First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We’re all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We’re look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!
Ok, on to the announcement:
Today, I’m excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.
The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.
Next, let’s discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.
Regarding the [Vote] tags, we’re introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week’s [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.
For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.
This is by no means the final process and we’re depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.
We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.
As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn’t work so well.
This is a great step forward. I’m unsure how we should handle voting but I do want to express my support for the week-long opportunity to vote on important matters, and the recording of votes in a transparent and publicly-auditable fashion. I do think there should be a practical maximum to the number of topics that come to a vote weekly, I think more than 2-3 would quickly become unmanageable for everyone.
Yeah, I agree with that.
We just couldn’t come up with a number that didn’t feel arbitrary, so the idea is that we’ll run a week to see how many topics come up and try to pick the ones who’s discussion threads seem to have run their course.
I don’t think it’ll be a big issue right now since the community is pretty small but I can see that things could quickly get unmanageable. This is definitely an area that I think we need to iterate on.
I would like to use star.vote, if at all possible, but I understand it would be harder to control who is eligible to vote on an external site.
It’ll be interesting to see how the current plan works and what refinements are made.