Will never understand why this needed a nonprofit organization at all, ever. It's a personal goal in an agreed-upon timeframe; it's a task tailored for local gatherings, not an international non-profit organization that needed a $1.3M annual budget and 12 paid staff.
There's a bullet point on a slide:
> The hope was that the community would come through and support us when we were transparent about the organization's financial problems. That didn't happen.
Probably a good sign that the non-profit wasn't valued, much less required, by peer groups of prospective and active writers to set personal goals over a month they collectively pick, hold each other accountable, and provide feedback to each other.
They acknowledge this in the slide deck, too. Many (arguably most) of the friction came from the fact that the non-profit wasn't necessary for writers to self-organize in Discords and other venues, but because the non-profit existed, it took the brunt of the complaints, even when it had nothing to do with them (whether loud on AI and minors participating, or quiet on the fact that after you've done it once, it becomes an expoentially less valuable goal to do it again, and the non-profit offered no meaningful evolution of the concept).
The non-profit and staff were largely responsible for meatspace events such as writing camps for kids, resources for teachers, and supporting local writers groups via volunteer municipal liaisons.
The slides are really burying the details of the child grooming scandal. NaNoWriMo hosted a forum for their participants, including the children. (There were subforums specifically for the child-participants, so they can't claim they didn't know they had kids as users.) Moderators of those subforums were accused of using their access to the children to direct those kids to off-site places where they could be groomed. Then, when allegations of child grooming arose, the other moderators and/or staff claimed it was happening off-site.
There's a bullet point on a slide:
> The hope was that the community would come through and support us when we were transparent about the organization's financial problems. That didn't happen.
Probably a good sign that the non-profit wasn't valued, much less required, by peer groups of prospective and active writers to set personal goals over a month they collectively pick, hold each other accountable, and provide feedback to each other.
They acknowledge this in the slide deck, too. Many (arguably most) of the friction came from the fact that the non-profit wasn't necessary for writers to self-organize in Discords and other venues, but because the non-profit existed, it took the brunt of the complaints, even when it had nothing to do with them (whether loud on AI and minors participating, or quiet on the fact that after you've done it once, it becomes an expoentially less valuable goal to do it again, and the non-profit offered no meaningful evolution of the concept).