SITE OWNERSHIP - Discussion Thread

It might be helpful for a moderator to lock all the various ATF threads about this stuff and force discussion here where it could actually produce useful results.

Of course they can. I'm not trying to stop your motion or anybody else who wants to make one. It just seems headed towards a pretty clear loss and I think if all the energy being spent in ATF were redirected here instead it would be more useful.

Or maybe this is that thread.

Anyway, as I've said before, I want to be part of ownership and am willing to put my name on stuff.

I'm willing to put my name on stuff and don't really care either way about ownership. There's definitely some analysis paralysis going on that's made worse by all the competing threads so I'd like to thank zikzak for trying to better focus the discussion.

One of the first threads started here was people volunteering funding with over $1k pledged so assuming those people stand by their pledges we should have enough funding for at least the first year.

Money doesn't seem to be the problem. Hell, Hobbes offered to make up the difference on any funding shortfall for the first year up to a relatively large amount. I'm not suggesting that we spend a lot because it's there. Long term security will be greatly enhanced if we have a low nut, but I think we'll be fine with money for a while anyway.

I think folks first need to take a step back, and think about what purposes legalistic ownership is supposed to serve.

Off the top of my head, I can imagine two purposes... having a mechanism in place to sue a community officer who absconds with our community's funds -and- CYA for our community's officers if they happened to be sued themselves by irate users or outsiders.

We should set up the minimal legalistic framework that accomplishes those goals IMO. The way I'd move forward is to crystallize a particular list of these purposes, ship that list off to some lawbros to come up with the an action plan, hopefully our community would ratify such an action plan, then put that plan into effect.

What we shouldn't do is let the tail wag the dog here.

We should be committed to community control. Any scheme of legalistic ownership should be explicitly subordinate to this community control. If, say, it's a legalistic convenience to have a hierarchical board of directors for a coop (for example) we shouldn't imagine that that board has veto powers over our community... and we therefore have just jettisoned the entire concept of community control. Instead, it should be explicitly understood that this board is simply a legalistic convenience, that the members of this board are acting purely as trustees for our community, and that any attempt of such a board to veto the will of our community is a "breach of trust"... which hopefully would be thwarted by our entire community walking out as a whole.

No one can own the community. 2p2 didn't. This is just about who owns the domain and leases the server. Every second the site operates forever into the future the community will have the opportunity to tell the domain owners and server renters to fuck off if they don't feel like they are acting in the community's interests. When we get a list of people who want to be owners they will get to say "hey, you lazy fuckers, there are only 10 of us here to do all this work. We'll do it, but we get the ad money if there's any left over after paying back investors." or something like that. Or maybe 100 people want to be owners and it's very different.

I think it probably would not turn into a problem but I don't know the exact restrictions and policies that they have. It's far from a guarantee that I end up in government, I'm just looking at a career change and if I continue in law I will only work in the nonprofit or government sector. If there are 20 people volunteering for ownership, maybe the community would choose someone else rather than me if it means not having to deal with the possibility of transferring my portion to someone new down the road.

Thanks. I don't want power or privileges. I'm not allergic to money though and I think hobbes should send me some.

zikzak deserves more credit more broadly. Dude is like a superhero and a genius.

I completely agree that Zack also did super job with this discourse and support all possible privileges for him and actually everyone who did work on the tech team. ( I did none. I just learned)

He showed me not one, but two different ways I could support the joists over my basement window that didn't have a header. He also landed an Airbus in the Hudson river when both engines shut down after hitting a flock of geese, saving all 155 people aboard.

I'm against any graduated membership scheme where some people have more say in the running of the site than other people. If we are trying to build an inclusive community and attract people who haven't been on 22 for the last 10 years the worst thing we can do is exclude people because they haven't met some arbitrary criteria. If someone wants to participate we should let them participate. If we are afraid of sock puppet accounts we should not allow them, if we are afraid of getting swarmed by deplorables who vote us out of leadership roles we can start another board and try again.

May be something like certain kind of decisions like mod-decisions, mission statement and so should be decided by community(=anyone who wants to participate in the decision).

But financial rewards, in case I am wrong and this site will one day bring-in something, used as first to reward people who invested the most. I mean..... If I look at "NOW", at this point in time and assume that the site will bring-in tomorrow some money, then it is kinda unfair that people who already invested significantly more time and effort and did a good job will get the same dividends like me, who learned something, did something, but realistically nothing really productive.

Then I believe, that someone already paid for the domain. It might be not big money, but I think he should get some money before someone who invested nothing.

May be something along the lines: you have to buy one share for something laughable like 5 $ to become a member of the coop and then investors (=anyone who pays a bigger sums like costs for a host or so) are paid first, people who did the job for tech are treated like they invested hours to a standard market rates and get that as a pay, so that anyone who actually works gets paid before any money distribution to good causes or as dividends. That means that mods in case this site will indeed start to bring-in any money will get something.

The decisions however will remain in the hand of the coop members. That means that it will be probably suboptimal in the sense of money maximization.

Again.... Tx Zak for starting this threads. I find this talk highly useful.