YouTube Community Council: First Thoughts

Well, hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello. I just wanted to make a quick video today to talk about the YouTube Community Council. Now, most of you, many of you have heard that a new, let's call it a new organization, has been created here on YouTube. If you haven't, I'll put the link up here to the very brief and admittedly impromptu video that the 5 members of the council made while we were out at YouTube headquarters earlier this week. Now, uh, there's some things I want to tell you about this initiative. First of all, uh, the 5 of us who are on the council were approached about a month or so ago, asked to sign a very standard, uh, document that all corporations use when they are discussing things that are confidential, and that document is called a non-disclosure agreement, NDA for short. We were all asked to sign an NDA before we were even told what the initiative was about. I signed the NDA and was then sent an email which said, hey, we're gonna want to start this council, community council. We're not really sure exactly what it's going to be about, what it's going to do, but we know we need to get more feedback from the community. And we've picked 5 people who we think are going to serve the purposes for a 6-month duration of helping us to get this council off the ground, help us to get it moving. Okay, I signed. They came back and said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to bring you out here to headquarters and we're going to have you talk to a lot of people involved with the, uh, with the company in all kinds of capacities, and we want you to meet with them and just talk and answer questions and so on. And that's what we did. Now, the 5— the 4 other members of the council. I'll give you links to their channels over here, but they are Mark Visible Mode, Brad O'Farrell, Lindsay Bravesgirl5, and Sari Cray, Sarah, myself. So there we were, the 5 of us, never having met face to face, only having seen one another's videos I'm not sure how many of you— some folks maybe didn't even see any of my videos, but we had all probably seen one another's videos. And here we are thrown together for the first time as a YouTube council. It was a terrific experience to be with these 4 people. Somebody in the comment section of the video, the introductory video, called us the Golden Five. And one of the things that happened over these couple of days was that as a group we started to What did we discover? We've all got a sense of humor. And so next thing you know, we're walking around calling one another the Golden Five. We're the G5. Uh, silly, but yet what we were doing was what every group does when it is first brought together, and that was we were forming some kind of bond with one another. We all knew that we had been asked to take part in an experiment. Nobody knew, and at the time, and nobody still knows exactly what the duties, if you will, what the responsibilities of the council will be. But we do know that we're going to want you, the members of the YouTube community, to let us know what we— what you think and what we think are going to be important ways to improve the experience of being a member of this community. Now, over the 2 days that we were at YouTube headquarters, we heard a tremendous amount of information. And still having signed the non-disclosure agreement, there are a lot of particular things that I'm not permitted to say. Parenthetically, you know, I've been a management consultant for 20 years, and in those 20 years, I've sat in lots and lots and lots of corporate meetings, lots of meetings with with corporate people. And, you know, after a while you start to be able to, um, how can I put this delicately, you start to be able to know when you're being bullshitted. You know, you get a pretty good sense of, you develop a bullshit detector. And what I saw over the course of these two days passed my bullshit test pretty well. What does that mean? It means that There were lots and lots of earnest, hardworking, dedicated people that we met at YouTube who really want this to be the greatest experience for everyone that anybody's ever imagined. Now that's— they set very lofty goals for themselves. Accomplishing those goals, accomplishing our goals, getting everything done that we want to get done, fixing all the things that we all think are wrong is a monumental task. We all know that. We see the magnitude of this endeavor. We see how many videos are produced here every day. We know how many videos are watched here every day. Lots and lots and lots of material. So, um, over the course of the next 6 months, the 5 of us, the inaugural Community Council, are going to do our best to try to listen to what you have to say pass that information along to YouTube. Folks at YouTube are going to ask us a lot of questions, they're going to run a lot of stuff by us. Whatever we are able to say to you about those things, I know we're going to want to say to you. You're going to have to be patient with us. Some of you don't want to be patient with us. The comments in that introductory video, some of them were pretty harsh. We get it, you know, we get it. Nobody understands how these selections were made. I don't understand how the selections were were made. Fact of the matter is, when I look at the 5 people who've been selected, they passed my bullshit test. These are people— when we sat and talked about being on YouTube, every one of us knew what it was like. Every one of us had made lots of videos. Every one of us has been involved in every bit of difficulty on YouTube that you can imagine, technical and non-technical. So, um, look, I just again wanted to let you know how happy I am to be a member of this inaugural Community Council and how much we're looking to you to support us. And most importantly, how good it's going to be to hand this off to the next group, the next Community Council, because this is only the first. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to be able to get involved in this process, and I'm eager to see how this is going to go. I'll let you know my experience in ways that I'm allowed to, but nobody's going to be able to stop me from making this kind of video. Where I just tell you what it's like for me to be part of that group. So, uh, take care and I'll see you all again soon. Bye-bye.