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

  • wraptile
    5·
    5 years ago

    What an interesting idea!
    Though I have a feeling it goes a bit against the spirit of decentralization ideology. As we’ve seen with Reddit these sort of groups get corrupted very quickly and I feel that open anarchy as opposed to elected democracy is a better fit for steering open projects.
    In other words - wouldn’t it be better to be more open and include everyone in this?

    I feel that has been the biggest mistakes mastodon has made - centralizing around private inner dev circles and .social pod which included grey tactics like shadow bans and personality cults.

    • nutomicMA
      10·
      5 years ago

      As noted in the text, we would like to include everyone, but that is not realistic because we are on the internet, and a single person could easily create multiple accounts to cheat in votes. So what we have here seems like the next best option, but we are open to suggestions.

      Afaik Mastodon works differently, there Eugen has complete control, and decides what gets implemented or not. Our goal is to have a system where the decisions of devs can always be overruled if there are good arguments against them (once there are more council members).

      • realcaseyrollins
        22·
        5 years ago

        It might be helpful to make sure there’s an ideological balance among group members. This could help prevent biased moderation/leadership.

    • muirrum
      3·
      5 years ago

      i think it’s important to have at least some governance, certainly over this instance and the software it runs. People are always free to make forks, but (especially for federation) there should be something that can be agreed on

  • Mehran
    5·
    4 years ago

    Voting doesn’t actually work with platforms. People voting may not have access to the required information. Having a single or council of people to actually who actually understands what is happening in our society do question answer with other individuals is the healthiest way of doing things.

    I can get into detail about why if people actually want to create a healthy platform.

    • ster
      2·
      4 years ago

      I agree, but that doesn’t mean that having a council is bad, even if they don’t have the final say

    • DessalinesOPMA
      4·
      4 years ago

      I really like the idea of weekly feedback threads. Thx for this comrade.

    • nutomicMA
      4·
      4 years ago

      The main concern we had about direct community involvement was that people could make multiple accounts to influence votes. But I think your suggestion of feedback threads avoids that pretty nicely.

        • DessalinesOPMA
          4·
          4 years ago

          Okay we talked it over and are now gonna have a feedback friday. Every fri we’ll post to announcements asking for feedback on features, how the site is running, giving reports on what we did this week, kinda a blog of sorts. /u/nutomic

  • 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.

  • mathieu
    3·
    5 years ago

    That is an excellent idea! Great work on structuring this already! It would be proper to structure this with regard to other projects, with a code of conduct, a values and a rules document. Ethics is always a good thing to consider as early as possible. Knowing the issues other project went through in the past, I am 100% for it. Keep it on man, you rock!:nerd face:

    • nutomicMA
      5·
      5 years ago

      We have a code of conduct, check the sidebar on the overview page.

  • Mek101
    3·
    4 years ago

    Is it possible that someone from this council could also be a moderator? I think it would be better if the roles where mutually exclusive, in order to prevent biases and concentration of all the powers in very few individuals.

  • AgreeableLandscape
    3·
    5 years ago

    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.

    Can you only recommend someone else or can you ask to join for yourself?

    • DessalinesOPMA
      3·
      5 years ago

      Haha, yeah you can recommend or ask to join :smiling face: . Me and /u/nutomic wanted to get feedback on this first before starting to add ppl.

        • nutomicMA
          3·
          5 years ago

          Don’t worry we were both thinking about you already. Do you have a Matrix account so that we can chat together?

  • Zetaphor@zemmy.ccEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Am I to understand that the proposals and voting are going to be in a private Matrix channel? This is not what I would describe as democratic process, secret proposals and voting are the behavior of a cabal.

    Currently everything is happening in the open via the Matrix channels and Github issues,why would this be any different?

    I understand the need to limit contributions to council members to reduce noise, but there are other ways to accomplish this such as a public read-only forum or channel that only members can contribute to.

    Edit: I just saw this post is 3 years old. Why did this show under the “Hot” sorting with 0 comments?

    Edit again: The Connect mobile app says it was posted last week 🫤

  • k_o_t
    2·
    5 years ago

    Interesting idea! How would you prevent this from being abused/hijacked though?

    • DessalinesOPMA
      2·
      5 years ago

      Its invite only, and we wanna grow this pretty slowly.

    • nutomicMA
      2·
      5 years ago

      Right now its too early to set a hard limit, but we will probably limit the size at a later point, cause it just doesnt make sense to have a hundred people or whatever. Council members will all be listed in the docs, and we will probably make them admins on here.

    • DessalinesOPMA
      4·
      5 years ago

      Its run by the two devs here on the same domain, but its not “official”.