 Ahoy, Ahoy. Have you ever wondered to yourself who in their right mind would claim to be in charge of the SCP foundation? I mean we're talking about an organization made up of psychopaths and killers and sadistic monsters and also a bunch of SCPs but recently someone asked a question of me they said well they didn't ask me specifically but they just asked in general about like what's the general organizational structure of the SCP foundation and it inspired me to make a video about it so today we're going to talk about who is in charge of the SCP foundation and how its organization is structured let's get started so first of all obviously when we talk about the SCP foundation the people in charge are the O5 council now O in this particular case it is specific it's not 05 but literally the letter O now what does the O mean well let's open the air much like most things about the SCP foundation we've got overseer, overwatch, operations really the term O5 council is about as nebulous a term as it can get because first of all you would think the O5 council would have five members but it doesn't O5 generally would mean the security level of the people involved which is to say that only the O5 council has level five access and that should be the top level access to all of the SCP foundation secrets but that's not even technically true because the way classification works tends to be on a need to know sort of thing so there's probably stuff that say O5 3 knows that O5 10 doesn't have access to just as an example also there aren't five members there are anywhere between 12 and 13 members in certain canons there's going to be less but generally 12 or 13 depending on who you ask mainly because both 12 and 13 are significant numbers for lack of a better way to put it 12 is you know they're 12 apostles 12 you know it's a very important religious number but 13 also has that uh occult field to it so there's 12 or 13 depending on the can regardless these guys are the ones who are in charge of the scp foundation they meet they generally you would expect to have equal amounts of authority though groups of them could vote groups of you it's a council so say if you can get a majority to vote somebody out then that person is no longer a member of the council the thing is in most canons and to be honest with you how it would probably operate in real life even if they are nominally equal in authority the people who have been there longer with a better base of support the you know can persuade other people a little bit better would tend to have a little bit more authority there's probably a certain amount of seniority involved like the oldest members kind of get a precedence or precedence preference on uh being able to speak first and make their opinions known and then you've got the below the o5 council so after you get past that there's you know 12 or 13 o5 council members who make votes on everything then there's not supposed by the way this is this is something that comes up every once in a while they're early on in the foundations like text and stuff there's a kind of a rule the o5 council is not supposed to technically ever be in contact with an scp just because of the opportunity for them to be corrupted by it in one way or the other either through info hazards or cognito hazards you you get the deal so they're not supposed to be in contact with scp's but that is kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years i not fully but still after that though once we get past the o5 council the next biggest source of authority is probably the ethics committee and that might be a little bit odd to hear or it might not be odd to hear but but the way it's been portrayed ever since the ethics committee orientation is that the ethics committee is scarily powerful to the point where it's likely that one member of the o5 council is probably in charge of the ethics committee and that's just like their thing they don't bother with sites or you know cognitive you know the various departments that need to be run but rather just run the ethics committee and that person probably has more authority than most the other guys when it comes right down to it uh because they have their their influence has to flow from the top because when the ethics committee member says you can't do this thing then they're going into say a site and we'll talk about this in a second where the site director is god and the project director on a particular project is god except for the people who are technically above them so lesser gods will say regardless the ethics committee is much less defined and much less uh used than the uh o5 council is not to say that there are ethics committee members dr samarian the character not me personally but the character dr samarian in lore is a prominent member of the ethics committee uh in some cases and some canons he's the he's in charge of the ethics committee though that's that's rarer than just being a random member because the ethics committee doesn't their management doesn't really get talked about too much um however think of it like in a corporate structure and this may be helpful to some people and less helpful to others but anyone who's worked in any job knows that there's you know managers but then there's also the hr department and they kind of work together back and forth if you ever watch the office maybe that'll help because most people have watched the office uh tobey tobey is the hr guy and he kind of has the ability to tell uh the guy who's in actually in charge the actual manager certain things that he can he can't do what that's a whole other matter entirely we'll talk about how much i'll have the office in another time regardless uh this is a good example of how hr can work inside a normal corporate structure uh and and it is useful to think about the scp foundation as a corporate structure because