Hey @burrrata 
I’m glad you’re volunteering to help out and took the effort to write this down. 
As I understand you’re interested in improving the Discourse and championing those initiatives.
Also, you’re offering to champion ongoing tasks on Discourse.
See, how I think championing works for Initiatives and ongoing work? 
, but I digress.
Prefer Initiatives
I think you’re right about that. And my suggestion would be to start with using Initiatives to describe the improvements as much as possible. For example:
Organize Discourse categories
The current categories on Discourse grew organically. This Initiative is to look at what we came up with, what’s working and what’s not, plan and implement a new category structure.
Of course, in the future we will probably have different needs again and perhaps need another round of this. But that can be the “Organize Discourse categories, round 2” initiative.
I think there’s a couple of advantages to this:
- Being clear about expectations, status of something and building an archive of work done.
- It’s easier to value something when there is a finished result. (Even if the real value becomes apparent later, you have a concrete Initiative to point at and flow more Cred to.)
- It offers granular freedom in deciding exactly what you do and don’t want to champion. I prefer having as many as possible autonomous leaders (e.g. Champions) over elected/appointed public service people who must follow the community’s bidding.
Note: I think it’s ok for Iniatives to take a long time. Discourse mirror revision for example started somewhere October, till a few days ago.
Ongoing tasks
I wrote about this a little here Supernodes: Moving past raw activity - #11 by Beanow
But regardless of how we describe these and put them into the nodes / supernodes. There’s several that make sense to me.
- Keep the forum organized so that it’s easy to find information.
Yes please - Keep the forum friendly and welcoming so that everyone enjoys contributing.
There’s a shared responsibility there, but certainly welcome leadership in this effort! - Engage with new users to A) help them understand how the community works.
Even more shared responsibility, but welcome leadership! - and B) get feedback to help optimize the community.
This is a nice concrete task I feel makes sense with a Champion.
Not ongoing tasks
- Explore new features and mechanisms that will help enhance the community and contributor experience.
These should be Initiatives imo. - Document forum changes, upgrades, and mechanisms so that Discourse Director changes are minimally disruptive.
Most of these would be part of Initiatives. Others more a good practice.
Powers
Yes, for things like overhauling and maintaining the categories, I say go for it 
.
With the unfortunate sidenote of Discourse Admin trust model that access to private information is something nobody should have if it can at all be avoided, whether I trust them or not.
A resolute no for me on this front. But I’m glad you bring it up, because I don’t think it’s been discussed explicitly yet (that I’m aware of). I feel this should include our TBD @decentralion and anyone else with the power to edit/censor someone else’s posts.
I have a huge faith in our current community to be capable of constructive arguments. I also have faith that should there ever be abrasive or toxic disputes, it will be called out by the community and people will self-moderate.
Should I be wrong on both accounts and we wind up with constant toxicity problems, I would want to call a meeting and decide together how to react, as opposed to someone with power taking matters into own hands.
I think exceptions to that would be something actually illegal or damaging, like disclosing private information without consent (like doxing), or trying to spread malware. That’s something where I would want an admin / moderator to step in without needing to wait for a community mandate, but should be transparent about having stepped in, so it can be discussed afterwards.
Incentives
Of course there should be rewards, and incentives should encourage you to work in favor of the community, not against it. But I think there’s a couple issues with this specific construction. For example, what if we want to completely stop minting cred based on raw activity (see Supernodes: Moving past raw activity)? Would this still give you an amount of Cred that reflects your contribution?
This incentivizes the Discourse Director to help the broader Discourse community generate a lot of cred
Why not always incentivize everybody to make our Discourse better, including the Director? 
I feel the positive-sum game should be as inclusive as possible. That said, here some context from the original motivation for the Champions term.
The sentiment for me hasn’t changed. As a Champion / Director, you’re adding value beyond the sum of contributions and I don’t want that to be undervalued.
My inclination is that’s best done with recognizing you as the Champion/Director of a mixture of Initiatives and ongoing tasks. But I’d like to hear a how other people think about that as well, especially @decentralion
Governance
Yuck 
- Appointed by authorities.
- Appointed by popular vote.
No thank you.
That’s more like it!
I think like Champions, the basis should be self-nominating / voluntary commitment. Unless the community puts a stop to it.
Yes, to be given admin powers you’ll have to ask TBD @decentralion for purely practical reasons. And I trust they in turn do a good job of gauging the community support for it as they see fit. If not, the community is free to raise their concerns.
Let’s do this in public
I think this Leadership category is now the private category.
In my opinion it’s not something we should use for drafting things in private unless there’s a compelling reason why that would be too sensitive to do in public. So I would urge to move this to a public category and have these discussions in the open 
So if that’s ok with you @burrrata would you do the honors of moving it? Want to make sure you agree before I move anything.
Excitement!
Me too! I had lots to comment on, but I’m glad you want to lead this effort.