Occupy Underground

Is this a new thing, ellisonz? Polls, that is.

Full disclosure: Ellisonz asked me to work a bit more on the hosting guidelines we were originally proposing for this group, in order to revise them according to what people were saying in a previous thread. I've been working away on it (there were two completely separate drafts, one submitted by long-time users from DU2 who wanted a place they felt welcome, and one submitted by ellisonz in response to feedback after the forum was created) although I haven't been pushing myself to finish it, I should probably do so very soon or else those documents will become irrelevant.

I think it is valuable to look over the proposed hosting guidelines and make necessary changes if we're going to think about hosts.

My "thing" is that I think it would be nice to run GA threads and pinned "mini-project" threads for meetups etc. here on Occupy Underground.

But if we want to have (community created) guidelines and pinned threads, hosts seem to be required. Apparently there's no such thing as "non-hosting" guidelines although I suppose we could "be different" and create them.

My feeling is that if we have hosts, they should serve at the pleasure of the group meaning the lead host would take a background role and re-appoint co-hosts according to the will of the group. I also think we should try to use consensus, which is possible using poll threads (we did it when we did the proposal for this group.

Consensus might not be used to actually choose between a slate of "candidates", for that we could use "slate" voting where you put the candidates in a straw poll and the top X vote-getters win.

But it could be used to authorize the hosts to actually do anything (including reconsider a block or off-topic decision, which shouldn't be a problem, since if we can safely get away with NO hosts, then we can safely get away with structuring any hosting guidelines in such a way that it's difficult to block users or threads except in extreme circumstances where the group actually asks the hosts to do so.) Other hosting duties such as pinning threads are less controversial and can easily be done using consensus. Note that I'm not a consensus fanatic, I just think it's an elegant system for horizontally structured, activist friendly projects which are especially open (in fact, open groups like us and Occupy are especially difficult to be run by simple majority vote without adopting a top-down structure to decide who is and is not "off the island&quot and in the tradition of Occupy.

I dunno... your thoughts? NYC SKP and Unrepentant Liberal had some thoughts on this as well.