Discourse Director

[decentralion]

@Beanow

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 .

…

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

@Beanow raises some good points here. If the Discourse Director does a good job, they will get a fraction of all the cred flowing through the Discourse, because a fraction of the Discourse cred will flow to the Discourse artifact, and the Discourse artifact will flow cred to the initiatives / tasks that the Director was responsible for.

Therefore, we may not need a “flow Cred directly to this title” mechanism, since the title should just be a proxy for doing the work, and we can reward the work directly. This would be good, since flowing Cred directly to the title creates a lot more risk of “cred favoritism” (e.g. I appoint my friends to Directorships and they get a ton of Cred regardless of how much work they actually do).

(Just for the record: I was the one who originally proposed to @burrrata the idea that the Discourse Director would get cred directly from the Discourse artifact during their term as Director.)

@Beanow

I think like Champions, the basis should be self-nominating / voluntary commitment . Unless the community puts a stop to it.

Hmm, I don’t think I agree. I think there’s real value in having a DRI–someone who is concretely and specifically responsible for taking care of outcomes. In a self-nominating mode, I expect we’ll have many DRIs, which arguably is the same as no DRIs–who makes the final call when it’s contentious? And do we fall prey to the bystander effect?

If we need one DRI, then we need a selection process that produces only one Director (whether a vote or appointment).

@Beanow

• Moderation in the case of a dispute

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 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.

If the Director is responsible for ensuring that the Discourse community is healthy, respectful, and collaborative: maybe when problems start to arise, the Director’s job is to bring the problems to the community’s attention, and drive discussion about what changes we want to make. Then, once we’ve collectively decided on changes (possibly including a more active moderation policy), the Director can make sure the changes are implemented.

So we still benefit from having a DRI, but it’s much less top-down use of power.

@Beanow

Let’s do this in public

I agree. I was the one who suggested @burrrata draft this in the private forum to get initial feedback from you and @s_ben. Having seen the feedback (love it!) I now totally agree that we should move this thread into public (maybe #governance?).