PROPOSAL TO IMPLEMENT DEMOCRACY

[COBOLdinosaur]

I see it as succeeding already

Successful by what measure?

Financial?...  Obviously not.
Growth of membership?... I would argue no.
Attracting traffic?...   moderately yes
Production of quality content?... YES
Development of a community?... Mixed; the core group fully participating is quite small.
Serving the needs of the market we targeted?... only in a very small way.

Now let's look at the important one, are we successful in doing what we set out to do?  This site was founded on the idea that experts need a place where they could teach without being force to play in games for points.  A place where the people delivering the service would make the decison that effected them.

Have we been successful... We have the place; built by our own efforts.  There are no points or games. I make all the decisions.  Two out of three is not success, it is a C grade.  Being able to express your opinion and even having them listened to and perhaps acted on is not the same as having the power to make the decision.

There are a lot of boards where management tries to listen to the members and respond to them.  EE in its earlier days tried to do that.  On most boards the admins came up through the ranks, but at some point after being elevated, they quit being Experts and become part of the  site management team.  At EE we even went so far as to have an Experts Advisory Board... that failed twice... for the same reason; management did not have to listen to the Board, and the Board had no authority.

We wanted to turn the EAB into an elected body.  Management would have none of it.  It would have been a threat to the owners absolute power to do as he pleased with the site. An elected EAB could have legitimately claimed the represented the Community.

We are stuck at 2 out of 3 and the C grade unless the community through its elected representatives can make real decisions.  Having an elect does not demonstrate democracy; it is just a step along the path.  We will not be able to say the site is truly a democracy until the first time that the board makes a decision I disagree with and it gets implemented anyway, because they have jurisdiction.  At that point we can call ourselves a democracy.  

That would make it 3 out of 3 and an A grade.  I have always hated C grades and expected the chance to improve the solutions so they were worth an A.

Cd&

[rdivilbiss]

I agree with the proposal.

[coral1]

It's time to Rock-n-Roll. Let's get this party started.   :glasses7:

[Huntress]

So where are we posting nominations?  Or should we just PM them?

[Srirangan]

I think we have been talking enough. Everybody will have an opinion and an argument against someone else's opinion.

It is time we implement what we have broadly agreed upon and move on.

[nicholassolutions]

I agree

[VGR]

joking :
if 3/3 is "A" (20/20) and 2/3 is supposedly "C", where is the "B" ? :D :D

2/3 is 66,67% so it's ***a lot*** better than a "C" grade which is - if I'm not too mistaken - the mediane = 10/20, or 50%

don't cheat on the numbers ;-)

And yes, when I said "I see it as succeeding", I meant :
- member registration at a good pace
- people happiness of being there
- participation relatively high
- responsiveness reasonably high

I ***never*** count "financial" arguments as measuring success, or else I would have to recognize Merdu$oft as successful :/

Financial success, as is registration rate BTW, is a consequence of the good product quality, market targetting etc

in that sense, I see ERT already as a reasonably good success, but apparently you want more out of it.

[Srirangan]

Doesn't matter. Already a success or not, we still have a long way to go. Hold elections, let's get a leadrship and let's move on.

It is better than arguing if we are doing good or not.  :wink:

[VGR]

Doesn't matter. Already a success or not, we still have a long way to go. Hold elections, let's get a leadrship and let's move on.

It is better than arguing if we are doing good or not.  :wink:

la réflexion avant l'action ;-)

ça vaut mieux que l'action suivie de la réaction :D

(like acting against Saddam and then having to react to Iran's profiting from the [previsible] unbalance induced in the region, or like acting against Saddam-the-tyran and having to react to the [previsible] apparition of Chi'ite tyranny)

Thinking and argumenting before action doesn't cost you anything but some time, acting & regretting can cost you a lot more.

[Srirangan]

1) I don't think Iraq War was a mistake.
2) But yes people do c ommit mistakes.
3) People also die in car accidents.
4) People don't stop driving cars.

If we keep talking and do nothing, we aren't going to go very far.

[COBOLdinosaur]

So where are we posting nominations? Or should we just PM them?

AHA!...  read the the proposal my sweet darling(I'm not making a pass Muso).

We still have to vote on whether to have an election.  Then there will be a topic for nominations.

Thinking and argumenting before action doesn't cost you anything but some time, acting & regretting can cost you a lot more.

I agree.

If we keep talking and do nothing, we aren't going to go very far.

I also agree with that.

The strength of a democratic system is that it forces debate and examination of issues that slow things down.  
The weakness of a democratic system is that it forces debate and examination of issues that slow things down.

You can debate for years and still make a mistake.  You can examine in every fine detail and still make a mistake.  You can delay something beyond the time when a decision is need and that might be a mistake; or might turn out to be good.

