[wp-forums] Ethical practices of consultants

[James Huff]

Very good questions.

Here are my "qualifications" for unethical status:

1. The consultant solicits his/her services when none have been requested.

2. The consultant goes to ridiculous lengths to contact a user outside of the forums (tracks down an email address or Facebook account).

3. The consultant takes more than 24 hours to communicate with clients (consideration should be given to emergencies, etc).

4. The consultant dramatically increases the final price after the job is finished.

The thread will be closed (only editable by mods), so concerned users will be forwarding "evidence" to this list if necessary and we should all be involved in the decisions on whether or not we blacklist a particular individual.  I think, given the evidence already, that Gisha James should be the first if her actions continue after the email that I send later tonight.

Consultants should feel free to solicit their services when it has been requested by a user on the forums, but we should continue to close threads and direct users to the jobs site.

I think you must agree that a list of ethical consultants would be impossible to maintain.  There are quite a lot of us out there, which is why a blacklist is important.  It basically says, we'd like to think that everyone is ethical, but these people certainly aren't.  If users are desperate for a "ethical consultants" list, they can use something like Elance.

If a consultant is blacklisted, they should be welcome to contact the list and dispute it.

Yes, this will be little bit more work for us, but I think that between all of us we can do this, and we owe something like this to the community.



________
James Huff
http://www.macmanx.com
http://programnotes.wikia.com

On Jun 30, 2010, at 5:07 PM, Mark Ratledge wrote:

> 
> On Jun 30, 2010, at 5:39 PM, James Huff wrote:
> 
>> The basic format of such a topic (which would be closed and sticky, btw) would include a brief bit on what we consider to be "ethical practices"...
> 
> Thoughts:
> 
> I think there should be real clarity in what is considered to be ethical and what is considered to be not ethical.
> 
> Should people or consultants *never* email people offering to fix what they need fixed? Can people or consultants email help seekers with a simple "contact me if you are interested?"
> 
> Sounds like there will be a list of unethical consultants; will there be a list of ethical consultants? And who decides that?
> 
> Should be people be pointed to jobs.wordpress.net or sites like Elance?
> 
> I can already see this: what's the process when a consultant is blacklisted and they subsequently raise hell about it in the forums? Delete the thread? Delete the user?
> 
> 
> -------------------------
> Mark / songdogtech
> http://markratledge.com
> 
> 
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