We know. We know. This is what you’re thinking:

This week we have a very short but very exciting announcement: The selection process is coming to a close, and the Selection Committee is reaching out to their chosen applicants to confirm their appointment to the leadership roles. Once all roles have been confirmed, we’ll put out another announcement, whenever that happens to be! We hope you are all excited to find out who is going to spearhead this organization, as well as learn more from the Selection Committee on how those people wowed their socks off!

The only other thing we wanted to cover this week is a follow up on our first Real Talk™ article from last week. Some people have asked why our first major announcement was regarding the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Team instead of more about where we’re going to take the game.

The short, easy answer is: This wasn’t our first major announcement! We said we existed here, announced applications here, put together a organization chart here, wrote a FAQ here, and had an interview on Bad Publicity here.

The long answer is that until those leadership positions we mentioned above are confirmed, there’s not really a lot we can say about the direction NISEI will take regarding things like card and set design, event circuits, etc. Almost all of that work will depend on who ends up on the leadership team. We felt it was necessary to leave any of those as open and unburdened by preconditions as possible to let the respective leaders build their teams and various projects as the saw fit. After all, Kenny Deakins (@Simonmoon, a noted DLR apologist) may convince the Lead Designer to reprint some dumb tag-me resource, or maybe the OP Manager will figure that unbanning Aaron Marrón would be a good idea (we hope not, but you never know).

While all of that is up in the air, we feel that establishing a clear policy for the equality of all players doesn’t require a leadership team, and is in fact essential to finding volunteers, selecting good leaders, and making sure that everyone knows from the get-go what to expect from NISEI. Without that vision, we wouldn’t have had the conversations that let us know that we needed to recruit an EDIT Leader (you know, the role that will oversee the team which reviews each of the organization’s projects to make sure they’re not racist, homophobic, transphobic, or any other “-ist” “-ism” or “-phobic” that would be hurtful).

In regard to the “tone” of the Real Talk™ article, we’re not going to apologize. Yeah, it had a little sass, but often very real people who speak about the very real issues the article brings up are told they need to be nicer as a way to delegitimize their arguments. That’s frustrating, and frankly we’re frustrated about that frustration. So, we decided to be blunt, direct, and, well, real. If that hurts a few people who don’t agree that we have some real issues to talk about, so be it. If you mostly agree we have some real issue to address, ask yourself if the tone matters more than the points? We don’t think it does.

Stay tuned for the leadership announcements (as well as Real Talk™ articles from them eventually!), share this thing where you will, and Always Be Running.

Weekly Sweep