The people participating in this topic are active on the site.  Given the number of views there are others watching. Some of those lurking have been active; some want to be active, but have not yet seen a chance to contribute.  There are members who visit every day without posting; and who are actively supporting ERT externally; waiting for the topics where they can help in heat up. We are the debaters.  Those able to express our ideas and confident in our ability to do so. There are others who are not comfortable in this rolebut just as interested, and doing other things to support the community.  It would be nice to hear from all the members who support the community, but we are not going to hear from everyone in this topic.  Hopefully we will hear from them when we count votes, and we will hear from them by their actions of continuing support or leaving because we have not given them what was promised 7 months ago and as part of the regular promotion of ERT since.

Some of us have been on the site from day one back in September, and have always looked for ERT to become a democracy. I planned for a year with the idea of it being a democracy.  I believe the thinking has been done by many for some time.  I hope the debate on democracy and how we should implement it never ends.  It is now time to take the next step.  There will always be a chance of failure; no matter how long we wait.

When I want something on the other side of the highway, I know there is a chance of being run down by a manic motorist if I cross it.  I know the risk; and I am cautious.  I evaulate how much I want what is on the other side; and make a decision. So we can stand watching the traffic or cross the road.  

Cd&

[Huntress]

AHA!... read the the proposal my sweet darling(I'm not making a pass Muso).

We still have to vote on whether to have an election. Then there will be a topic for nominations.

Well duh!  Had to re-read it since I only skimmed it the first time.  I guess I'm just raring to go on this thing eh? {and don't worry, muso knows you're like a big brother to me!]

[Esopo]

Cd&,

You keep putting down your so-far "king" status. Democracy is a sweet thing to talk about but not an easy accomplishment (and in my view not necessarily an allround positive thing either).

Anyway, you took on the roll of the decision maker because we needed one. We still do. The democracy thing can wait until the time is right for it. You say now is the time, I won't argue. But don't ridicule the much needed one-man-rule we've had so far.  (and you've done an overall pretty good job BTW  :thumbup: )

[COBOLdinosaur]

Esopo,

I'm not riduculing one man rule when it is called for, and getting almost anything kickstarted generally needs some kind of a dictatorial approach.  And even though I have the final word on things; Sandi has done a lot of the day to day management of the forum without a lot of recognition for it.  

I will agree that I have done a pretty good overall job.  Some things were not done as well as they could have been.  Some thing have not been done.  I would rather look at the positive side of it.  

When the new front page went up I remove the news feeds form it.  They are duplicated on the tech news page, but more important the feed were causing Google to list the page for search terms that related to the news story, and bring people to the site who were not look for us.  I expect that to cause the the hits on the front page to drop.  It hasn't. The content that is now on the home page and the way the page has been optimized make it the number one landing page on the site.  I thought it would drop our Google hits.  It hasn't as of today we already have more hits from Google the we did for the whole month of March.  

So I have done a good job getting us traffic.  I would like to take credit for all the referenceson the Internet to ERT, but I didn't do that.  When we went live in January the search term expertrt returned just a handful of pages.  When our page rank jumped up to PR3 in  February we were up to 800 references.  When I looked today Google says "1 to 10 of 12,800"  I have no idea where all those 12 thousand  references are.  They are not all links.  expertsrt is not a word, it is just us, so somehow Googles spiders have managed to find over 12,000 pages with our name on it.

We are not just nibbling at the edge.  The content both on the content side and in the forum is going head to head with big content rich sites and grabbing position on them.  One of the hits I looked at in detail today  was the simple search term: changecss javascript ...  We should not even be in the game with something that inspecific. So how did we git a hit. The user must have been going deep into the search pages.  NOPE! An ERT Javascript topic was number 2 in the millions returned. Behind a page from Quirksmode.  EE comes up 16th with a year old thread giving a good link to Alistapart, supplied by an expert who is now an active member of ERT. We are seeing that kind of thing a hundred times a day and soon we will see it a thousand times a day.

We are going to start growing very quickly, and if we don't nail down a democratic system now we are going to be too busy with other thing later, and it will keep getting put off.  If we are not ready now, then we are not going to be ready in 6 months or a year.  The Google crush buried EE because even though we could see the growth coming Austin was not prepared to do anyting to be ready. I don't want us to repeat that mistake.  We need to have our structure in place while we cna still do it easily.

The worst that can happen is we screw it up. So we will just step back and figure out a better way to do it, just like we have been trying to do with everything else.

Cd&

[coral1]

Cd&/Huntress:

Say when.
or you could break the Lock yourself.   :coffee2:

http://www.expertsrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=6751#6751