Here’s what we have so far for the governing documents, also pasted below. Feedback / additions / changes would be much appreciated.

Lemmy Council

  • A group of lemmy developers and users that use a well-defined democratic process to steer the project in a positive direction, keep it aligned to community goals, and resolve conflicts.

Voting / Decision-Making

Process

  • Anything is open for discussion
  • Voting done through matrix chat reacts (thumbs up/thumbs down)
  • Require a simple majority for votes. (Maybe 2/3rds for more debated decisions).
  • Once a decision is reached democratically, the dicision is binding and all group members have to follow it
  • All members of the Lemmy council have equal voting power.
  • Voting must stay open for at least 2 days.

What gets voted on

  • Membership (joining, removing)
  • Coding direction
    • Priorities / Emphasis
    • Controversial features (For example, an unpopular feature should be removed)
  • Communication mediums
  • Conflict resolution
  • dev.lemmy.ml (domain and server)
  • lemmy.ml and subdomains (excluding communism.lemmy.ml)
  • git repo including mirrors (on github, gitea, etc)
  • Any official accounts of the Lemmy project, for example the Mastodon account or the Liberapay account
  • Changes to these rules

Joining

  • We use the following process: anyone who is active around Lemmy can recommend any other active person to join the council. This has to be approved by a majority of the council.
  • Active users are defined as those who contribute to Lemmy in some way for at least an hour per week on average, doing things like reporting bugs, discussing rules and features, translating, promoting, developing, or doing other things that aim to improve Lemmy as a whole. -> people should have joined at least a month ago.
  • The member list is public.
  • Note: we would like to have a process where community members can elect candidates for the council, but this is not realistic because a single user could easily create multiple accounts and cheat the vote.
  • Limit growth to one new member per month at most.

Removing members

  • Inactive members should be removed from the council after a few months of inactivity, and after receiving a notification about this.
  • Members that dont follow binding council decisions should be removed.
  • Any member can be removed in a vote.

Goals

  • We encourage the membership of groups such as LGBT, religious or ethnic minorities, abuse victims, etc etc, and strive to create a safe space for them to express their opinions. We also support measures to increase participation by the previously mentioned groups.
  • The following are banned, and will always be harshly punished: fascism, abuse, racism, sexism, etc etc,

Communication

  • A private Matrix chat for all council members.
  • (Once private communities are done) A private community on dev.lemmy.ml for issues.

Member List / Contact Info

General Contact @LemmyDev Mastodon

  • vendion
    4·
    4 years ago

    I’m very much for this idea, and sounds similar to what other projects have. So that this will have a :thumbs up: from me.

    A few questions I have, that hopefully you already have answers for:

    • Based on the section for “Removing members” assuming that a member doesn’t do any of the three listed items for removal (they stay active, abide by the rules for being part of the council, and doesn’t do anything that will cause a vote for their dissmissal) and assuming someone doesn’t step down. Is their place in the council perminate or will there be a regular vote for current members to stay in the council?
    • Exactly who are the ones that does the voting to add/dismiss people from the council? Is this internal to the current council members or the greater Lemmy community?
    • If there is a member of the council, who has not done anything to trigger a vote for dismissal by the council, but the greater community feels doesn’t have the communities best interests in mind is there any way for non-council members to take action?
    • How do you plan to quantitate the time someone spends promoting Lemmy or “doing other things that aim to improve Lemmy as a whole” (which is vague IMO)?

    Part of why I bring this up is looking at some other projects that have something similar (I’ll list two that have different apporaches here but there certainly are others):

    FreeBSD Core Team

    All seats of the core team is up for elections during the election period.

    Who can announce their intention to run

    Any FreeBSD commiter can announce their intention to run during a set period. Current members of the Core team can also announce their intention to run again during this period

    When elections take place

    Elecitions happen every 2 years

    Who has the ability to vote

    Any active commiters to the project

    What to do if there is an issue with a member of the core team

    The greater FreeBSD community can raise issues to a member of the Core Team where it gets handled internally and the results are made public after a disission has been made.

    Drupal Board of Directors

    The Drupal project has two “At-Large” seats set aside for the greater community.

    Who can announce their intention to run

    Any community member can announce their intention to run, including the current seat holder.

    When elections take place

    Each seat is up for elections every other year in a rotating basis, so there is an election each year for one of the seats.

    Who has the ability to vote

    Any one within the Drupal community

    What to do if there is an issue with one of the “At-Large” seat holders

    The greater Drupal community can raise issues to the Board of Directors where it gets handled internally and the results are made public after a disission has been made.