Discourse Director

Community Governance
1

Hey everyone :slight_smile:

As @decentralion mentioned in this thread, we need someone to organize, maintain, and optimize our community forum.

I volunteer as tribute! I love Discourse and use it every day. It’s a great way to share ideas and build a community. I also love positive-sum games. SourceCred is the best of both worlds. Ever since I heard of the memex I’ve been dreaming of an online community/forum/game like this. It’s really a dream come true. Thank you everyone for all the work that’s been done to make this possible. I cannot express how excited I am for SourceCred and this forum :slight_smile:

Started researching ways that we might improve Discourse and realized a few things. First, this is going to take a lot of work. Second, the work will never end. Initiatives have champions that work towards a concrete goal. What about things that are intangible and require ongoing effort? What about things like supporting and developing a community?

For this @decentralion and I thought that Director positions might make more sense. Directors guide a project forward. They have responsibility for the project as a whole. This might involve strategic direction, operations, and community/contributor onboarding. In the case of the Discourse Director, this would include optimizing the Discourse UI/UX, making sure that everything is organized, and helping community members engage and contribute. If the SourceCred community disagrees with that direction, then they (or TBD) can elect a new Director. The first of these Directorship positions will be the Discourse Director and the first Director will be me (@burrrata)!

Overview

As Discourse Director the first order of business is to define expectations around Discourse Director contributions, powers, incentives, and elections. Here’s my initial thoughts, but please let me know if you feel these could be improved:

Expectations

  • Keep the forum organized so that it’s easy to find information
  • Keep the forum friendly and welcoming so that everyone enjoys contributing
  • Explore new features and mechanisms that will help enhance the community and contributor experience
  • Document forum changes, upgrades, and mechanisms so that Discourse Director changes are minimally disruptive
  • Engage with new users to A) help them understand how the community works, and B) get feedback to help optimize the community

Powers

  • Admin access to the SourceCred forum
  • Moderation in the case of a dispute

Incentives

  • Some (very small) fraction of all Discourse cred flows to the Discourse Director
  • This incentivizes the Discourse Director to help the broader Discourse community generate a lot of cred
  • The main purpose of organizing and optimizing Discourse is to make it easier for people to learn and contribute, so this aligns incentives with the Discourse Director’s goals

Governance

  • TBD determines Discourse Director
  • The goal is to move towards some form of Cred Weighted Voting so that the community can choose Directors

Overall, the goal of the Discourse Director is to support the SourceCred community forum as long as they and the community want them to :slight_smile:

Again, I cannot express how excited I am about this. So happy to help cultivate and grow the SourceCred community with all of you. To start, if you see room for improvement in this proposal please share! Otherwise, if you have requests for Discourse features and see things that could be improved, please share them here.

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