Do we want a Community run/owned forum “in spirit” or would we rather that be “in fact”?

[polpolrene]

@frabrunelle

There is no single owner. Even if I manage the technical aspects of the forum, I am not more important than the other mods. We always aim to reach full consensus amongst mods when discussing issues. And even as mods, we don’t feel like the forum belongs to us.

I really agree on this one. I also think it’s quite hard to let the forum be really owned by the whole community. Where do we draw the line, 1 person that get’s in contact with discourse when we have a technical issue, or maybe 2 persons? Or do we give 15 people the contact details to contact Discourse? And what about Admin rights. Do we need like 15 admins? And do we want them to vote on each action? Quite not doable IMO. So we have both @frabrunelle (who got a lot of support for being both mod and admin) and @ioptio who is working for Maidsafe (who pays the bills). Same for the URL and the certificates etc. If we allow 20 people to alter them it would just take 1 fool to kill the URL and link it to disney.com. We’d better be careful.

@frabrunelle

The community is not big enough. Less than 200 community members have made more than 10 posts in the last year. IMO there would need to be a lot more active community members for us to consider making significant changes to the moderation system. It’s much wiser to wait until we have a feature complete network, at which point we would likely have thousands of active community members.

I agree. We have almost 1800 users. So when we vote on anything, how do we count? Do we want x out of 1800 to agree on an issue? Today we’ve had 109 users online. yesterday 139. That’s like 250 in 2 days. So let’s say we vote on a new mod. @satoshinakamoto offered to be a mod. We open a vote, when do we have consensus? 20? 40? half of the 1800? It would take weeks and we wouldn’t get a clear picture IMO. That way it is “democratic” but not really democratic because not even 25% of all members did a vote. I did ask a very open question about splitting topics. And we didn’t had a clear picture either:

Should we split topics that have a lot of replies?

Same for a poll. We had (I think) like 1500 users at that time. We got 99 votes. So 6,6% of the users actually made a vote. Yes good feature said 35%. No bad feature said 35% . So again, where do we draw a line? Even if 90% voted for “Yes, good feature” it was still lower than 7% of all members that made a vote. Where’s the democracy in that one?

Being a fully 100% democratic organisation is not that easy. At least, not on a forum where not all users are around all days. I do hope we can have something close when Safenet is live. Maybe an app could send some PM’s to user that have at least 20 active posts/replies over the last 6 months, and are member of the forum for over 6 months etc. That way it should be possible using PM’s on Safenet where you get a message asking you to vote on 1 or 2 topics.