We understand the complicated nature (and, in some cases, the high stakes) around legal identity. Though we've received questions about the transgender and nonbinary communities, others (e.g., undocumented people, victims of abuse, stalking victims, public figures) who are either reticent to provide their identities or who may not be able to supply the documentation may be disproportionately impacted. It has to be said that, as a society, we haven't developed any viable, widely-accepted systems for handling these issues, and that NaNoWriMo is not alone in trying to navigate through them.
We want folks from all the aforementioned groups to be part of our community and to be eligible for any role within the organization. We've had internal staff conversations about this since December and we consulted our attorney in early January about this specifically. We commented here on our legal obligation to conduct volunteer background checks in California. Another thing we were advised to consider is that a lack of rigor around volunteer background checks will impact our insurability, especially given the events of November.
Our attorney's primary recommendation was that we make our privacy policy (which is currently being revised, partially for this reason) very clear and that we underscore that we will not distribute this information. The only document containing MLs' legal names that we will have on file are the ML agreements. Internal to NaNoWriMo, those would not be available to most employees. In terms of criminal background checks, we will see those results when we log onto our vendor site, but we will neither materially collect (e.g., print to PDF) or store (e.g., upload to our storage drives) that information.
There are reasons why we want people to sign the ML agreement with their legal names. We're reticent to abandon this because it's so standard as a nonprofit industry practice. Most nonprofit volunteer programs that involve a significant time commitment have formal applications that ask for even more personal information (e.g., name, address, phone, etc.). We will not ask for any of that. But we've already encountered situations at NaNoWriMo in which we needed a volunteer's legal identity and didn't have it (All of them related to cooperating with law enforcement) and we don't want to place ourselves in that position again.