I'm going to tell a story (to the users, I know SE staff doesn't care), which is a bit long but please, see if someone can notice any similarities.

A few years ago I worked in a very well known company for one of their local websites. There was a guy that, take it from someone that has 25 years worth of experience, was just incredible. He'd been with the company for 12 years and spent most of it as the principal architect. He know literally everything, and he was the go-to guy when nobody else could help. Everyone loved him because of the respect he showed to other people but also because of how he brought the development team together. Let's call him Bob.

One day, our manager tells us to go with him in a meeting room for an unexpected meeting and tells us that he decided to "ask" Bob to leave the company. While we were inside the room, Bob had already packed his things and disappeared. After a shocked silence (nobody expected this in the slightest) we asked about what happened and the manager said:"Well, it's on a personal level, so if you want to know more you'll have to ask him".

Fine. We have Bob's contacts, we set up a date to go with everyone for a beer and meet him.

So we do. We meet him and ask what the hell happened and Bob says that he had to sign an NDA not to say anything. Obviously the manager already knew that he couldn't talk, so he deviated our attention.

We were not happy. But, we wanted to keep our jobs, so we kind of moved on.

Fast forward of about one year.

The only competitor that we had (literally, just one), decided that we were too strong in the market, so they went to our boss' boss and said that they would sell us their company. So... We won the market! Yeah! Big celebrations obviously, and after about 3 months there was already a scheduled global (world-wide) meeting with the other local websites, so we were looking forward to being celebrated for being market leaders.

I mean, that's good news, right? ...Right?

...Wrong. When the global meeting came the big boss (and I mean big, the CEO of the whole thing worldwide) announces that our website has reached end of life.

This was met with silence on our part, and then something like "Sorry, what?"

Because someone (non-technical) decided that the technology stack was too old and it had to be migrated to a common platform which actually still didn't exist, but the base for it would be another "sister" website.

So our whole team (development, sales, marketing, whatever) was all split into the different teams of the "sister" website.

That was 27 people.

During the first month 5 people left, including me and I know that during the second month another 4 people left.

I don't know what happened after that but I stopped caring.

So, do you see the pattern here?

Answer 14

It seems as though the ones in charge have ordered full engines ahead. Never mind the hole on port or the massive gash on starboard. Disregard the boilers flooding. Pay no heed to the crew calling out that forward are lots of underwater rocks that keep scraping the hull and busting the bulkheads.

Now the helm yells "keep going!" The crew is thinking of jumping ship to escape the inevitable. They could patch the hole and seal the gash. They could pump the water from the boiler rooms. They could keep the ship afloat. But if the helm is just going to keep ramming forward through the rocks to chase a Moby Dick, and they have all the weapons locked away with them, then why go down with the ship? Let the helm figure out how useless a sinking ship is without a crew. Hopefully they realize it before they are at the bottom of the ocean with it.

Answer 15

No doubt this will some day literally be a textbook example of how to run a successful enterprise right into the ground.

Meager though they may have been, this is also my last contribution.

-30-

Answer 16

I would like to use this answer as a way to remind everyone, or inform anyone who did not already sign, know or wanted to sign, to visit the link to the Community's letter to the Stack Exchange management.

Seeing as meta will probably be phased out anyway now, at least some artefact of the community's reaction and sentiment will be out on the internet.

Answer 17

I have not been an active member of SE long enough to know or appreciate these individuals. However, by the sheer numbers of upset and heartbroken users alone, I can see that they were indeed very prominent and beloved members of the community.

I can't help but notice how this decision has been quite contradictory to everything Stack Exchange stands for. The site has always proudly proclaimed its centralization around community. It brags of being one of the first and largest online networks to be almost entirely community driven. Therefore, it is quite appalling that they would remove these critical pillars which uphold such a vast portion of our community.

This has been a very bad move. Other online communities have made similar mistakes, but they were not afraid to correct them. The Stack Exchange company, on the other hand, is dismissing its actions as "investing in the community." How arrogant are these people?? Can they not admit to their mistake and take the appropriate measures to correct it? It is quite pitiful how these grown adults are acting.

