re What's our responsibility?

Ali Ali at zymurgy.org
Mon Aug 18 22:34:10 UTC 2003


This is just my personal response to some of the questions and 
comments posed by Cindy's resignation and Melody's post. I've also 
posted it onto MEG.

First, let me concur with Melody's sentiment regarding Cindy the 
poster; I think that Cindy – and indeed all of you here, are great 
posters. I would love to see you all posting more. The absence of 
many of your posts has IMO made the main list a dimmer place to be. 
Before I joined FAQ or MEG I had formed a hypothetical team of what 
I called "Big Hitters" of whom Cindy was one. I also had a number 
of "Legends", older members who commanded enormous respect both by 
reason of their posts, and their time in the community. Amongst 
those, I would include the likes of Penny and Neil.

What has saddened me greatly over the "Modgate" debacle is that MEG 
has lost so many of these individuals, some have left HPfGU 
altogether. Penny was the list Mom, but still chose to go when she 
felt her time was up. Truthfully, what has happened is that the need 
for a working team has outgrown the need for brilliant individuals. 
What we lost so catastrophically in March was our governing team. We 
have been trying to rebuild, and yet waves reverberating from 
Modgate have caused us to lose yet more dynamic dedicated people. I 
know people who have lost considerable weight because of the 
problems, many have shed tears, and still more friendships have been 
strained to breaking point. 

Meanwhile, we have been running the list, we have been desperately 
deciding on a new governance system, and we are aware that we need 
new blood. Prior to OoP, I was adamant that it was too early for new 
elves as I felt it only fair that we could prove that we could pull 
together and move on, before we invited anyone else. We have pulled 
together, in a fashion, and are moving on.

MEG has needed to heal; we are once again a working team. Different 
teams need different kinds of team members, we needed to move on 
from the old system. We have moved on from the old system and that 
has meant changing some of the old ways. We will move on further, if 
we can. We will do this by voting.

Melody, you rightly ask about democracy? Democracy to me is an 
ideal, I'm not aware of any other groups on the internet which 
operate such a system, simply because of making sure such a system 
could work in the cyber world. How would an HPfGU democracy work? 
Would only the current posters vote – in which case most of us would 
never be voted for as we are spending too much time behind the 
scenes, or simply lurking. Do we allow everyone who has posted more 
than 50 messages vote? This would seem very unfair on the large 
numbers of dedicated lurkers we have. Do we allow anyone who has 
been on the list more than say 6/12 months a vote? 

It's not that I think you are wrong to mention democracy, or that it 
would necessarily be wrong to instigate it, but it isn't the catch-
all easy system which it might first appear.

Like you, I'm fully in favour of a more open, transparent form of 
governance. And yet, this in itself can cause problems. In normal 
times, 4 good posts is deemed sufficient to be removed from 
moderated status. How should a good post be defined? What about when 
we worry about whether the snipping rules have been learnt, if we 
worry about a poster's tone? We need to be able to reserve the right 
to keep them on moderated status without rancour, and that means 
without publishing our guidelines – well IMHO.

It is arguments such as the above which have made the change of 
governance slow, especially at a time when we were suffering from 
ever reducing numbers, and when erm, we had one or two new members, 
and a few pendings to deal with <bg>.

Actually, that brings me to another point. We did indeed replace 
individual welcome messages, for I think a 2 week period – it could 
have been longer. I think I was the first to admit I could not do 
150 on my elfing day. Whilst that was unfortunate, given the 
situation we had at the time, I don't regret it. We are doing 
welcome messages again now.

In terms of the FBI state of MEG, I would gladly show you MEG, but 
I'm not Tom Riddle, I can't let you see into our past, and don't 
have the right to show you around the list, without full MEG 
agreement. Sorry. But, please do ask questions, and we will do our 
best to answer – if we can.

Ali







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