First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We're all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We're look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!
Ok, on to the announcement:
Today, I'm excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.
The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.
Next, let's discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.
Regarding the [Vote] tags, we're introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week's [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.
For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.
This is by no means the final process and we're depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.
We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.
As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn't work so well.
I have an adjustment to voting that I'd like to propose, considering how the vote to defederate EH is going.
After 3 days, if the vote tallies show a supermajority of votes for aye or nay, and the vote has passed a certain number of votes cast, then the vote is called early.
We would want to make sure the supermajority is high enough to be clear, say 80% or 90%. And we must absolutely be sure that enough votes have been cast to represent the instance at large. Perhaps 40-50% of the total users? I’m no statistician, so these numbers will likely need to be adjusted.
I think this will help us, especially early on like this, where there may be lots of policies and procedures for us all to vote on.
And this should only be implemented for future votes, as I think it's bad form to change things mid-vote.
The concern that led us to picking a week as the voting period was specifically to ensure that users who could only be active on certain days wouldn't be left out of the vote. We wouldn't want someone to be unable to take part simply because they worked on the weekend and couldn't find the time to participate.
Ideally, I think that we'd want to have things so that we vote on policies and then the policies are implemented by the admin staff. That way there would never be some issue that would be so pressing that it couldn't wait a week.
I've been having the same thought, that we can create policies, or "laws" that the admins can then use to decide things like defederation or removing communities.
Seeing how the discussions have gone about defederation, I imagine the Discussion thread deciding what the triggers would be will get a bit spicy.