Opening up Discussion on Hosting Guidelines

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. My thoughts on Ellison's questions --

1. I am pretty solidly anti-authoritarian (for a non-leftist, lol) but the structure of DU3 exposes us greatly in the absence of hosts. Already people are just coming in and dropping occupy threads here as a bulletin board without saying hi, and we don't want it to turn into something like the problems Peak Oil Group and other groups were having where any news related to the subject got dropped there without comment and the community of folks replying didn't necessarily agree with the concepts behind the group. (Transit has a serious problem with this on DU too, I tried joining that forum as it is a major interest of mine until I realized that the two most active posters cared about the issue and were opposed to progressive solutions on transit. If DU had a forum on single payer, or public housing, I imagine there'd be a similar problem finding FDR democrats, much less radical populists of the Occupy sort, to populate it with.) The only way to establish a community is to try and have assembly threads or at least mic check threads like we have been doing on du2. We were hoping that would be a model for here. Of course du2 is a special case as it has a large community of self-selected, grandfathered in mods. In leftie circles, this problem is sometimes known as "insistence on absence of process" as a means of creating cliques and social fiefdoms and ignoring dissenting opinions. For instance, no hosts means no pinned threads, which sometimes comes in handy as a tool, and it means other people can come along and propose to host the group and effectively co-opt it from without.

2. The former, but I said my piece on this in the original mic check thread in the discussion with Ohio Joe

3. I support hosts being a small part of the system basically the way Wikipedia operates consensus. Folks who are familiar with how wikipedia consensus works will know what I mean. It's one of the most progressive and non-heirarchical systems I've seen once you cut through the bureucracy that comes with being an encyclopedia that has continual elaboration of systems by academics who are, lets face it, systems lovers. Alternatively you can think of it as occupy du2 with its informal modding.

4. I disagree with the idea of having elections, that makes it seem like hosts are representatively chosen authorities over the rest of us. There should be some happy medium like 75% consensus for choosing a slate of hosts based on willing nominees. As for term limits, I have no opinion but we must be mindful of the fact that people who support a constantly rotating set of co-hosts don't necessarily support it for non-heirarchical, inclusionary reasons. If they envision it as "power sharing" then that implies the hosts are there to "run the joint" and the idea of hosts in a group like this should be to maintain the GA structure, i.e. janitors, not administrators.

5. Anonymous poll on du2. I don't think elections fit in with the spirit of a General Assembly but there are ways to make it work within the spirit of a formal or informal consensus process.