h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's a big difference between voting and standing for a post though. If you're standing then you need to be up to date and currently contributing in some way. If you're voting the criteria can be far less stringent.

If nothing else, the vote could bring people back who have drifted off. By and large people will only want to vote if they actually care about the site, so it will be largely self-policing.

Having done just that, I would think that you need recent activity. I've no idea what "recent" means....

Ben

I'm wondering how far we can step back from voting for roles.

In the short term do editors need to be voted for the whole community or do we need an accountable team of editors in the foreseeable future?

I ask because they are two different questions.

Love Peanut

There are two issues though - there's being open, honest and fair and there is being SEEN to be open, honest and fair.

Take the Interim Committee - an inclusive group from all parts of the site that anyone interested could and still can join at any time, or a self-selected bunch of cronies who spend all their time plotting behind closed doors?

We already know that people feel that there's not enough transparency, but how do you get the balance right between transparency and spam?

I don't understand the question, Peanut.

We won't be able to afford a payroll, so we'll need volunteer editors until such time as Elton's ticket comes up on the lottery.

Even with a researcher wide email notification and hoping such actually gets past the spam filters I can't see how this vote has any value unless folks know who they're voting for. That vote has to be based on qualifications, not whether you like a particular candidate and getting that info out and the really hard part, getting folks to read it, is a daunting task and one which needs to be approached with caution and care.

When we did the Presidential election it was a virtual 'Who's who' of candidates, all backed by a substantial campaign effort to get the word out. As a percentage of active researcher numbers you'd be well under the decimal line if you look at the number of votes cast, folks just don't always do what you think or want them to.

Spy

It's a fine line Mrs Zen. I'm thinking along the lines that there is a system of 'open accountability' without the immediete need for a whole UN overseen election process, I guess.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the purpose of the elections is

(a) open access to positions
(b) accountability
(c) transparency
(d) no tenure-for-life

If we can achieve those things in other ways, then that works for me. But I think democracy is about holding the bers to account and slinging them out when they turn bad, but not so much about giving everyone an equal voice in all decisions or about distributing power equally. So I'm likely to be in a minority of one on that.

In fact, thinking about it, my inclination has never been to vote people INTO power but to vote them OUT of power. Ballot boxes instead or torches and pitch-forks.

As I said - a very personal here.

B

I'm not disagreeing there, I was just thinking that we could get all the things listed in the short term by an open recruitment process.

If the community have come with agreeable guidelines for the editorial process (for instance) and we need a number of editors, could we have a team of editors that get us through the first year when we move, without having elections.

"We won't be able to afford a payroll, so we'll need volunteer editors until such time as Elton's ticket comes up on the lottery"
[Mrs. Z]

>>Remember, we already have a history of on site voting which could be used for reference, that being the great Presidential election of 2005.
<<

Yes, and how many people voted from several accounts?


Why are we wanting to vote in Editors? Shouldn't they be hired based on their skills and experience (yes, I know, hired into a voluntary position). My concern is that it will inevitably be either a popularity contest and/or end up being an uneven result due to only the hardcore voting (those that have time to follow the campaign) or due to lots of people voting based on not very much.

I'd be interested in a system that Ben suggests, where people can be voted out.


Re one person one vote. It seems like we need some very good technical advice on this. Expecting people to use RL names is not acceptable (for reasons I'll go into if required).

I'm ok with limiting voting to people who fit a criteria.

I think the most useful (easiest) initial one is that people have to have been registered a certain length of time. This stops coups from outside. How long is reasonable?

The next issue is about readers/lurkers. I tend to agree that voters should be made up of people who are active on the site. This is probably because I'm more about the community than the EG. However I can see that regular readers/lurkers have a vested interest in the place too.

I don't think it's all or nothing though. At the moment we have different levels of influence and power onsite (the bbc, the Editors, various Volunteers, very popular people and loud mouths, the plebs, people with lots of time vs people without, people who are eloquent vs those that aren't, people that can access from work... etc). Personally I don't think that anyone with internet access should have the potential to vote on how this place is run.


I'm not particularly in favour of openID for posting. I like that we are a community and I'm not convinced that openID wouldn't undermine that by allowing easy access into the conversation threads. Depends on how openID is set I guess, and whether it's to the whole site, or maybe just the EG?


I think all these questions should be being asked on Ask.

Meant to say that while I can't be a community Editor I would still like to help and be involved at some point, so maybe we need to look at ways that ordinary researchers who know the community well (or the EG) are able to contribute and help out.

Thank you for finding this and commenting.

We didn't want to ask on Ask because some people thought we may be spamming, so we wanted to restrict our discussions to one place.

