This topic is to discuss the ways and means for someone responsible in this community to step down gracefully.
This post will evolve into a policy that will be adopted.
Things to consider:
Stepping down usually happens because of an incapacity to keep up with the ongoing, so the process should be easy on the person willing to step down;
Someone else must take over: this can be one or more people – this is why it’s critical to maintain active teams of several people, so that responsible people can step down;
When someone steps down, people want to step up, but their motivations are not always suitable: they may be curious but end up not being engaged enough, or they may come here to grab power – this is why stepping up is also a process (see @well-being.team for example, where it takes time to be onboarded).
This policy comes at a time where SocialHub community feels like a failure: over time we were not able to keep a stable and growing and rotating team of responsible people to take care of this community, so we end up with one super-powered person (myself) and several satellite people who are here to care for parts of the community (e.g., the @fep.hosts is a very healthy team work).
I dont feel like the socicalhub community is a failure. From my experience, forums work best when there are about 1-10 posts per day. Less than 1 and it starts to feel like a ghost town. More than 10 and it’s hard to keep up. While I agree SH has been busier, I still feel it’s in a nice range of: not too big, and not too small. Hence, I would like to see it continue. Folks should be allowed to step back, we just need to find a way to let others continue they leave off.
This is a good start, thanks @melvincarvalho for pointing to the Ubuntu CoC and @how for starting this thread. We need a wiki post to accompany this, and people - community - to keep it up to date together (note that not doing so is an anti-community dynamic where implicitly this falls on the shoulder of the ‘commons janitor’, the faciliator doing the boring chores, to do). I suggest we use the wiki I already created ..
@how as I suggested before, could you give someone in the community team forum moderator or admin rights, so they have the necessary tools to streamline the transition process?
This point works both ways, and that should be addressed..
When someone steps down, their conditions for a transfer of power must be reasonable, and in line with the “sense of community” i.e. that which the community wants to be.
Finding balance between point 3) and point 4) is crucial and leads to an important requirement..
Requirement: Community-we-have must be well-defined, so that community-we-want can be proposed, and see motivated people willing to volunteer with that as their mission / goal.
Challenge: Governance chicken / egg
I hammered on this definition of “community” so much, because right now we can’t this be just some handwavy term that each and every participant have their own vision and expectation of what it means. That is a guaranteed failure mode, that will lead to shutdown.
Let’s go back and look at some of the functions and characteristics we wanted SocialHub to have..
Community-we-want characteristics
A community dedicated to the healthy evolution of the ActivityPub-based fediverse.
A community who envisions a new social web for everyone, that breaks dominance of Big Tech.
A community who realizes the importance of open standards to achieve this goal.
A community whose primary audience is the developer ecosystem that must foster and evolve these open standards.
A community who furthermore wants to give voice to all fedizens to help the developers build the right thing.
A community who - given its focus on the needs and empowerment of people - is naturally progressive in nature.
A community that is self-governed by volunteers coming together on this basis and proactively do what is needed to actually make progress collectively towards these common goals.
Community-we-have challenge
A community that took the existence of the community for granted, and overlooked the custodianship role of P.S. to sustain it.
A community that consumed the benefits, but insufficiently delegated the chores that helped create said benefits. Tragedy of the commons dynamics ensued.
A community that saw a steady decline in active facilitators, increasing the burdens and responsibilities of those still doing the work.
A community where power dynamics became the exact opposite of the ones a self-governed community requires.
Chicken / egg
That last bullet point indicates the problem and chicken/egg I want to address. With everyone leaving, @how became the de-facto BDFL running a discussion forum for the larger AP dev ecosystem. Here is where I hammered to explicitly say that SocialHub is no longer a “community” but rather “just-a-forum”.
As it happens you can make any community proposal you want, prepare them as good as you can, and organize democratic voting procedures for them … but if there’s no community to act on them, its no use.
An example are the proposals I made in: Wellbeing, participation, processes and policies
Three proposals, each with 5 to 6 votes. Meaningless as a good census. Without that there is only @how to decide on things. Hellekin in turn pointed to this:
This reads as a transfer of all responsibilities, and continue unburdened as a regular community member (very similar to what I did). Well-deserved after so many years of caring.
Thank you dearly, Hellekin!
But then Hellekin continues to sum up a number of conditions he places on the new community, like the number of admins that must volunteer. And in other threads more conditions are implied but not made hard. If there is to be a negotiation process between de-facto BDFL and new community team, then that should be clear. Much better would be to define a hard set of criteria as conditions for a transfer.
So if I refer to proposed Policy point 4) above again, we can ponder what is reasonable, and here are mostly considerations for @how to make. The original idea of the community-we-want is that it had open democratic governance..
Shouldn’t the new custodian / community team decide how many admins are needed?
How does ‘progressive community’ translate to acceptable ideological bandwidth?
To phrase as left vs. right, I think it is fair to say that Hellekin is more left-leaning than many others in the community. In other words, the ‘acceptable entry point’ for members in community-we-want will be more to the center than where Hellekin likely stands, and he should be open to that (just saying, as I think Hellekin is already doing so).
There was mention of US being the location of a new custodian party. This may refer to multiple concerns. It must be clarified in what way they have relevance and impact.
The chicken/egg to resolve is that potential volunteers need to know what they are getting into, and what are their freedoms to make the community the best it can be, healthy, safe, and thriving.
@aschrijver I think that was all put very eloquently.
I can appreciate the apprehension towards putting in hours of time and effort into something, and then turning it over to some yahoo who two months from now decides he’s bored and just lets the hosting lapse, bringing it all to a very unceremonious end.
And simultaneously, I also think it’s true that if @how is looking to let “the community” take over, there has to be some level of acceptance that the community is in whatever form it is, and doesn’t necessarily tick all the desirable boxes.
What if we kept SocialHub going in a light “maintenance mode” for 6 months?
A small team from the community (based on @how’s work + wiki volunteers) runs things in a transparent, FOSS-style way. Maybe this could still include @how in a guidance role.
It sounds like an interesting, low-energy plan, that will allow other people to step up, identify gaps, and propose initiatives. There are a number of roles that could be transmitted, such as teams and hosts. I like your energy-preserving option @melvincarvalho.
Challenge: Governance chicken / egg
Chicken / 
egg
Thank you dearly, Hellekin!