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I know, but I think what we tend to miss when we're talking about Tom not being here an awful lot of the time is that, in a very important way, that's actually sometimes a *good* thing. Especially when it comes to stuff like this.
BEcause we need somebody who's not caught up in teh middle of it all and who can take an objctive view of the situation, but who we all trust to have the best interests of the board and the community at heart. Honestly, I'd not want any powers of banning handed to me, regardless of how many other hands the vote had to go through in order to get passed.
I actually couldn't agree with this stuff more, on a whole range of perspectives generally about my absence from the decision-making in many of these circumstances. Firstly when I've acted on the board without the sanction of the community, all hell has tended to break loose. I've learned over a period of time that the extent to which I'm able to be involved in the board every day (spotty but regular) means that I'm much better served often by letting the board come to a conclusion or contributing as one of the community rather than being in charge. I really would rather you guys came to conclusions about many things in meta-systems and then asked me to implement them on a case-by-case basis most of the time rather than me being asked simply to 'do something' and being clumsy about it. I know that's not really what you're talking about, but it still bears repeating.
The power to ban users was always something that we've talked about giving to the moderator class, along with better new user handling and a better sense of political mobility through the various Barbelite classes. To an extent - as people have said - the point is rather moot, since I can't do the building concerned to make it a reality. As to the social implications - I agree that my distance is useful in these situations, and would add that my absence means that it's not acted upon in the heat of the moment. I am contactable via PM, although sometimes you will get a lag of a day or so. Some board members know my e-mail address and e-mail me if things really get out of control, so if it's urgent, I'm never that far away.
Do I think moderators should have this power? Well, yeah, I think I do - but with adequate protections of course ie. that while any moderator can propose an action it would require many more ratifications to be successful than normal, and voting would have to occur across the board bringing in as many of the active moderators as possible. Also any action would have to be reversable. I suspect to be practical, the board would have to operate in a different way to normal - e-mailing all the moderators when the proposal received a certain minimum baseline of votes (ie. five) to let them know such an event was occuring, in order ot get them to the board as soon as possible.. Also to be practical, I'd probably propose that you'd need more than one person voting against the move in order to veto. Otherwise you'd never get anything passed.
The point of the distributed moderation scheme was that we could move towards a system where the users were more in control and I was in less, and I definitely think that there should be no scale of decision that the community shouldn't be able to make for itself. The question seems to be just about the mechanics and checks and balances. |
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