that's generally kind of how it works so there's the corporate leadership which is the o5 council and their their apparatus obviously the o5 council isn't just 13 guys they have their own employees they have their own processes there's the ethics committee beneath them they have their own guys their own processes and then you have the individual sites now it maybe corporate structure won't work for you there's also ways you could parallel it to say the u.s government with states and the federal government uh but each site to me is more like a franchise like say for example in a fast food franchise mcdonald's doesn't actually run the individual stores they send down directives they send down you know guidelines they probably provide a little bit of guidance on the hr thing but in the end the store manager is the person who is ultimately in charge of the day-to-day operations and their word is law now someone can come in like a regional manager and actually like say do this do this than that and the site director would have to actually follow through on that now that normally you would think that that would be like in the scp foundation's hierarchy what is a regional manager versus a uh regular store manager so what's a site director's version of the regional manager it would probably just be a regional director you could look at the um canon the gulf for example in the gulf there it's a collection of sites set in the south and uh kate mcterris i believe it's been a really long time since i've actually read it my the canon that i helped start but kate mcterris in the gulf canon for example is a regional director uh she also helps run the mtf in that particular one of the mtf's in that particular area which is kind of a go-to like there's a hot spot we move our mtf over there for it uh an unassigned mtf for lack of a better way to put it and her as a regional director could show up at a site and be like hey do this thing i don't care that you're a site director and that you supposedly normally have ultimate authority here i'm telling you as a directive of the scp foundation's greater goals we need to change this this and this and then at a site so we've got the o5 council their subsidiaries the ethics committee just a little bit below that and then you've got your site directors and maybe regional directors are a buffer a little bit between the o5 council and the site directors but once you get to the site director level we're talking about the organization of a particular site and each individual site is organized a little differently than the others because they must necessarily be organized differently each one's gonna have different projects going at any particular time and those projects are gonna have their own departments based around them smaller projects like scp 173 that have been researched to death probably only have a basic containment set up with uh you know it's not it's not a very cushy job because there's not a lot of upward mobility for the guy in charge of the scp 173 project that's been researched to death the only thing they need to do is keep it in containment and keep the floors clean so that's probably and if you think about it it's like those are the things like you start small you start at the bottom of the ladder and you probably work your way up to more and more important assignments but each department's going to have for one as i was mentioning 173 is probably just very simple but there are more complex scps that would require multiple department types of bi you know there are scps that have a biological and a medic and you know and a maybe a pyrophoric uh problem or uh elements i should say and so you would need you know someone someone who's different departments to deal with each of these individual problems and then the department heads for that could work together on the full containment of the thing and maybe for streamlining one of those department heads is also the project head god this is we're talking about so much organizational structure here i better have some stuff on the screen for this but those guys will all answer to your site director and the site director and the ethics committee liaison for that site generally how i've seen it and i think it's been mostly adopted by the rest of the the rest of the wiki at this point but the ethics committee liaison for a particular site is the he's the guy who is the go between between the ethics committee and the site director and the site director and the ethics committee liaison are essentially the ultimate authorities on everything that happened at this particular site site director a little bit more so the ethics committee liaison should be kind of hands off except when necessary but the ethics committee liaison is going to have full authority to just straight up fire somebody if necessary and then the sb foundation that may require some amnestics applications but still and there's some limits to that certainly so like if an ethics committee liaison decided that the site director had to go he couldn't just go into his office and have him fired that would be complex and probably and honestly depending on the reasons why that person is being fired may result in some gunfire the really important thing to remember is that everything flows from the authority the o5 council so he's going to have to go to his superiors and they'll go to their superiors and finally there'll be a directive handed down that so-and-so has to be removed processes bureaucracy red tape all over the place when we talk about the individual projects and we've talked about leadership in those projects the you know individual departments for a particular scp those individual departments have department heads and those department heads have to have their people in their departments so there are researchers junior researchers and just doctors in general