You've made lots of great points:

- Voting in Editors, that's a really good point. But who would decide on which editors to choose? Or could the community elect a committee who would then appoint the editors? Would someone who doesn't care too much about the EG have a vested interest in what makes a good editor?

- I do think we should elect community editors though.

- One vote one account: I *like* your idea about people who have had accounts for a certain period of time. What's your feeling on time? 6 months? 6 weeks. A week seems too short.

- Re Open ID. I would wonder if Pre-modded Open ID posts should be made ok on EG entries only. But if you want to post anywhere else then you should need to create an account.

- Kea - definitely great to have you on board as a community consultant. I've not been comfortable with the fact that you haven't commented too much on this as I do value your opinions a lot.

Thanks Z. I've just opened another account and am subbing to all the noohootoo stuff to see if I can keep up that way.

>>We didn't want to ask on Ask because some people thought we may be spamming, so we wanted to restrict our discussions to one place.

I remember seeing one person in one of the post-burlesque Announcement threads complaining about too many consortium threads (but not about the massive amounts of 'we're freaking out about the upgrade' threads ). Was there more to it than that? I think that there are certain conversations that should be happening there - this voting one, the how to engage the community one, at least. That's not spam IMO (although I appreciate you wanting to be careful).

I'll have a think on the other questions

I've just been looking at the FP Archives. Who maintains that these days?

The reason I ask is that I suspect there are a lot of tasks the Editors do at the moment which could be chopped up into bite sized chunks and done by one or two researchers *who only do that task* the way Bel does the Post and the FP Archivist does the FP Archives.

I think the first step to electing editors is to create a job description, a very *specific* job description, of all the different things that the Editors do.

Then I think we should consider how each whole Monday-Friday 9:00-5:00 job should be split up into separate volunteer roles. Now, I don't know what the Editors do, but part of their job is updating the Front Page, and another part is dealing with moderation referrals, and another is responding to people who are locked out of an old account.

So my suggestion is that we divide the Editors role up into slices and have volunteer editors who look after the Front Page, ones who look after the access requests and ones who look after the moderation issues. (That is a whole nother by the way, and I don't want to get sidetracked onto it at the moment).

Then... when we have the job description worked out, we can work out what experience someone should have to be eligible to stand for the role. So for looking after the Front Page you would need to be good with GML (only previous sub-Editors need apply perhaps?), you would need to be active in Ask and elsewhere in the community (so you could pick a Quote of The Day), and you'd need to be able to come up with a nifty one-liner as intros/teasers (we could create a contest for that, so that we got to see how good the candidates were at it). Then we can make sure that the people who stand can in fact do the job. Yes... after that it could be about popularity, but at least we'd be sure all the candidates were competent and capable.

Now, I am not saying this is how it will be done, or even that this is how it should be done. All I am saying is that there are ways of making sure it's about ability not popularity.

My guess is that in fact we'll be short of volunteers for the Editors' tasks rather than fending them off and creating elections, but I think we need to be prepared to hold elections.

Yes, though I was wondering if the tasks would actually need to be more fluid than that at first?

Someone's got to be able to take the 'big picture' view of strategic direction for the site.

There's bound to be stuff the Editors do that we don't know about as well.

*thinks*

*goes back to work*

Can we ask the Eds to help us draw up a list of tasks/the job description? Will they be at the May Meet?

What about past, recent-ish Eds? Natalie?

We certainly can! I think that's probably the next step.

I made a BBC approved journal entry last month in which I said

'It may seem like things are quiet at h2g2c2, but behind the scenes It's all coming together, we are working on making a pitch for h2g2..

All your work from Magrethea is being ploughed into this along with the discussions we had right at the beginning about legal structures, finances and so on. We've taken all your ideas and have tried to create the best bid we can, so please bear with us and be rest assured that, we’re be doing our darndest to be the best pitch around! I can't say much more at the moment as we're now part of a formal process which the BBC has set up which involves confidential stuff but when I can say more I will. '

So I think that the involvement of BBC staff at the moment may be tricky. Although we have the personal contact details of a lot of staff we wouldn't want to get them into trouble.

The problem with the time based criteria for voting, was that I was thinking well, make it a couple of weeks longer than whenever the date of the vote is first announced. But, of course, there's nothing to stop people from knowing we will have a vote, especially once we are up and running and doing it at regular and fairly predictable intervals, from sorting out a couple of prospective, but dormant, extra accounts.

So I think I'd prefer an activity based criteria, not just a time based one really.

To be honest, though, I don't think it would be a problem at first, but assuming the site did take off and the editor job started to look attractive, for whatever reason, as well as a lot of hard work (Ben's solutions notwithstanding), it would definitely be something we'd have to look at.