I’ve spo­ken to a cou­ple of the peo­ple involved in deal­ing with this (although not Leslie) as well as sev­eral peo­ple in the Aus­tralia tech and social media indus­try who are qual­i­fied to com­ment thanks to their exper­tise. I’m left with a raft of my own ques­tions, as I think every­one, for one rea­son or another isn’t telling or hasn’t told the entire story.

Obvi­ously, this leads to spec­u­la­tion, as we can see here on my friend, Bron­wen Clune’s blog. It’s edu­cated spec­u­la­tion, but spec­u­la­tion nonethe­less. If we’re to report on this issue, we need the entire story. From both sides and from all the players.

I’d like to hear straight from David Quilty, as Leslie has sug­gested he “had a fuck­ing stroke” when he found out about Leslie’s iden­tity as Fake Stephen Conroy.

I’d also like to hear more from Mike Hick­in­botham. In all my deal­ings with him, and they have been sev­eral, Mike’s been a stand up guy. He knows and under­stands social media, he respects us as a com­mu­nity and he sim­ply doesn’t strike me as a “voice of management”.

The fact is that Leslie’s been outed as Fake Stephen Con­roy. He outed himself.

Tel­stra has said, and it’s been reported widely, that Leslie won’t lose his job over it. That’s a good thing. But there’s dis­agree­ment over whether Leslie was directly silenced, asked to exer­cise judg­ment on con­tin­u­ing as Fake Stephen Con­roy, or has sim­ply cho­sen to hand over the man­tle (after all, he wasn’t, by his own admis­sion, the orig­i­nal). That’s a bad thing, and we need clarity.

There’s also some pretty valid spec­u­la­tion as to whether Leslie’s lat­est tweets, effec­tively call­ing out Mike Hick­in­botham as a man­age­ment mouth­piece, are more or less a career-​​limiting move. Cer­tainly in some indus­tries, they’d make him unem­ploy­able. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to make the com­ments if I were Leslie.

What this all leaves us with is sev­eral things:

  • if Leslie loses his job today, it’s arguable he brought it on himself.
  • Leslie has strong sup­port in the com­mu­nity, par­tic­u­larly the tech, web and media com­mu­ni­ties, for what he did as Fake Stephen Con­roy. He was funny, enlight­en­ing and insight­ful. There’s no question.
  • Tel­stra can look really good or ter­ri­bly bad out of all of this. It all comes down to what they actu­ally do today. If Tel­stra choose to let him go, they look pretty nasty and they rapidly undo all the good­will they’ve built in the social media user base over the past year or so.
  • Tel­stra could retain Leslie and use him as a pub­lic face. He’s obvi­ously whip-​​smart, has a way with words, and can crack a funny. Last night, Gavin Heaton (@servantofchaos) spec­u­lated on Twit­ter that Leslie could become Telstra’s Robert Scoble. This morn­ing, he asks on his blog whether Leslie will be given that chance. I hope so.

But what’s more impor­tant, and I don’t think any­one is ade­quately look­ing at this, is why has this come about? Frankly, there’s just one answer. The Aus­tralian social media and IT media com­mu­ni­ties con­ducted a hunt that forced Leslie’s hand.

We hunted him down and forced him to out himself.

If Leslie loses his job today, who’s really to blame? It’s us. The peo­ple who made it nec­es­sary for him to reveal who he was. Because if he hadn’t been forced to reveal him­self, none of this would have hap­pened.

So, yes, Tel­stra should be the good guys and keep Leslie on staff. Maybe even rein­vent his role and make use of his clev­er­ness. But if they don’t, which one of us that shares cul­pa­bil­ity for this is going to give Leslie a job?