I have posted in the relevant thread regarding the amendment to the Manifesto. Regarding the abolition of the ZC, I personally am happy to go ahead with junker's proposal. If anyone has objections, please raise them in this thread. I will not act until either 72 hours have passed with no objections, or any objections raised have been resolved.
I was hoping to avoid bringing this up since it's now mostly resolved, but the EJ incident is the most obvious and most recent example. Because the system is not at all codified and relies on our (usually "your") common sense, it fails as soon as the de facto decision maker thinks that something doesn't require much consideration.
I don't consider this a failure. People have indicated in the past that they do not want to always be consulted on every issue. I'll refer to
this thread another time, in which the first page has four different members saying that they do not want a democratic process for choosing moderators. Blanko even goes so far as to say:
I think you're overthinking this and trying to force changes where none are necessary. Do you think our current methods of action are flawed?
As it has been said, this is stemming from internal issues between you and pizaa. Don't blow it out of proportion.
Given that people (other than you, evidently) do not want change, and for as long as that remains the case, I consider it far more important that people have the ability to openly criticise changes as they are made. This is exactly what happened in the case of the "EJ incident". A decision was made that turned out to be a poor one in retrospect, people said they didn't like it, and the issue got resolved.
The spirit of collective decision-making was also further broken in that case when you expressed initial opposition to reverting your decision despite wide opposition.
Can you provide a citation for this claim? As far as my recollection of events goes, this never happened.
Again, you did eventually accept it and moved on, but this once again relied on whether or not you, personally, would be convinced. A simple process for deciding which decisions count as "major" and how to properly approach various class of decisions would both improve clarity of expectations between everyone, and it would remove some of the burden of personal responsibility. See, I really don't want to keep lambasting you over EJ, but in the end of the day it remains a matter of fact that you made the decision unilaterally, and then unilaterally resisted its reversion. What is one to do if next time you're not so easily convinced that something should happen?
Decisions are made "unilaterally" all the time, by anyone who makes substantial contributions. You "unilaterally" decide how to manage our social media presence. junker "unilaterally" decides which threads to split or move into CN. Thus far, I cannot think of a single instance where a poor decision has been made by anyone and could not be resolved within a reasonable timeframe after the fact, in any of these cases. Unless you have a counter-example, that makes this a strictly hypothetical problem.
If your goal is to
prevent poor decisions from being made in the first place (it's hard to tell since you haven't suggested any concrete changes), that comes with the inherent trade-off of impeding people in the course of getting things done. Can you imagine yourself trying to maintain our Twitter account if we had to hold a vote on every other account we follow, for instance?
Ultimately, this boils down to you being the first among equals. You have many times stated that this is not your intention, and I do believe you, but you're currently the only person who can press some buttons. If you don't like something, the buttons don't get pressed. If you like something, the buttons do get pressed, even if perhaps they shouldn't. To some extent, this is unresolvable - you'll always have the power to ignore any rules or their spirit by virtue of being the site owner. However, my personal impression of your character is that you generally wouldn't consciously do that. So, all we need is a little bit of guidance for whoever may be in charge of a particular decision. Perhaps that guidance should be a teeny-tiny bit binding. That's all.
I am not opposed to such an idea in principle, I simply do not believe it is necessary, or that most people want it (based on the thread we've both been referencing). If others are in agreement with Pete here, please do speak up.
I did come up with a good plan for how the leadership council could be reorganized and democratic system could work for this society, based on the failings of how the Zetetic Council was set up. I described it here: https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=4291.0
It will take some technical work and management duties. I don't mind working on it with someone, but don't want to feel alone on this.
I had somehow missed that this would infer voting rights on members last time I skimmed the thread. I only recalled it being about a membership register.
The problem I foresee here is that the democratic process in a volunteer community only really works once someone has already committed to undertaking a task. This is why I think the current democracy/"do-ocracy" hybrid system here works well. Smaller decisions are made by the people doing the work, and when larger decisions need to be made, they are brought to an informal vote. That is, votes are always on questions of "is this thing I'm already working on acceptable?" and not "do we want someone to work on a thing?".
If we change that so that we give the membership body the power to command that certain tasks be undertaken, all that's going to happen is that the outcome of voting will be ignored if nobody is interested in doing the work. That is one reason I believe the ZC fizzled out; there were a few occasions when a vote was taken to do some work, but when it came to the crunch nobody wanted to do it.