Would You Recommend Working for PACE?

[Dominator]

This is a honest question.

[Mike Bentley]

Just to be clear, PACE is a 501c3 non-profit. PACE members serve on a volunteer basis, although we do provide some compensation for specific tasks such as writing and editing questions (including to non-members).

[AKKOLADE]

PACE is a good non-profit to volunteer for.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I used to compare PACE to the Stanford Prison Experiment, except with a corporate bureaucracy instead of a prison. Perfectly normal quizbowl people would get elected to PACE and then, especially if they were the Communications Officer, they would cease to talk like human beings, and start talking like spokespeople for large, blue-chip companies. And not the cool big companies like Google or Facebook either. It was utterly bizarre to me. PACE also did a lot of weird things for apparently no reason other than it had always done things that way.

After several power struggles, PACE now seems to be firmly controlled by people who focus on substance over style and seem to be remodeling it as a paradigm of quizbowl best practices. Indeed, ACF is likely to soon adopt rules modeled on the PACE rules. I haven't written or volunteered for PACE in half a decade, so I don't know what its like to actually volunteer for PACE, but consider this post an endorsement of the people currently running it. They say who you work for is really important, after all.

[ryanrosenberg]

I've really enjoyed being a member of PACE. It's a great way to help spread quizbowl and give back to the community, and you don't even have to be a fantastic question-writer to do it; PACE has plenty of opportunities for people interested in quizbowl outreach, communications, and tournament direction.

[Nine-Tenths Ideas]

I was in PACE for a few years, even serving as VP of Outreach. Since PACE mostly does one, specific thing (NSC), it was very low-stress, and my only complaints about "working" for them come from the year before I joined (NSC 2011). Since they're under new leadership now, those complaints aren't really relevant anymore.

[Stained Diviner]

I hope that we are a good place to work for, and we welcome feedback both private and public on how we could be better. This is my third year as a member. I have found Matt Jackson, Michael Bentley, and other PACE members to be great people to work for and with, and I want to continue the many things that have been done well.

There are three ways to work for PACE:
1) Be a member. We often discuss what it means to be a member, because it's not often clear what the position means. I think the one thing we would agree on is that means being a part of our decision making process. We look for member nominations every six months, and we just had one.
2) Write or edit questions. Because we only produce one set each year, this is a pretty laid back process compared to other companies, though producing a high quality set with over 1000 questions does take a lot of time and effort. It is overseen by our Vice President of Editing. PACE is not the best place to write questions if you are an unproven writer, because that is not a priority of ours. It is a good opportunity if you want to work with many of the best writers and editors in the business for an organization that places a high value on question quality and have your questions used in high stakes matches played by the best high school teams in the country.
3) Staff the NSC. We strive to make the NSC the best tournament that high school quizbowl can have, and we need over 100 staffers to make it work. I'll reiterate that we welcome feedback on what it would take to make staffing the NSC a better experience and/or make people more likely to staff it.

PACE members are talking now about what we can do to improve high school quizbowl across the country, and we welcome input from the community, though that's probably a topic for another thread.

[marianna]

I also have had a fantastic experience as a member of PACE, although I haven't been a member for very long. To me, PACE feels like a very small tight-knit community where there's always a project to work on, depending on your skillset and interests. In my time as a member, my fellow members have been very supportive with regards to proposing new ideas and testing new projects to support high-quality quizbowl.

I want to second David's comment that we're always happy to hear feedback about how we're doing. Feel free to PM or email me (I'll respond as a real human being!), or if you prefer, you can reach out to a specific PACE officer (our emails are listed on our website).