MeatballBoard

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1. Overview

1.1. Objective

1.2. Duties

1.3. Membership

: 1.3.1. Committee membership

2. History

3. MeatballProjects

4. Meatball Committees

5. Discussion

CategoryMeatball CategoryMeatballWiki

1. Overview

1.1. Objective

Act as the decision making body responsible for managing the operations of Meatball consistent with the MeatballMission, and the charters of the composite MeatballProjects?. Above all else, focus on acting through a FairProcess, and wherever possible, strive to DevolvePower sanely.

1.2. Duties

Prime mission: Follow the MeatballMission to build a community about helping each other to build CollaborativeHypermedia communities.

Make Meatball a SafePlace? to work.
- CommunityExiles and HardBans, consistent with the BanningPolicy.
- Protect the site from spam, vandals, discrimination, and harassment.
- Protect the corpus; protect its integrity, protect the dignity of those who have come before, and protect its benefit to those who come later.

Grow the community.
- CommunityMarketing to ensure that Meatball continues to attract excellent people.
- Cultivating, managing, and growing relationships with sister communities (cf. MeatballOutreach).
- Community leadership and mentoring to ensure that Meatball continues to keep excellent people.
- ConflictResolution between CommunityMembers.
- Negotiating with external parties. (This may require an official-sounding title.)

Keep the place running.
- Managing the MeatballBudget.
- Managing the MeatballServer(s).
- Managing the domains.
- Managing the PublicScript(s).

Act as the MeatballSafetyNet.
- Move towards MeatballProjectIncorporation as a NonProfit.
- Multiply the trusted site admins.
- Devolve control over key properties, like the domain names.
- Open financing of the MeatballBudget to a wider pool of funders.
- Craft and enact a MeatballBackup and restore policy!!!

Legal stuff.
- Defend the MeatballWikiCopyright whenever it absolutely needs defending. Strive to be nice and forgiving, but you must also defend the dignity and integrity of past contributors who trusted their words would remain in one place, mostly.
- Move towards MeatballProjectIncorporation as a NonProfit.
- Manage the money.

1.3. Membership

All non-exiled contributors within the CategoryHomePage (i.e. anyone using their RealName) constitute members of the board (aka TheCollective). Individual committees may be more restrictive depending on the FairProcess decided to manage the concern. As always, strive to DevolvePower sanely.

1.3.1. Committee membership

At the moment, there are no committees.

2. History

When Meatball was founded in 2000, SunirShah and CliffordAdams split duties evenly. Cliff would manage operations (i.e. the servers and code) and pay the costs for the site, and Sunir would manage the community. This separation of concerns was enforced technically by the fact that Sunir did not have any of the administrative passwords. Consequently, each role was a BalancingForce for the other, as technical concerns were negotiated with social concerns. Later, as Cliff began to leave, Sunir took on increasing responsibilities that constituted a ConflictOfInterest? between the technical and social, known here as a GodKing. This situation sat unresolved through Sunir's time in graduate school, even while he was thinking through what consituted FairSoftware. After he completed those personal life duties, Sunir decided to DevolvePower to the MeatballBoard in mid-2006 in order to resolve the situation.

See MeatballBoardBrainstorming for the pre-summarized version of the page.

3. MeatballProjects?

4. Meatball Committees

5. Discussion

My original idea of a small group of people being the Board was a bad one; the community seems to have formed a consensus that the Board should be open, which I think is a first class idea. I struck a lot of discussion about roles and voting. That's the wrong order. In keeping with the ObviousNextStep and Wiki:YouArentGonnaNeedIt, the right order is identifying specifically what needs to get done, what processes need to be in place to do them, and then what roles need to be filled to enact them. Maybe we'll need voting at that point. Maybe not because VotingIsEvil. That being said, I've included Helmut's suggestion to form committees (WorkGroup?s?). Most of them will probably be free-form open committees (perhaps with ConsensusPolling?).

Until such committees and processes are formed, my responsibility is to describe them clearly, encourage better processes for dealing with them, and encouraging others to take responsibilities for those processes. In the interim period, I'll still have to do the heavy lifting, so I'm highly motivated to DelegateResponsibility. In short, every time such a decision needs to be made, I am going to have to write it down, describe the process, and ask TheCollective how they want to take control over it.

All of this rests on the assumption that if it were clear what needed to be done, and it was straightforward enough, people would volunteer. Am I wrong? Thoughts? Did I summarize things correctly? -- SunirShah

: Looks like a good summary to me. -- TedErnst

ConsensusGroup is probably easier than full-blown ConsensusPolling the majority of the time; one only needs use the latter when there's dissention. I'm going to implement this right now, in fact, on MeatballAntiSpam. -- ChrisPurcell