board77

Voted

Looks good to me

I voted - in the minority.

My reasons have been stated before, and I shall not bore you with them again.

I voted with the majority.....I feel dirty....eeek.


of course the mission statement I would go with is

Faster Horses, More Money

Another majority voter here.

TheLidlessEyes wrote:

Well if it's not going to be called a Mission Statement, then that's fine by me and I withdraw from the discussion.

Same for me, because I think "Mission Statement" sounds ridiculous; but I think it sounds fine.

We have a quorum!

Please keep voting, though . . . this doesn't mean that it's over, just that the result will count.

*sigh*

Do we still have to call it a "Mission Statement" when it fails the test for every single definition of a Mission Statement?

It's...embarrassing, and we are all better than that. I'm sorry to be so bold, but it is fundamentally not a Mission Statement. It's a "What We Are" statement.

To be honest, no one will decide to join or not join the board based on this in any case. It just rankles with me, something as fundamental as this, just like TORC's Vision had the word "languauge" until Griff (in the main) and I pointed it out to them (after a couple of years).

Lidless, I think a big part of the problem that you have with calling this a Mission Statement is that it is not -- in the realm that you are most familiar with. But this statement is not inconsistent with that of other non-profit organizations that I have been involved with.

That having been said, when this appears on the front page, it will not have the words "Mision Statement" included with it. It will just have the text "Board77 is ..." In other words, it will be a "What We Are" statement.

That's because non-profit organizations do not have the ability to financially attract the best. Pay 'em peanuts, you're gonna get monkeys.



But since it won't have the description "Mission Statement" attached to it, deal.

I voted yes. And for the record, I strongly agree with Frelga's change. Logical grammar makes me happy. I enjoyed diagramming sentences in 6th grade.

I voted yes, but it looks like I was too late!

No, not at all, Wingy. Every vote counts. It's just that getting a quorum means the results count, too, whatever they are.

Aaah, I see! I had thought that whatever the result was when the quorum was reached was the result that held. Good to know I didn't waste my time.

voted

I agree with Lidless.

Maybe I'm being too picky, but I think that a mission statement should, uh... I dunno... maybe, like, state a mission? Don't get me wrong, the diddly diddly chocolate beans is a great and wonderful description of this place, and I commend the committee for their hard work in coming up with it. But as a mission statement, it sucks.

I hate being the guy who shows up after all the hard work is done and bitches about the results. It feels disrespectful to me. But it would be even more disrespectful to vote no and not explain it. I'm glad we have a consensus and that this won't hold up the opening of the board or anything - it's not that important to me. I just can't bring myself to vote for it as a mission statement.

Maybe it is a mission for a message board, pulled in one direction then another by a shifting population and changing times, to try to choose a principled place to stand and then stand there. Simply staying with those principles will keep us constantly in motion.

It says: we are a democratically governed community.
Ok, maybe it would have sounded more like a mission if it had said "we are trying to be and maintain a democratically governed community".
But apart from sounding rather doubtful of success, that would not have been any different in outlook!

Being a democratically governed community is just about the toughest aim anyone could have, IMO. To me, it sounds like a lot of work ahead! And quite a mission to write on your flag!

truehobbit wrote:

It says: we are a democratically governed community.
Ok, maybe it would have sounded more like a mission if it had said "we are trying to be and maintain a democratically governed community".
But apart from sounding rather doubtful of success, that would not have been any different in outlook!

Being a democratically governed community is just about the toughest aim anyone could have, IMO. To me, it sounds like a lot of work ahead! And quite a mission to write on your flag!

If that's the case, then our mission statement should read:

"To be a democratically governed internet community"

and that's it. Yes, the diddly diddly chocolate beans (or "DDCB" as I like to call it) says that in a different syntax, but then it goes on to say a bunch of other crap also. In so doing, it desribes b77 very well and is a great statement for our front page. But it's way too broad and general to be a good MS. A MS should be focused and concise, defining more than describing. It should point towards the one single most important thing that we are trying to accomplish, and then it should shut up.

I don't want the DDCB to fail in this vote, and I don't want to hold up the opening of the board over this. If my vote were going to decide the issue, I'd abstain and let us go forward with what we have, because I don't think the board is going to sink or swim on the strength of its MS. But I do think that in the rush to get a million different charter issues resolved, we have missed an opportunity here to figure out something important about ourselves as a community. What really is our mission? Is being democratically governed really the single most important thing thing that we do here? Or is it just a means to an end? To what end? The MS should pare everything down to a succint answer to these kind of questions, stating only what is absolutely essential.

Maybe we can revisit the issue later when we're not so busy with the entire charter and get a little more introspective in the process of rewriting the thing.

Ang, I wasn't trying to change your mind, it's just that I don't understand people's problems with the mission statement, never have. There have been a lot of arguments just like the one you made, and I just can't agree.
IMO, if you can sum something up in a single phrase, it's most probably a facile misrepresentation of a complex issue. In my experience, nothing can be summed up and defined fairly in a single short line. Life is too complicated for that to work.
The way I see it, we don't have the kind of facile mission that can be expressed in one line.
There have been a few examples of companies' mission statements given in the course of the discussion, and for me, the one thing they had in common was that they all sucked. So, I'm glad we took care to incorporate a whole set of values, which it is our mission to uphold and realise, into a still very short paragraph.

(I just picked out "democratically governed", because that's the one that is mentioned first, and it's also the biggest deal, the most difficult to accomplish - even if we only had that as a mission, we'd be kept busy for all time - but in fact, this is just one (big) chunk from the whole set of our aims.)