My specific goals for this website have been somewhat fluid over the course of the summer, but its mission has remained the same: To promote meaningful, incremental, and systemic change in an inherently predatory business structure.
In March of 2022, I built a framework for 20+ volunteers to collaborate on a project to spread meaningful awareness about the Federal Trade Commission’s most recent revisiting of regulations applied to multilevel marketing companies. With the help of these volunteers, we were able to centralize information from the FTC and legal experts regarding the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to address unfair and deceptive earnings claims made by multilevel marketing companies and representatives in multiple languages, as well as to provide a simple template for the public to use to craft a comment focused on answering the questions asked in the ANPR.
This effort was massively successful; to date, the “Comment Crafter” form has been used 650 times, and 618 of the entries contain some kind of response to the questions laid out by Claudia Gross, an assistant professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I have plans to further mine this data so that I can let everyone who chipped in know how many actual comments submitted to the FTC were a direct result of this campaign.
June brought the second annual MLM Conference: The Consumer Proection Challenge 2022. In June of 2021, I was still a part of the MLM company that had indoctrinated and scammed me. This year, I was blown away and honored to be asked to participate in a panel for the MLM Conference. Some colleagues I hope will eventually be contributors on this website can provide more data than I can on the success of the conference.
This summer, and out of the connections formed over the planning of www.MLMchange.org and the MLM Conference, a sort of coalition has naturally formed. I started this website, OutOfMLM.info, knowing that I wanted to offer up my knowledge in software development and web design to the cause in some way. Already, I’ve been through a few iterations of this website and, at the time of my writing this, it still hasn’t been launched to the public. But I think that this small network of activists needs a space to collaborate that doesn’t depend upon copying & pasting the “cc” box from the last email somebody sent out–something more optional, and hopefully more user-friendly. I’m still working on the user-friendly part. I think step 1 is going to be convincing everyone to come and create an account on my website so that they can even see this post.
So, all that said, if you can read this, and you have read this far, I thank you for your time and ask one more thing of you:
Please comment on this post, so that I know what is working and what is not.
Thank you 🙂