Please help us organize this Discourse

[burrrata]

@decentralion

I’ve promoted you to TL4, so you can now do this yourself.

It’s an honor and a pleasure

@decentralion

I generally like models where areas of responsibility are assigned to concrete owners, versus having a “run by committee” style of approach. So maybe we could have a formal leader for the Discourse, who is elected by the community with fixed terms, or something?

Yeah death by committee sucks. Totally onboard for having champions/leaders for projects. For something like Discourse, however, it might get complicated. A few thoughts:

Moderation

• Does being a Discourse champion also include being a Discourse moderator? Maybe. Initially that seems important so that the person shaping Discourse is also on the ground floor engaging with users to understand what’s working and what’s not.
• Another way to look at forum moderation is as a community effort. Those with higher trust scores and experience could/would be expected to help out and/or take action whenever they see something amiss.
• Perhaps to combine the two the Discourse champion could be the primary moderator, but then also have the responsibility to recruit knowledgeable community members as moderators if needed?

Feedback & Signalling

• While having a single champion/leader/director for a project generally enhances productivity and accountability, we also want the community to have a voice. Discourse is, after all, the heart of the community. People come here to discuss, design, and take action on things they care about. Some of those things might involve meta level upgrades to Discourse and/or the community. It’s important that community members have a way to signal their preferences and/or engage in the work of improving their community/home (even though it’s online). Cred weighted lists and/or voting could help with this.

Governance

• It’s important that the leader of any initiative, esp one as meta as managing our Discourse forum, can be deposed. Power corrupts. While it’s silly to think of someone drunk with power managing an online forum, it happens frequently. Before electing someone to a place of power a protocol for governing that power must be put in place. Currently the TBD has that power, so that’s ok. In the future, however, we should figure out a more community driven model. Could be via trust scores on the forum (because that’s a Discourse specific thing). Could be via Cred weight. Could be a combination of both. We’ll figure it out, but we must not lose sight of this important goal.

@decentralion

Do you imagine people voting to elect the “Discourse President”, or voting on our moderation policies, etc? Using some sort of cred-weighted voting makes sense to me overall.

Yeah that would be great. My experience with open ended voting systems is that initially they’re great, but they balloon in complexity exponentially, and they do so alarmingly quickly. There should only be a few things that can be voted on to keep it simple and reduce voter fatigue. A few ideas of what that might include:

• electing the Discourse Director,
• reducing or expanding the Discourse Director’s powers
• deciding on the moderation policy

This way the Discourse Director couldn’t arbitrarily inflate their own powers, and if a director isn’t going in the direction the community wants they can get a new one. Deciding on the moderation policy seems important to give the community agency, but in reality I expect we’ll use a fairly boilerplate mode policy. The Discourse ones are really good.

@decentralion

It seems that only admins can create categories, but once they’re creating others can re-categorize topics. So please just message me with any categories you want made, and I’ll create them for you. (E.g. we should come up with a category for the manifestos.)

Sounds good. We could add that to the getting started guide too so that people know how to request help for things like that.

@decentralion

Yes, I believe we could make it so that you need, e.g., trust level 2 to edit a wiki post.

Awesome. Is everyone here who’s actively on a weekly basis already trust level 2?

@decentralion

Can you elaborate on how the aggressive boosting will keep the materials up to date? You basically mean, people will be incentivized to keep improving the materials because of the cred-and-grain rewards for doing so? This is more than just about boosting, we also need e.g. wiki edit tracking integrated into the Discourse plugin so we can flow cred to wiki editors.

Yes, that was the idea. I thought that Wiki tracking was already integrated, but if not then it would be great to develop that.

@decentralion

Cool! As TBD, I support your being Champion of the Discourse. I was tempted to write “by the power vested in me as TBD, I proclaim you Champion of the Discourse”

Thanks!

@decentralion

is Championship conferred by me, or is the mantle of Championship simply claimed by you? I suppose we’ll need to think about the rituals of Championship.

Kind of depends. If you’re championing your own initiative, then that’s great. All day long. If you want to champion a meta-level initiative that’s infrastructure for the community, then that requires being elected (either by TBD or the Core Cred community). Maybe we should have a list of ongoing initiatives that require election and more project related initiatives that anyone can volunteer for?

Another question, for ongoing roles that have certain responsibilities does it make sense to have a certain amount of Cred flow to that champion? This would kind of reflect the way that many positions are compensated via salaries as well as bonuses. Kind of on the fence about this one…

• On the one hand, taking on extra responsibility and committing to consistent ongoing contributions is really important and may also involve lots of work (or thinking) that isn’t reflected in the day to day actions of posting, commenting, etc… Maybe a Supernode could help with this?
• On the other hand, the whole point of SourceCred is that it automatically rewards and recognizes contributions. The more we force ourselves to dogfood this core mechanism the more it forces us to think through all the ways it could be used. This might result in discovering novel reward and organization mechanisms that we would have overlooked if we took the easy route. This is especially relevant because one of the coolest ideas about SourceCred is that it “just works.” Plug it in and it’ll reward and recognize contributors. The more roles, responsibilities, and mechanisms we create the more complex (and potentially the less usable) the protocol/product might become.

I dunno, at this point it’s early days to be defining concrete roles and responsibilities for “positions,” but it’s important that we start thinking about these things. Also, maybe it would make sense to delineate the the “core SourceCred product” vs add-on features and mechanisms. This way people would have a version of SourceCred that “works out of the box,” but then they could customize it with add-ons. This might be similar to how browser extensions allow you to customize the functionality of the web.

@decentralion

the Champion badge.

Yes! That would be great Then you could see who’s actively working on stuff. That would A) be fun, B) maybe incentivize people to champion more stuff to get the cool badge, and C) it would raise awareness of championing for new users