Credibility

When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, good ol' pa told me that the most important thing a person can have is his/her credibility. (Actually, he also said that something equally important is education, but that's for another post some other time.) Credibility, Pa said, is something that is built over time but destroyed in an instant through irrational reactions or even calculated decisions stemming from under-developed ethics. His point, sternly delivered while he was working on the swimming pool pump one sweltering Arizona summer evening was, essentially, once you lie, people may never trust you ever again. Your action is irrevocable and likely irreparable.

His instruction to me was far more powerful than a thousand retellings of the Boy Who Cried Wolf (who actually got the proverbial three tries before the town's folk ceased to find him credible).

I admit, I've slipped a few times in the way. Pa told me this when I was probably 5 or 6 -- in between then and now my teenage years have come and gone, where lying wasn't common but a little well-placed deception might've been. ("No, Mom, I'm not at a bar...I don't know why you hear music in the background!") Then there's the whole dating scene where you don't lie, exactly, but you may obfuscate the truth or work a little harder to keep someone from thinking about the real answer. ("No, I don't color my hair ... it always has flawless highlights!" or "Yes, honey, you are such a better pool/video game/football/card/chess player than he/she/the computer.") After the perils of youth, there's then the job scene where the little "white lie" is politely called "aggressive self-marketing", where you might over-bill yourself just a little, and then afterward hope you have the abilities to learn quickly what others might've thought you already knew.

But, with age comes self-confidence and a person tends to be a little less apologetic, hopefully with positive ethical behavior fortified by time, and less motivated to lie or even fib through insecurity or fear. Adult credibility is thereby gained (except for holidays, birthdays, and when your friends ask you for your honest opinion about their hair or weight, which is when all bets are off).

Yet some people just don't get the importance of telling the truth and the harm caused when spreading untruths.

An example of this is Deron Beal, progenitor of The Freecycle Network. There's plenty that can be said about Freecycle (TFN), both positive (its strength as an environmental movement, its delightful concept, its ability to engage so many across the globe) and negative (its questionable treatment of volunteers, selling out to corporate interests, the common "my way or the highway" attitude, favoritism and questionable threats made against former leaders, and allegations of misuse of member information).

DISCLAIMER: Every allegation made in that past paragraph is documented by multiple publications: Recycle Group Breaks Ranks with Freecycle, Recycling Movement at Crossroads, What's Up (or Down) at Freecycle?, FreeRRRs, and others.

Any of this in itself is worthy of a research paper and plenty of other people address them. I won't rant on it here because this post is about credibility. However, before going further, we must establish a basic understanding of TFN and its technology infrastructure.

Freecycle is a self-described grass roots organization that promotes direct giving/donations. Instead of dropping your clothes off at Goodwill, you offer them online (for free) and if someone is interested, you give them away. It's a simple concept that leaves people always asking "what's the catch?" but there really isn't one. You can get rid of anything as long as someone wants it, whether its a half-used can of paint, some baby food jars, a piano, or unneeded food from your garden. Help each other and do something for the environment. What a deal!

TFN has its own Web site which contains all of the basic information (FAQ, etc.) you'd expect, plus links to individual community-based Freecycle groups throughout the world. Those ostensibly locally-operated groups are hosted on Yahoo! Groups, where, predictably, TFN is subject to Yahoo's Terms of Service. On these Yahoo! Groups, you send a post whenever you have something to give away with a subject line like, "OFFER: Flying Purple People Eater". When your Flying Purple People Eater was taken by some truly deserving person, you then post "TAKEN: Flying Purple People Eater." It's not rocket science...or astro-physics.

TFN had, for some time, required an e-mail account (named finder@freecycle.org) to be added to all "official" TFN groups hosted on Yahoo!. It's effectively a dummy e-mail account that would re-broadcast the subject lines and e-mail addresses from messages to a secondary Web site (freecycle.org). The purpose behind this was so that Susie Doe could go to freecycle.org, type in key words like "People Eater" and her location, and she'd receive an alert telling her who, if anyone, was offering a People Eater in her area. Without having to be a member of multiple area groups, she could ask for that People Eater from anyone within the range she is willing to drive to pick up. Again, what a deal!

