Ok - here goes.
One of the things I've personally been averse to even discussing is the creation of any sort of "privileged classes" here. Frankly, I don't even like carrying the title "administrator", as it implies something that really isn't and certainly shouldn't be true. (I feel that our titles should be changed to something else that better indicates our roles as technical facilitators rather than some sort of rulers and overlords. The term "administrator" is perfectly accurate from a plain English standpoint, but not in the context of online communities.)
The only "special class" we have here are the Ambassadors. We (I) created the Ambassadors as a lark for one of the first few members who came in here and complained (jokingly) that he didn't have stars. The Ambassadors actually became somewhat functional for a time, as they were translating the content of our original front page into many different languages. Other than that, there are no special powers or privileges for Ambassadors. Even their forum, The United Nations, is wide open to the public - and is one of those boards that doesn't really serve any purpose here anymore.
It is an awesome thing that we can manage to carry on here without moderators - in other words, without a police force or babysitters. In fact, everybody here has full Mod privs over themselves, if you think about it. Each member-owner owns all their content and can forever edit and delete and lock their own threads. Every member-owner has an admin panel and can change and edit the News Flasher. Mu is currently working on an integrated system to add the ability to directly maintain the front pages through standard forum interfaces.
At the same time, there are many here who are willing and able to take on special responsibilities. Those responsibilities don't entail control over the material of other people - in other words, they have nothing to do with traditional Moderator roles. And yet people absolutely deserve recognition and, as the administrative roles here continue to be disbursed more widely, it is going to become harder and harder to know who to go to in order to get things done. And, as we are discussing in the Newb Dilemma thread, it is obvious that there is a LOT needing to be done. In order to get it done, we need to be able to recognize those doing the doing and start moving the perception of responsibility further away from the admin team - who really aren't here to be project managers. But we DO need project managers!
Currently under discussion is the possibility of creating something like the old Dream Guides at DV. I cringe at this for a couple reasons. First is the idea of separating out a group of people here who are more responsible than others for taking care of the Newbs coming in. It seems to me like that should be everybody's job!
The second and probably deeper reason is because the creation of a specially recognized class creates a goal - a reason for people to be here besides a love for the community and for Lucid Dreaming. This one is difficult to convey, so please try to bear with me. Many of us enjoyed the privileged positions of responsibility back at DV, along with access to the private and secret forums that went along with them. This created a hierarchical arrangement - the Admins, followed by the Mods, followed by the Dream Guides, followed by the select Community Members. All served The Owner - though for a good part of our time there, The Owner was absent and there was only one real Admin, Seeker, whose love and dedication to the forum shaped pretty much everything that went on. We were all working very happily for a benevolent dictator. . . a man we all loved and trusted. When his "lordship" was usurped by a more active owner with an agenda that had little to do with lucid dreaming, everything changed.
Mortal Mist was created in part as the Anti-Whatever-DV-Had Become. Rather than an owner holding copyright to everything posted there and being able to sell it and exploit it for profit, we started right from the beginning with member ownership. The role of Moderator was expanded to everybody - but only over themselves. The Admin role was spread out among six of us, so nobody ended up getting overwhelmed with any one aspect of the technical side of managing the systems. The focus here is Lucid Dreaming, not rising to power and privilege in a hierarchy. We weren't trying to be what DV once was - we were working on something quite different and unique.
And yet we now find ourselves floundering - in some regards because we do not have staff.
I have expressed my positions on this matter as best as I know how. The community belongs to you, the member-owners, not to me or to the admin team. So what would you, the community, like to do? How do we establish positions of responsibility without creating a hierarchical system of special privilege and power? Or is it time to scrap that whole notion, in whole or in part?
