On Jan 26, 2009, at 10:19 AM, Emily Ravenwood wrote: > Here's one for the "questions of policy" basket, since it just came > up on one of the IJ comms I watch. > > What happens when the maintainer of a community is inactive on the > service for a long time? > > What appears to be a standing LJ policy *on paper*, that a comm with > a long-inactive maintainer will have a new maintainer appointed > randomly from the members, has been put into practice on LJ and seems > to be occasioning some bad reactions. I have no idea how > "inactivity" was defined or what measures may have been taken to > contact the maintainer, all I saw was the notice that one chosen > member got.
I've read the rest of this thread, and there's some great ideas in there. This isn't something that we're going to have to solve for quite some time, but we'll think about ways to solve it hopefully before it comes up... For the record, the LJ policy is here: http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/policy.bml#mia_maint In particular, two misconceptions from what people seem to be thinking: on LJ, 1). the abuse prevention team won't transfer maintainership unless the existing maintainer has been completely missing from LJ for (IIRC) six months or more -- no posts, no comments, no logins, nothing -- *and* there's some kind of bad situations like spam or perpetual flamewar going on in the community (so, not just "we want to change what the community looks like" or "we want the name of this abandoned community") *and* the missing maintainer doesn't respond to attempts at email contact from both community members and the abuse prevention team, and 2). new- maintainership choice isn't random; the person handling the case reads back at least two months of the comm to figure out who's an active participant, with weight given to people who seem to be able to keep their heads in conflict, people who have community- maintainership experience, people who have been participating in trying to resolve whatever conflict is present, etc. (Then, the person handling the case has to convince someone else why that person's a good choice, since the maintainership-transfer power is limited to the team managers.) So, it's designed for what to do in situations where there's an active community with an absentee maintainer and there are problems going on in the community -- the point of the policy is that sometimes a thriving community outlasts the maintainer's interests in LJ. LJ's policies don't address several commonly-seen problems though: * what happens when a maintainer has been inactive on the service for a short term (1-2 months, for instance) and there's problems in the community; * what happens if the community settings are set to require maintainer approval (closed membership, moderated posting, etc) and the maintainer is inactive for a short term (1-2 months); * what happens when a maintainer's gone completely, there's no *problems* in the community, but the community members want to do something that requires maintainer powers, like tagging or customizing the design. Community maintainers on LJ are also often hesitant to appoint co- maintainers, because there's no hierarchy of maintainers -- any maintainer can appoint other maintainers, *de*-appoint maintainers (including the original maintainer), etc. (Note that there's a difference between maintainers -- the people who can do admin tasks in the comm -- and moderators, the people who can specifically only handle the community's moderated posting queue. People use "mod" or "moderator" to mean "maintainer". This is a potential point of confusion, and one we're going to be clearing up with some code changes and some vocabulary changes.) I think our solution for DW is going to be a combination of any/all of the following: * allowing people to designate in-case-of-emergency backup maintainers like people have suggested in this thread -- "If I'm gone from DW for over three months, allow so-and-so to become a full co- maintainer of the community, but NOT to remove me from maintainership", etc; * changing the community maintainership model so that it's hierarchial -- allow people to designate sub-maintainers who can, for instance, tag comm posts/manipulate the comm design/ban people and screen people's comments/etc without having the power to change the community's maintainer structure; * put some kind of "vote in a new maintainer" process into place for communities that legitimately have been abandoned (maintainer's been inactive on DW for 6+ months, doesn't reply to community attempted contact, doesn't reply to DW attempted contact, has appointed no backup maintainer or sub-maintainers) that can be triggered by DW staff or the ToS team if everything else fails and the community membership of an active, thriving community contacts us and lets us know there's a problem. Also, this won't apply for things like single-member communities, such as someone's comm for posting their fic, their recs, their art, etc. Only for multi-member communities that have active discussion and participation, but nobody at the helm to handle problems. --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
