1. Recent developments

Based on developments in the past week, it has come to my attention as former webmaster that:

Communication has broken down between myself and the rest of the trustees. Trustees refuse to answer calls or call me back.
The apparent breakdown in communication provides evidence of a breakdown in trust.
Significant changes to the organization are underway that have suddenly been made while blindsiding me to them until after they are accomplished.
As a result of recent changes, any technical services on my part will be irrelevant and unnecessary in the future, thus relegating me to an administrative role that has never interested me since even before I became a trustee. I have no desire to supervise or micromanage even a paid web designer to do the work that is necessary. I don’t like playing uncompensated babysitter and prefer to work independently as much as possible since the alternative is an expensive and time consuming process at a level of effort that I don’t think any of the other trustees are interested in or would even appreciate or reward. Therefore I’m not interested either.

2. Historical Unresolved Issues

Combine the above with the fact that:

Censorship by the founder of any links to my content, because he was an atheist and said he didn’t like the spiritual component of my content and didn’t have a SINGLE link to any of my vast work anywhere on the site.
I have been the target of acrimony by a former President. This has given rise to trepidation by some trustees towards me.
A sense of apathy on the part of other trustees getting meaningful work done that would serve the best interests of the Society as I perceive them.
There are significant disagreements over what the best interest of the Society looks like.
My hands have always been tied in offering free services to help that would save the society lots of money in professional web designer fees. All the suggestions I have made have fallen on deaf ears.
Since there is overlap between what I was doing before I became a Trustee and what the Society is doing, my hands are tied in voting on most subjects and especially major or important subjects for fear that I might have a conflict of interest.
There is a long history of declining revenue for Constitution.org that started long before I came alone. I seem to have become the main object of blame for this, even though there are many factors at work that I believe aren’t being considered by the trustees, such as:

Site content that is outdated with many broken links that frustrate visitors. When I offered to fix these, that offer was rejected.
Site that is not relevant to contemporary freedom and legal researchers, causing them to go elsewhere to sites like mine. It is static and not updated to current standards as my other sites are.
A VERY complex method of raising revenue that makes site administration extremely susceptible to service interruption because of changes by Ezoic and complexity of keeping it running.
Static HTM content formatting that is no longer popular because not interactive and engaging and “social” enough.

The fact that my resources are spread extremely thin by virtue of the many things I must do to serve a huge audience on other websites mostly FOR FREE.
The fact that probably only about 3% of the content on Constitution.org is original. The rest is outside the copyright window of 75 years and therefore public domain.
The fact that most of the site content is already available online from other sources that even Jon Roland pointed out to me before he died, such as:
1. Online Library of Liberty (OLL)
  https://oll.libertyfund.org
2. The Library of Economics and Liberty
  https://www.econlib.org/
3. Law and Liberty
  https://lawliberty.org/
4. Adam Smith Works
  https://www.adamsmithworks.org/
5. The Mises Institute
  https://mises.org/
The fact that there is no new original content being added to the site and no trustee who even cares enough to do so. I volunteered and those efforts were denigrated so I became demoralized and apathetic like the rest of the trustees.
The fact that the revenue from the site is insufficient to pay for someone to do all the things that are needed to enlarge the audience for the site. Further, even 100 times the current revenue would be insufficient, because the amount of effort required is astronomical and ongoing.
The Complete absence of Christianity and spirituality perspectives on the site that would greatly improve user engagement by putting the Constitution.org content in a much more meaningful, moral, relevant, and practical context for most people. Men and law are both objects of idolatry and God says both are corrupted and hopeless without Him.
The fact that NO ONE so far has been deemed by the Trustees to be worthy of enough trust to delegate the maintenance of changes or updates to the site without the need for significant micromanagement that would make the pace of changes so slow and their cost so high that it is impossible within the budget we have to get anything meaningful done. Analysis and distrust paralysis.

Failure to be able to even talk about the above issues and resolve them as a Trustee has been a significant demoralizing force that has caused me to lose any hope that these important problems can ever or will ever be addressed. It’s not in my nature to merely pretend that they don’t exist or to stop talking about them. I have consistently been beat up for even caring about these issues. The prime directive so far seems to be the convenience and leisure of the trustees, since they aren’t compensated. I can’t work that way and this is not the first time I have gotten in trouble with coworkers because of my capitalist and work-a-holic approach to everything. This disparity in workplace ethos is also why I had to leave government service. Déjà vu.

The opposite of love is not HATE, but INDIFFERENCE or PASSIVITY. I’m a loving and passionate person with no shortage of enthusiasm no matter what I am doing. So I’m obviously in the wrong place and need to find a more edifying and hopeful environment to direct all that love and enthusiasm toward outside of Constitution.org.

