Holby and Dindraug,
If the size of this board was expected to remain the same, I would agree completely with both of you. Informality works very well in small groups.
We don't know what the consequence of opening the board will be, but certainly the current membership will be strangers to the newer members, the knowledge of our past won't exist for new members, there will be no understanding of what we wanted to be and the environment we wanted to create , and we will all be equal when it comes to future decisions about the board. The current membership will be a minority and unable to control the direction of this board.
We are responsible for creating a home, not for the 150 of us who are here now, but for the several thousand who may be here later.
The way we can express our vision (sorry) is through the structure we create in this process. If what we create is amorphous, our vision will be transient. If we create a structure that reflects how we think we should relate to each other, then our vision has some chance of survival. All we are doing now is erecting the signposts to point the way, our way, when decisions must be made in the future. Whether or not it is accepted is another issue, but the only way we can influence the future is by creating the structure now.
Some of us once had strong feelings about the problems elsewhere that led to the creation of this place. I thought the problems included undefined procedures that could be changed on a whim, no transparency to whatever the procedure of the day was, and consequently a strong sense of unfairness in regulation of the board.
This is our chance to create something that is free of those problems. We can consciously decide that drifting aimlessly is what we really want, and that is OK, but our ideas and concerns won't be carried with it. We can also decide that we want to create an environment that reflects our ideas of what an online community should be, in a way that is able to be understood and used by the thousands that may come here in the future. If we choose to express our ideas, vagueness will not serve them well. If we can't find a way to express our ideas in a tangible way, no one will know what they are. The procedures and roles we create here are our expression of this.
Whether or not we create multiple elected positions now is probably irrelevant. The natural tendency is that they will eventually become so. What we call the positions is largely irrelevant. What is important is that we identify roles and the relationships between those roles, as they are likely to have some permanence. If we get the roles or relationships wrong, I think the board will be permanently crippled.
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Idylle in exile: the view over the laptop on a bad day