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A person, or a group, or a society, can be judged by their own values or by someone else's. It can be fairer for the organisation (although perhaps misleading in the context of society as a whole) to judge them by their own values. So what are NACSA's values?
1: Freedom of speech is paramount. NACSA cites their fight to keep their web site operational, having to move it to the USA when an unfortunate conjunction of articles posted to their web site identified specific CSA staff and possible "punishments" against CSA staff.
2: NACSA persists in providing unmoderated discussion forums in which "anyone" can say whatever they like. (These forums include Child Access, Advice, Campaign, Ex-Pats, General, Parents With Care, Reform, and Sisters). NACSA states that articles advocating violence will be deleted - this is different from a moderated forum, where articles are vetted before appearing in the first place.
3: NACSA wants to be seen as a credible lobby group. They want to influence politicians, and they actively promote themselves as a responsible contributor to discussions about about the future of child support in the UK.
4: NACSA is intensely critical of people and organisations that get in its way or upset its members in any way. At various times NACSA has a "Hall of Shame" page on its web site, with the names of people who have been nominated for being in any way less than fully helpful. (These include ministers, MPs, journalists, officials of various kinds, and many CSA staff, etc).
(It is surely obvious that at least one of these principles has to be jettisoned!)
Keep these principles and values and attitudes these in mind when reading the following, and ask if they are compatible with NACSA's actions during August.
On 1st August 2001 I launched this web site.
On 1st August I posted a simply message to a couple of the NACSA forums announcing this web site. On 2nd August "Boris" (who is not on the NACSA Committee) posted a critical article about this web site with its URL as its "Subject". Both of these articles developed into threads, often heated, without much more input from me.
On 3rd August, the NACSA Committee (apparently including the Chair and Vice Chair) made a statement about this web site "by the national committee by democratic vote". Soon afterwards, both of the above threads, and all their articles, including this statement by the NACSA Committee, were deleted. (I have never seen a statement about this web site by the NACSA Committee, although I have seen a number of contradictory statements by individual Committee members).
The article (above) posted by the NACSA Committee on 3rd August apparently stated that is was their decision to ban the posting to NACSA forums of the URL of this web site.
It is not clear how firm this decision is - the NACSA Webmaster (who is a Committee member) later posted the URL himself to two of the forums. He also told me by email on 13th August "I am sick to death of the hassle but I will make you this deal Go quiet on this and I will add a link to your site by the end of the month".
From 4th August my posts to certain of the key NACSA forums (including Advice, General, and Reform) simply disappeared - they never appeared in the forums. The Webmaster stated repeatedly that my posts were not being blocked.
On 10th August I asked a respected regular contributor to impersonate me on a couple of the forums. He experienced the same disappearance, stated so under my name, and received the same denials. He then stated under his own name what he had done and what the results were, and within hours the block was lifted!
On 13th August the NACSA Webmaster banned me from posting to the forums. He claimed that "the forum system has been completely disrupted" by my actions. Yet at the time of the ban, only 3% of all articles visible in NACSA forums had been posted by me, and none of these was disruptive or abusive. (Most the disruption was caused by hot debate about censorship and deletions, to which the Webmaster was a major contributor!)
On 15th August the NACSA Webmaster ruled that "registered handles" were needed to post to the NACSA forums, presumably to reinforce this ban on me. While it is easy for an IT-literate person like me to obtain as many registered handles as I want (it really just needs an email address, and I have millions of these) and so by-pass such a ban, it is likely that people desperate for advice and perhaps using equipment which is not their own (for example, in a public library) may be blocked by this rule.
(I don't publish publish emails without permission. But I do consider that when someone publishes my emails, see below, that constitutes permission to publish related emails!)
Although the NACSA Committee has mainly used public means (see above) to express its disapproval with my web site, most of my attempts to resolve the matter have been conducted by emails to members of the NACSA Committee. Unfortunately, there has been very little response to these from the Committee.