3. Farewell

My duty as Trustee is to pursue the best interests of the Society. Conflict, mistrust, or incompatibility among the Trustees is anathema to that goal. Even after I leave, these problems and those documented in the previous section (which are my view but not necessarily yours) will inevitably continue.

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I must tender my resignation as Constitution Society Trustee and save you all the apparently enormous inconvenience of even having to hold a meeting to vote on the subject or worst yet, a contentious and ongoing debate like the one with a former President of the Society. That was a curse I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, least of all friends like you that I have great respect for and would never knowingly injure in any way.

It has been an honor and a pleasure over the years working with you all. I never asked for this job and accepted Jon’s invitation very reluctantly to begin with. My intuitions on this subject about the eventual outcome of saying yes to Jon’s invitation were correct. I should have said no in retrospect. But of course if I had, it would surprise me if any of the data from the original Constitution.org site would have survived. Rescuing the website data was quite an effort far beyond what the Society would have been able to do I think within its budget, resources, and technical abilities at the time Jon left us. If Jon had been more proactive, such monumental efforts would not have been necessary. Rescuing it for you all was the SECOND resurrection of the site. The first rescue happened without invitation after the site went dark while Jon was in the hospital starving himself so he could check out. I wasn’t even asked to do the first rescue and couldn’t even contact anyone about what happened. I only did it out of concern for the loss of years of Jon’s work. He was so thankful that he decided to send me an invitation to be a Trustee.

I am very thankful for the things I learned about how to run a trust under Roberts Rules of Order as a Trustee under instruction from more experience colleagues. Those lessons will be a great benefit, and even the main benefit, of my past participation as a Trustee. My participation wasn’t a waste at all not only because of that, but because of the friendships I forged while serving that were very helpful in my own development and hopefully a blessing on you all as well.

Please do not call me to try to change my mind. This decision is FINAL. Bon Voyage.

4. Future cooperation

Now that I am resigned, it would continue to be my pleasure to do everything within my power to ensure that the Constitution Society has the data it needs to continue its vital mission. That data, after all, is the ORIGIN of its existence. Therefore, I can provide the following upon formal request, but only once so that I don’t have to continue to be an uncompensated archivist:

All the data constituting the version of the site just prior to the time I was recently locked out on 20230814 as a single downloadable zip file.
The entire content of Constitution.org before directories were rearranged dated 20200711 as a single downloadable zip file.

I personally certify that whatever I do provide will be the unmodified version of exactly what was on the server at the time.

I will not use any copyrighted or original content written by Jon in any of my own efforts in the future. If you do see any original copyrighted content published by Constitution Society in any of my own efforts, please notify me and I will take it down immediately.

Any public domain content outside the copyright window of 75 years on the Constitution.org site which I might reuse in any of my efforts will be configured so that it is not crawled by a web crawler to avoid making it compete with Constitution.org in search ranking. That is presently the case, as far as I know. That way, your revenues will be unaffected by anything I am doing.

5. Suggestions to help the direction of the society beyond this point

Based on my reading of the last meeting minutes, I would suggest the following path forward to minimize the expenses of the Society in transitioning in the direction they appear to be going:

Do one of the following to minimize the Word press problems with accessing the admin interface:

Migrate the Ezoic configuration so that you use Ezoic menus instead of Wordpress menus.
Move the site over to the Wordpress hosting that Ezoic offers. I never did that, but it might fix the problem.

Transition off the Ezoic advertising platform. It has severe limitations that make you unable to host the site on third party platforms such as the Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress.org, which were mentioned in the minutes.
The downside of leaving the Ezoic platform is that the labor and expense of website administration will be far beyond the current budget of the Society. This is because all the ads will most likely have to be added manually to each individual pages, and there are thousands of such pages. This is what Jon did with the site originally before he transitioned to Ezoic, and there are still many remnants left on the site of this that have not yet been removed. These ad remnants corrupt the presentation of the page, so they must be removed manually. I spent hundreds of hours doing this. The level of effort I put into the site is hundreds of times beyond that of any Trustee and was underappreciated. You will therefore have trouble finding and motivating anyone to do this job for free and don’t have enough money to pay someone to do it over the long haul at the current revenue rate. This is the main problem you have.

6. Conclusion

I sincerely hope that our separation can be amicable and peaceful and not vindictive on your part. This has always been my approach, in fact.. None of us needs yet another needless conflict like the one with our psycho first President, and especially one that might end up in a courtroom. This communication and all my future efforts in the freedom area are therefore structured to make any future legal conflict nearly impossible and way more risky and costly than it otherwise would be.

This communication is privileged, nonfactual, nonactionable speech that is not admissible as evidence in any legal proceeding. Any use in litigation between myself and any trustee or the Society generally is subject to the following terms and conditions governing such a legal or commercial use:

Injury Defense Franchise and Agreement, Form #06.027
https://sedm.org/Forms/06-AvoidingFranch/InjuryDefenseFranchise.pdf

I wish you all well