Do we want a Community run/owned forum “in spirit” or would we rather that be “in fact”?

[frabrunelle]

Hi @Al_Kafir,

I think you raise a lot of good points and I agree that the current moderation system is not as open, transparent, democratic and decentralized as it could be.

I am certain that there will be major improvements to the moderation system in the upcoming months and years.

On the other hand, I strongly believe that it’s currently not the right timing to make major changes to the moderation system.

The main reason is because the SAFE Network is not live yet. This has a lot of implications:

1. We need to focus on bringing the SAFE Network to reality. If we did an election for moderators right now, I think it would be very distracting. The least we can do is to let MaidSafe focus on the development of SAFE. We can figure out the governance of the forum once the network is live. I think we as mods are doing a fairly good job and that there is no urgency to implement a new moderation system at this point in time. Instead, let’s focus on discussions that bring us closer to our goal (e.g. discussing RFCs, Dev Updates, how SAFE works, SAFE Apps, safecoin, farming, explaining SAFE to newcomers, marketing, etc.).

2. Until the network is live, there is not a lot of incentive for people to get involved as moderators, since it’s not currently possible to benefit from SAFE (e.g. by storing files on the network). The current moderators are effectively doing their job out of pure love for MaidSafe and because of their basic understanding of how SAFE works and its great potential In reality, being a moderator could be considered a job and we could potentially figure out a system where moderators get elected and also paid by the community. Once SAFE is live and we are actually able to use it, it will be easier for potential moderators to justify the time commitment it takes to be a moderator and for community members to bother with voting and participating in elections.

3. The community is not big enough. Less than 200 community members have made more than 10 posts in the last year. IMO there would need to be a lot more active community members for us to consider making significant changes to the moderation system. It’s much wiser to wait until we have a feature complete network, at which point we would likely have thousands of active community members.

4. Very few people have raised concerns about the current moderation system. First of all you would need to find more people (e.g. 10 or 20 people) to support you. But as I said in my 3 previous points, I think that it would be counterproductive to push for changes to the moderation system while SAFE is not even live yet.

@Al_Kafir

My understanding is that it is privately owned by an individual Mod who runs it with the other mods.

There is no single owner. Even if I manage the technical aspects of the forum, I am not more important than the other mods. We always aim to reach full consensus amongst mods when discussing issues. And even as mods, we don’t feel like the forum belongs to us. To me, it feels like it also belongs to MaidSafe as well as all the other active community members. I was elected by the community and I would be okay to step down if they think I am doing a bad job.

@Al_Kafir

The first step would be to ask the Community to propose others from the forum community to become Mods. Names could go forward for election etc, maybe a fixed term, can be booted off and replaced quickly and easily by community consensus etc. I’d expect most people to vote for others with earned reputations for fairness, consistency of principle, ethics, reasoned arguments, sticking to guidelines etc.
I also envision a public appeals process, judged by the community (not Mods) and the powers of Mods and security of tenure to be drastically reduced. This way, many more members of the community get a chance at modding and it will actually mean they have an incentive to behave – not having been “knighted” permanently.

This a great list of suggestions and we can definitely keep them in mind for when it will be the right time to have this kind of discussion.

Cheers.