What's been going on from Mark Orr's perspective

P. turned out to be a professional web developer (which is good) but
with only a subset of the required skill set, his experience being weighted
towards the "front end" side of things (what happens in the browser) rather
than the "backend" (what happens on the server and in the database). Not a
bad set of skills to have but unlike Jonathan he had no experience of the
main platform on which the ICU sites are built or of running a server.

He told me that he hadn't applied because he thought we would be the best
candidate but because he thought the ICU was in a bind. He was wrong
about that because, as I've said, the perfect candidate was available.
It's a shame he applied because, had he not, Fitzsimons would have had no
choice but to accept Jonathan for the post and maybe none of the "bad things"
that happened later would have occurred. But I'm getting ahead of myself:
back to November 2014.

Anyone, even Jonathan, would have had to go through a handover process with
me to show them where things were, what 3rd party services we relied on and
lots of other nitty gritty details. So P. and I started to go through things
by email. At that time the detailed "Overview of the ICU Websites" (which
you can find in the "Help" section of the main ICU site under "Administrator")
didn't exist. I wrote that later after Q. got involved (see below), but in
November I was trying to get all that across to P. by email.

Things started well enough. P. said he was learning one of the main technologies
used, but his email responses were not terribly fast and got slower as time progressed.
At the end of November he said he was going off on business to the US and would
be in touch later. That was the last email I ever received from him, despite
repeated attempts to re-establish contact. It wasn't until early in January that
Fitzsimons wrote to me and confessed that P. is "currently busy at work" and
that Q. would be taking over.

One would have thought that since P. was unavailable then the candidate
who narrowly lost the vote back in November (Jonathan) would be promoted, but
thanks to Fitzsimons that's not what happened. Instead I had to restart the
whole handover process with someone new and even more inexperienced.
Q. was a professional programmer but not a web programmer. Even worse, he
made it abundantly clear that he had no real desire to be webmaster, he was
just there on a temporary basis.

That's when I started writing the Overview mentioned previously, primarily
for Q.'s benefit but also for whoever else might come along after him.
As with P., things started OK, Q. asking questions by email and me writing
up the answers in the Overview but he wasn't the fastest responder and
eventually his emails also tailed off, again (like P.) without any
explanation.

No matter what your skill set is, the webmaster needs to either have
lots of spare time on their hands or very strong motivation to get
through the work load. In my estimate, P. didn't have the time and Q.
lacked the motivation. So by February 2015 I was still acting as web
master, furiously documenting stuff and waiting for Fitzsimons to
come up with his next candidate (obviously it wasn't going to
be Jonathan) so I could complete a handover and properly resign.

And then March 9th happened. But more on that later.

Since the early days of the ICU websites (2004) it had been
my credit card that had paid our service providers (mainly
web hosting and domain fees) because the ICU doesn't have
a credit card. Of course, I got what I paid out back in
expenses from the ICU, but it meant that the service
providers regarded the credit card holder as the owner,
not the ICU.

In late 2014, knowing I would soon be departing, I asked the
ICU to either get a credit card of their own or let me
start using one belonging to someone else and what came
back was the details for Fitzsimons' credit card which was
duly plugged into the hosting account. This gave Fitzsimons
(and Kildea, who was the one who actually carried out the
deed) just what they needed. Kildea went to the hosting
company, presented the credit card details (the one that
had been paying the bills for the last few months), claimed
ownership and asked for the server (and therefore both sites)
to be taken down (to make sure there was no way I could
access it).

It should be noted that Kildea and Fitzsimons acted clandestinely.
They didn't tell me what they were doing, of course, but they
also kept it a secret from the rest of the executive.

Ultimately, the server was out of commission for several weeks, presumably
while they made doubly sure there was no way I could regain access when
it came back up. The longest the sites had been down in the 10 years prior
to that was for a planned upgrade in 2013 and that was just a day.
It's very sad that things came to such a juncture.

I can see that Fitzsimons probably felt frustrated at my refusal
to let his friend Daly have an editor's login on the main site
but given why I was resigning in the first place (see first post)
it would have been rather inconsistent to allow that. I ask you
to consider whether in taking such drastic action he was putting
the interests of Irish chess first. Instead, he could easily
have:

* finally let Jonathan be webmaster (see previous post), or
* put more effort into finding some other serious replacement if he was dead set against Jonathan, or
* encourage either P. or Q. (see previous post) to resume their handovers.

So at that point my time as webmaster had come to a sudden and
violent end and there was not going to be a smooth handover
as had been planned. Luckily, I'd had time to complete the
Overview documentation (mentioned in previous posts), a useful
resource as long as the sites remain in their present form.

That was the first "bad thing" that happened. But as we'll see,
there was another one just around the corner.

I had hoped to end my involvement with the ICU gradually, perhaps
remaining as a source of help and advice for the new webmaster
(whoever that might be) for weeks or even months to come. But instead,
one moment I was doing the usual stuff (answering user queries, upgrading
software, polishing documentation etc.) and next thing you know I
couldn't connect to the server, the two sites were horribly broken
and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

Fitzsimons and Kildea weren't even able to take them down gracefully,
you just got blank screens where once the main site and the ratings site
had been. I mean, if it had been my job to shut them down, I would have at
least provided holding pages, with some information about what was going on
for the bemused users. It's awful to even think about it given how
meticulously those sites had been cared for.

As for me, that was clearly the end of the road. I was out, in the most
ignominious and shocking way imaginable. If you think that would be
punishment enough for daring to stand up to those guys, you'd be wrong,
Fitzsimons and Kildea hadn't finished with me yet.

In early June I received a copy of a report written by the
"ICU website's administrator" (whom I understand to be Kildea)
making a number of wild allegations against me including such things as:

* I was sending viruses in emails (I wouldn't even know how to do that),
* I had "almost certainly" copied the ICU database outside the executive (nonsense),
* I had kept data outside Ireland (the web server is physically in London, so what?),
* I had made a non-executive member an editor (perfectly normal),
* and so on and son on with stuff just being made up on the spot.

I was invited to comment on this rubbish, which I did, and
then subsequently in early July received notification from the ICU
secretary that the committee had considered both the report and my
response and had decided to:

* ban me for 3 years from the ICU,
* ban me for 5 years from the executive,
* rescind my free ICU membership (as an IM).

Normally, in cases like this, as has happened in recent years, an independent disciplinary
committee would have been setup (to ensure the executive was squeaky clean) but that was
dispensed with in this case.

On quizzing the secretary for further details I found out that:

* When the secretary suggested an independent committee might be the proper way to go he "was told 'No' in a rather forceful manner".
* Two members of the committee were absent, one of whom had asked for the meeting to be delayed because he was anxious to attend.
* No actual vote took place. The secretary said "the basis of which is that there was no demurring so no vote was required".
* On a request to clarify what that meant, the secretary informed me that an explanation from the chairperson himself would be forthcoming (it never arrived).

So there you have it. Starting in August 2014 with the announcement that I would be resigning (see first post)
and ending the following July with a punishment of unusual severity after a somewhat dubious committee process.
Along the way there were two aborted attempts to produce a new webmaster while the perfect candidate was overlooked.
Our beautiful websites were, for a while at least, trashed, and users were kept in the dark about what was really going on.

I argue that by his actions Fitzsimons has demonstrated that the good of Irish chess is not his top priority.

Therefore I urge all readers of this thread to go the AGM and vote him out.