I want to finish with a short analysis of this quote from A Theory of Moderation:

Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.

Well, this is interesting. The decision to remove Shog9 and Robert Cartaino from office creates some extraordinarily "exceptional conditions." It is also exceedingly evident that these "conditions" have brought a large portion of the community to "a screaming halt." This raises a seemingly blatant question: Who the hell is going to handle this exception?

It seems that SE is missing a catch clause. The community is shaken straight down to its core. The VM has crashed, and corporate is sweeping it under the rug.

Answer 18

ensuring that it has a seat at the table

Wait... what? Seriously? 'A seat at the table'?

How can you not see that the community IS the table!?

The company is merely a facilitator to the community. I hope this kind of arrogance will not go unpunished. If anything, the company just lost its own seat. I think it is time to start fresh. SO is poisoned and almost dead. Let's build a new healthy platform with the thousands of CM's that feel the same way.

Answer 19

The answer to this question appears to be that they are not.

Answer 20

There are already lots of answers and I want to add a more optimistic perspective about a possible future where the company concentrates on selling software for Q&A for enterprises and the public Q&A knowledge base has moved somewhere else for good.

It's really clear beyond any doubt that the company strongly reduced any support for the community, by not communicating with it or by reductions in employees working in that area and many other issues.

Public Q&A is indeed not very important for the company, the activity is stagnating at best and the ad revenue is not the major source of their income. And they can't sell the knowledge that easily, among other things because it is under an open license. Selling the software powering these systems however is fine and I wish them all the best with it.

They neglect the community and, that's how it looks, try to muddle through with the public Q&A. It doesn't work very well so far. Quality never was lower.

But this also incorporates a chance. A chance to start new with the sole purpose of providing quality Q&A that builds a knowledge base and lasts. If the company would be relieved from running a public Q&A, so to speak, which anyway never would be making lots of money, it might solve most of the current problems and probably create new ones as well.

It's a time of change. Creating an alternative home for the content and the community is a very big task and may even split the community in possibly multiple divided places but at least it's a productive way forward and in the best case it could make everyone more productive. Remaining in the current state is just too unpleasant.

Answer 21

I am such a small fish (by SO/MSE reputation and professional experience) in this huge sea of users which are always ready to help #SOreadytohelp.

Just now (Yeah!! I am so late to know this) I come to know about CMs firing / letting go / agreeing to separate "policy" of SE. Resulting lots moderators left the community or they are not active anymore.

SO/SE is very favorite to me, the entire community is working for "Creating a Knowledge Lit World." by sharing the solutions/discussions and ideas.

To make this mission possible, mods and CMs are the backbone, and letting them go without any reason is heart breaking. As I said I am so small to understand all this and what is going on in there.

But what I understand and my mother also taught me that, never forgot "The people" who contributed so hard to grow you up and tall.

Some of the mods and CMs who recently left/fired are "The people" who are with SE from its start (baby age) and letting them go is really very cruel thing. The people who worked for you (SE/SO) to grow this tall will never leave in this way (Its heart breaking for them also). Such people don't "suddenly" start looking for a new job or separates themselves, unless something so bad happened that they had no choice but to immediately resign.

I never had conversation with any of them but yeah some of them surely had moderated my questions/answers, some of the questions are marked as deleted by them, but there is not hard feeling for this action rather its created a virtual comm link with them.

"Politics is every where" agreed!! but "Internal politics" is very cruel.

I wish and pray that all old people who left/fired will either come back to SE or else will create a new Community website.

#SOreadytohelp

Answer 22

I, personally encourage everyone to at least withhold judgement until we learn more about why this is happening. Trying to learn more should always be the first step when reacting to these sorts of actions.

With that in mind, it is a very good time to start asking questions. You can't just remove multiple CMs and expect people to not want answers. I know SE wants to say this is a matter between them and the CMs in question, but as the community they helped manage, I'd say that we have a genuine stake in this matter.