and when we use the term junior researcher versus researcher versus doctor they're a doctor is not necessarily a superior to a researcher a doctor is just a title a researcher would just like they all have the job title of researcher whereas doctor is used because that's their title they have a doctorate so a doctor could very well be inferior in rank to say just for seniority's sake to a researcher now a lot of lore on the scp wiki treats the term doctor as though it's a like not a title but like an actual position within the foundation that's just straight up not how it works and definitely not how it would work in any sort of real world application and as you get further down you get to your junior researchers who are definitely to the inferior of the other possible options here they're the lowest here on the researcher uh ladder but they're not the lowest here necessarily of employees because there's other parts of the foundation beyond just the department just the basic like research departments and or study departments there's the ntf there's the security systems i mean there's any sites can have an anti memetics that most sites should have an anti memetics division they also might have like a site that that deals with a lot of reality warpers might have an what's it ontokinesis is that the word it is and i took a second and looked it up to be sure yeah might have an ontokinesis department just just an overarching department to cover the problems of having a bunch of reality warpers in the same place might be a lot of experts on scran reality anchors and how to ensure the human levels stay whatever they're supposed to be regardless uh so there's going to be individual special departments in particular sites but also every site's gonna have like i said every site's got to have an anti memetics division probably a records division talk about risa the uh security departments and just in general the stuff you would just the general stuff you might expect in a site like like i said the security departments uh a technical support janitorial services that's the kind of basic stuff and you'd be like well don't declass that well those are the bottom bottom of the level but no there's probably a set of individuals who are at least aware that they're working in a secret facility without knowing many of the finer details of what that entails just the idea that you know and some of them do because you know the people who have to work in close proximity eventually learn these things anyway um but not to the probably not fullest extent like they don't know about the end of the world stuff but they might know that there's magic in the world there might know you know there's anomalies that cause problems and such and these people would be drawn from the general population but also like in a sense that you've got to find people who are uh who pass their background checks properly but the number people you need to the point at this point becomes sort of and it's like it's impossible for everyone to be completely clean so weirdly as you think about it you'd have to look for people who are going to be good at the job but who won't find work elsewhere uh you're going to have to pay them more as well like a lot more have them signing nondisclosure agreements and all these other things give them all these benefits and etc for jobs where normally they'd be making say minimum wage isn't like a janitor or whatever um a good choice for that would certainly be people who have low level drug offenses uh who can't find who may have difficulty finding jobs elsewhere but who otherwise would be completely reliable the scp foundation is going to be entirely pragmatic for the sort of thing uh and realistically intelligent i would imagine so you've got all the way down to you know your basic staff level and then you get into your d-class and the d-class are literally just just supposedly disposable testing subjects um and the level of how disposable they are we'll throw it up in the air i mean you guys probably know by now how i feel about that but there is some level of i'm not going to say there isn't some level of disposability about them but obviously uh not not to the level that is necessarily portrayed in all of the sites fiction but to some level there has to be this is an incredibly dangerous thing how do we test it without risking someone's life well let's throw a d-class at it uh let's try to do our best to make sure that d-class doesn't die but if he does we understand that that's a possibility we're not going to get sued for it because this guy is has been disappeared at this point and that's it you start from the top and you work your way down and if you think about it it's not any different than any normal non non you know non secret governmental agencies structure the only difference is that the whole thing is surrounded by secrecy uh and if you try to get out you generally would end up getting amnesticized that's it if you have any more questions or something you think that i didn't quite cover here let me know in the comments down below i didn't really talk too much about the ntfs uh and those would be i would say under their own sort of thing like talking about mtfs is it's a whole video of its own this is already i'm going to cut it down as best i can but this is already 20 minutes long so we'll talk about mtfs in a different video thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed the video hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when i upload new videos then head on over to patreon.com forward slash D samaritan and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has including probably a wizard and definitely not a scientist at 40 hotheaded canadian at 50 lawful evil at $60 and vv at $88 thank you very much for letting me know that i'm not alone out here and i'll see you all again on tuesday