Some people had issues with Finder, thinking that it promoted a "gimme" culture rather than a "let me give" culture, but that's really an irrelevant point to this topic.

The real issue with Finder is that the rebroadcasting of the subject lines and e-mail addresses was considered a violation of the Yahoo! Terms of Service (TOS). Funny though it may seem, Yahoo! doesn't want content hosted on its infrastructure to be harvested and rebroadcasted into the Web-ether where it can be viewed by anyone. The reason for this is quite sensible -- make Yahoo! content available elsewhere and you may not visit Yahoo!'s pages any more. Fewer visits to Yahoo!'s pages equals fewer eyeballs viewing Yahoo!'s advertisements. Since Yahoo!'s business model is heavily based on advertising generated revenue, this is a bad thing.

So, this is still a very simple issue to fix. One outspoken TFN member/moderator posted on one of the TFN organizational issue discussion groups a very friendly message about the possible issue with finder@freecycle.org possibly violating the Yahoo! TOS. She politely suggested that someone at TFN look into it and confirm that there's no issue with Yahoo!.

Again, deceptively simple.

An uproar ensued. And this is where we get to the credibility part of this post (in case you thought I'd drifted too far astray).

Deron Beal, founder of TFN as we know it today, posted to multiple boards (either via the account ascribed to him or in a message forwarded by one of his chieftains) that finder@freecycle.org did not violate the Yahoo! TOS. In fact, he said clearly (but without attribution) that he had a "senior level management" contact who was "in the loop" on the whole issue and endorsed TFN's use of this service. Complicating the matter somewhat is that all of the Yahoo! customer service representatives claimed to have no knowledge of there being any kind of agreement between TFN and Yahoo! to be exempted from the TOS.

Mr. Beal's credibility collateral is a little skimpy with many TFN moderators, so they asked him to "show me the money" or to at least provide something from Yahoo! endorsing the use of Finder. Purportedly concerned that their community-run groups could be deleted by Yahoo! for a TOS violation, these mods demanded proof from Mr. Beal. In reply, Mr. Beal and many of his chieftains prevaricated and asked for time to sort everything out and provide the proof desired, proof we all suspected didn't exist if it was taking that long to obtain.

Devestating to TFN's and Mr. Beal's claims was when Jami Heldt, the Yahoo! Groups Community Manager, posted publicly on the Yahoo! Groups 360* (blog) page that rebroadcasting content is a violation of the TOS. Trying another tactic, Mr. Beal then said that rebroadcasting subject lines and e-mail addresses is not considered by Yahoo! to be "content" because it's simply header information. I wonder if, at this point, Yahoo! was pulling its hair in anguish or chuckling at Deron Beal and saying, "nice try, Slick, try again."

At the end of this whole sordid affair, which took weeks to sort out, dozens of posts, and much bitterness on both sides of the aisle, finder@freecycle.org was deactivated so it did not rebroadcast anything. Once that occurred, Yahoo! and TFN were then both able to present a unified front and say, effectively, that TFN is not violating Yahoo!'s TOS through its use of Finder. Of course it wasn't -- because Finder no longer worked in the way it was intended.

A few days later, Finder was pretty much killed and removed voluntarily by TFN (except where the "leave group" script didn't work, which is when moderators removed Finder themselves).

There are lots of sordid details to this story that can only make it longer than it already is, and there are at least a half dozen stories like this that some of the ex-Freecyclers tell. I've spent my last three years as a dedicated volunteer to TFN in spite of the good, bad, and ugly because I liked the cause, in spite of the questionable leadership and possibly mercenary motivations.

But, the point here is that TFN is a worldwide virtual organization of unparalleled size and unlike any other, being led by someone who, in an instance of indiscretion, destroyed his credibility (arguably already questionable) and that of his co-leadership with an ill-executed bluff. Maybe Mr. Beal's dad didn't give him the same talk mine gave me.

"A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth." -- Aesop