The Curmudgeonly Trainer

After a period of criticism about the running of the trdev list, Robert Bacal received the following from Kobus Kruger. Due to the general secrecy of the moderating group, nobody knows who actually owns trdev, but it’s primarily Kobus and Bev Ferrell that seem to be the public face. The email is reproduced in its entirety. My comments (or what would be responses) are in blue. My response to their post is here.

Robert,

My most recent direct communication with you appears to have been a mail sent on Wednesday, 6 June, 2007 3:40:48 PM, with the subject line “Re: Your note to Esperanza”. It was the final mail in series wherein we, the owners and coordinators of trdev asked you to abide by the norms and rules of the list. I want to quote the pertinent portion from that particular mail:

Startquote:
Kobus wrote:
> We note that you have not explicitly complied with our request to
> indicate your acceptance of the trdev norms.

Robert replied:
Sorry. I just skimmed your message, and obviously missed that part.
The answer is yes.
>
Endquote.

With the above in mind, the present altercation between you and the owners and coordinators refer. By now
you may or may not have received a notification informing you of your banning from trdev.

I actually received no notification, or in fact any indication that anything was wrong, except that my emails to the list were not appearing. As for there being an altercation there wasn’t one. I sent two messages to Bev Ferrell private indicating she should step down because her out of proportion concern for “security” was both silly, and damaging the community. I sent one public message (which was never seen by anyone) demonstrating that Bev’s “precautions” proved useless
I am sure that this is not unexpected, as over the last few weeks the content and tone of your communication has clearly skirted, and lately transgressed, the boundaries of civil discourse, intentionally or unintentionally. It appears as if you are intent on undermining the way discussions are conducted on the list.

It is worrisome that trainers who know “so much” about feedback and communication can offer the above without ANY specifics whatsoever. That’s probably because there aren’t any to speak of.
Further, you actively attempted to track down, without consent, personal and identifying personal detail of
one of the co-owners of this list in a manner that could be construed as posing a threat to her security. As you should be well aware, that alone is a violation of the Yahoo!Groups Terms of Service, and may or may not be in violation of US law.

I used publicly available information to identify some things about Bev Ferrell that are available to anyone with a browser and a search engine like google. This is a good example of what happens when two people end up running a list for eight years, which is the case for both Kobus and Bev. They believe they have power in the greater world. There is nothing illegal or against the TOS in looking up someone on the web.

In case anyone wonders what exactly I posted, I explicitly sent to the moderators some details but leaving out any specifics, so rather than saying “Bev lives in Podunk, Alaska” I wrote that I simply located here address. The point was to ensure everyone understood the vulnerabilities and that the only protection was simply to unplug the computer from the Internet.

You can view my post here.

This ban decision is final. Note that any future attempts to join trdev will be automatically rejected. Should any attempt to interfere with trdev and its normal operations occur, or to engage into communication without consent with the trdev owners and coordinators, or we be made aware of unsolicited contact with trdev members, your service provider will be notified. Also note that we do regard this as a private matter. This communication is therefore restricted in its distribution.

I was fairly sanguine about getting the boot, since I’ve only been on the list intermittently for the last years, but the final comments made in what I consider a threatening way pushed me into making this public.

I suspect the moderators, once again, want everything about what they do and how they do things on trdev to remain secret, which is ironic given the values of our profession. Perhaps that’s what they meant. But what’s striking is the desire to control my activities off the list, and their effort to do so is unacceptable.

As a writer, author and journalist I will choose to share with and report on anything I choose within the bounds of the law, and no two-bit moderators of a minor professional group are going to change that.

The reality is this sad group of folks has strangled the spread of knowledge about training and development, and restricted access to the community, thus resulting in the loss of a major used-to-be-effective resource.
Kobus Kruger
One of the trdev owners

Hate to be petty, but Kobus is being misleading here, probably out of ignorance. I’ve been a list owner way before trdev existed, and I can tell you that there is ONE single official owner. A list cannot have multiple owners.

I’d also like to point out the Kobus, whoever he or she is, almost never has posted or contributed to the public list. Nobody knows who Kobus is, or what he does. Go figure. Is it surprising?