Step down considerably

[aschrijver]

@how

3. 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 point works both ways, and that should be addressed..

4. 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:

@how

I think I have done my job here, and would like the community to take over. So it would require that we (petites singularités) pass on the infrastructure to some formal body that we can ensure will be fostering the trend impulsed so far and not diverge away from it too much.

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.

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Thank you dearly, Hellekin!

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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.