On 4th August, when it became clear that the NACSA Committee had some issues with my web site (although there wasn't, and still isn't, consensus about what the issues are), I invited the Chair and the Webmaster to contribute. I identified "how to contribute". (Contributions may be of various kinds, and these include dissent - "if the dissent undermines, rather than disagrees with, material on the site, then the material on the site will instead be corrected or even removed, and typically the contribution from the dissenter will be acknowledged" - and corrections - "normally these will be used to change or add to material in the site to make it more accurate and/or more useful").
With no response to this, on 7th August I emailed an extended version of the invitation, this time to the whole NACSA Committee, in case holidays or email problems were responsible. (I have separately received 8 failed-delivery notifications during August to other emails posted to a NACSA email domain stating "This mailbox has exceeded their disk quota", so technical problems may have existed).
With no response to this either, and the clock ticking towards this web site's update on 1st September, I re-issued this invitation to the Committee on 13th August, and this time provided extensive evidence that the statements being made in public by Committee members were inaccurate and that they had so far not identified any inaccuracy in this web site. Webmaster responded by publishing my covering email to some NACSA forums and in an article to the uk.gov.agency.csa newsgroup. This publication from Webmaster is the one that banned me from discussions in the NACSA forums (and also broke the Committee's own ban on publishing the URL!)
One response was from Webmaster on 16th August which included what appeared to be a request or demand to stop emailing the Committee - "I trust if you are being objective you will include your multiple TOS violations for spamming e-mail addresses found on the NACSA forums ...". Another on 24th August was from a Committee member who felt "... it is now time to attempt reasonable communication with yourself. I will state here that the committee do not appreciate threatening emails holding us to ransom should we not reply to you". Er ... what threats? (If The Sunday Times said "we publish next Sunday, whether you contribute or not", would that be a threat?)
The NACSA Committee's statement about this web site was deleted by the Webmaster soon after being posted to one or more of the NACSA forums. I didn't see that statement and haven't managed to obtain a copy of it. There were only 2 pages here that the Committee could plausibly have objected to: "The trap set by the Independent On Sunday" and "Suicide and the CSA". (The latter, which discusses the NACSA "Book Of The Dead", has now been updated).
Statements in forums from the NACSA Chair include: "... has portrayed nacsa in an extremely negative manner, based on outdated and false material ..."; "His remarks about the Book of the Dead are insulting to the families involved"; "... we wont advertise another site which has several pages condemning our efforts". Statements in forums from the NACSA Webmaster include: "If he wants to live in the past and focus on the old negative aspects of NACSA thats his perogrative, however I wont let him use this site to advertise his site given the negative content"; "Its only banned until the comments regarding the book of the dead on his site go".
So is the problem with one page, or two, or several? Which page(s), and what is actually wrong with the page(s) concerned? (As I've now pointed out in "Comparison - early & current NACSA material", current NACSA publications have the same faults as the historical ones I commented on - there was nothing outdated or false!)
At a time when the NACSA Committee was trying to promote NACSA as a responsible organisation via its web site, they caused all of the above visible fuss. (I know from private correspondence that there are some very bemused observers!)
The above actions have made it harder for people who really need help to post their questions to the NACSA forums.
Many questions in the NACSA forums are about the reformed CSA scheme. I know more about it than anyone posting to the forums, but I am banned! So people are getting bad answers, and other people are wasting their time guessing when they could get the correct information easily.
Where answers to questions are available on this web site, they cannot be indicated directly, because posting the URL is banned! (Responses say things like "see the web site of the person who is banned"!)
The NACSA Committee has visibly abandoned NACSA's own values. And no harm has come to me!
I am no longer banned by NACSA from posting to their forums.
The NACSA web site has a link to my web site.
I have been invited to contribute to the NACSA newsletter.
| Page last updated: 31 October, 2001 | © Copyright Barry Pearson 2001 |
