[HCoop-Discuss] Quick thoughts on voting

[Nathan Kennedy]

> Graham Freeman wrote:
>> FWIW, in the future I hope Hcoop.net will grow sufficiently to adopt
>> something resembling the Carver Policy Governance model, wherein the
>> Board is less involved in day-to-day operations and more involved in
>> medium-to-long-term strategy and planning.
>
> That would require appointing others to non-technical operational
> roles.  As things work today, nothing happens without the president (me)
> prodding people regularly to do what they volunteered to do.  I think
> it's essential to have some kind of Chief Prodder role.

I think we can probably agree that it's at bit premature to institute a
full-blown separation of management and governance, given our still small
(but growing) size and the difficulty of getting anyone to commit to any
sort of role.  I admit that I myself have not set the best example in the
last several weeks (missing the election start date being the most
egregious example, although nobody noticed), but I think there are things
we can do as a system to do better.

Prodding is very important.  Communication is too.  I think we need a more
disciplined approach to how we deal with projects and deadlines.  The
mailing lists plus the wiki was great when we had one server and a few
dozen members.  Adding the portal and telling users to submit tickets
there if they needed support was a big step up.  Now we need something
similar for admins and leadership to coordinate their tasks.  In my
opinion we're outgrowing our current communications paradigm, and threaded
or not, the more tasks we have going on the more the -discuss and
-sysadmin lists become giant unfiltered blobs and difficult to sift
through, utilize efficiently, and pay attention to.

Better organization on the Wiki and the various project pages there are
great, but usage is spotty.  I think we should either adapt the ticket
system on the portal or roll out some other solution that will make it
easy to look in one place to see everyone who is working on a particular
task, what those people have done on it and the status of those tasks, and
also all the tasks a particular person has done.  We need to pick a
solution and have discipline (prodding if necessary) in actually using it.
 Even if it's just a wiki page.  My hack of asking people flag emails
[ntk] for a quick response was crude but effective.  I think we can do a
lot better in the future.

I certainly do think that governance is important and we need to make sure
that our governance scales with our co-op, just as we need to make sure
our servers and our admins can scale with it.  And I definitely want to
re-examine the bylaws and make some improvements and changes before the
year is out.  That is again something that I agree with Adam must give way
for the present to the tech side of getting Peer1 set up--which is getting
close but behind schedule.  Once Peer1 is our primary situs, I definitely
would like to see a Bylaws committee and an Environmental Policy
committee/working group formed to meet and draft proposals.

Note that as it is written, amendments to the Bylaws (our most important
governance document) are entirely member-driven; the board has no special
role except that the secretary is designated to hold elections.

-Nathan