The poll has been open for several days now and currently sits at 44 votes. People are still voting, but I think it would be nice to see what kind of comments people are leaving alongside their votes.
Leave as-is: 11 votes
Change: 25 votes
Remove: 8 votes
Most of the comments on these are pretty easy to analyze, here's a rough breakdown, including the comments in this thread.
| Add members (most say 7) | 11 |
| Don't add members | 1 |
| Increase transparency | 8 |
| Public vote to initiate or override council decisions | 7 |
| Add/remove members regularly by vote | 6 |
| Council members should also be community leaders | 4 |
| Replace the entire group of members | 2 |
| More community involvement | 2 |
| The power to enact changes should be more carefully gated | 2 |
| Smaller council | 1 |
| Add the PD proof mod | 1 |
| Add/remove members other than by public vote | 1 |
| Don't let council members resign easily | 1 |
| Improve council decision making process | 1 |
| Include gaming abilities in a council membership test | 1 |
Keep in mind that any of these that are asking for a specific change rather than reinforcing the status quo are counter-balanced by the 11 members who voted to leave everything as-is.
Some of these seem worthy of actual discussion:
Adding members
I'm a little surprised how many people seem to want to add more members to the council. The only person who explained their reasoning on the member count was one who wanted a smaller group ("less of a clique"). The council has had various member counts over the years, at times having as many as 13, if not more.
Can anyone who is interested in this avenue share their reasoning? What benefit comes from having additional members?
I have been thinking about drafting a post about the dysfunction and disorganization of the council over the last several years. Having a large group sometimes made things difficult. I believe a smaller group has some advantages like increased personal accountability for actions, less hivemind/"sounds good to me", and a lower overall burden on the community's resources (this is way more a responsibility than an honor).
Increased transparency
The last policy I knew of was that council threads would be made public after discussion ceased. That stopped with no mention of why. I don't know if this even constitutes a call for change, more like a call for people to do their jobs.
Public vote to initiate or override
So messy!
I'm going to write a big thing about this but put it in spoiler tags because I don't think it actually matters:
Spoiler
Someone suggested a specific forum with strict rules for voting in specific topics. If you want to go down this route it will need to have well formulated rules! Many people think they can just make a poll about something and get some votes and BAM, it's a thing. This doesn't always work so nicely.
For example, the council themselves have failed to clarify the meaning of their votes on numerous occasions leading to general confusion. They often vote about a concept rather than a specific change to the text of the proof policy or a specific rule to be published. Then it comes time for implementation and they find out they actually don't agree as much as they thought. Taking this to a community-wide level will require great care.
Something like a specific moderator who has to approve a poll before it goes live, or similar, would certainly help. Even better would be requiring a pre-poll topic to clarify exactly what will be voted on. There will also have to be a clear policy on who can vote, how long they have to vote, whether potential voters need to be notified or not, thresholds, etc.
Or instead, you could just continue the current trend of having *informal* but non-binding polls to **inform** the council members of the community's wishes. Then the council members can take up the tough work of coming up with an exact solution. Make them do the work for you, it's their job.
And if a poll comes out 49-48 and the council comes up with a compromise or picks the less-voted option, they should totally be able to do so, with the knowledge that if enough people don't like their reasoning they could be voted off the council for not representing the community's wishes.
Adding and removing council members
This is already in the rules document. It says:
If public opinion of a council member becomes negative, discussion will be held in public forum to remove or replace members of the council. Likewise, when public opinion of a member of the community is favorable for addition, they shall be instated to the council.
It sounds like people want to do "elections" to refresh or remove the council members. Just need to determine voting eligibility and the process for calling a vote (term length or on demand). This is much easier than having the community make policy decisions by popular vote.
The power to enact changes and Don't let council members resign easily
If someone abuses their powers they should be removed following whatever procedures are in place. This seems like a case of "technical barriers won't actually solve the problem". I read a description of events that happened recently where a large number of those in power made a number of conflicting decisions in a short time period. Keep in mind that even if something is wrong for a few hours, what really matters is where the final result stands.
If someone wants to resign after a controversial decision, as long as they aren't picking their successor, the newly formulated council can just override whatever poor decision was previously made.