Posted by James Sinclair in Campaign HQ - Candidates Joe and Steve - Realigning the Membership

Posted by Joe P in Campaign HQ - Candidates Joe and Steve - Realigning the Membership
Three months ago, Rob attempted to pass a bill to change the club’s AWOL policy. He ended up not passing it, and withdrawing the proposal after nearly everyone who participated in the public discussion said that they did not like the proposed change. Now that some time has passed, I think it is worth taking a look at what happened, to understand why this did not get passed, because I think that will highlight the most serious problem that Steve and I would like to address during our term.

Rob’s proposal was well laid out; it included a problem statement and reasoning about how his proposed solution would address the problem. I think it is fair to summarize the problem they were trying to solve as “people feel too much pressure to post.” Let us take as given, that Rob actually talked to some people, those people really do feel too much pressure to post, that the proposal in question was something those people wanted, and that everyone all around was well intentioned. That sounds like how a lot of successful proposals start, by listening to what people have to say, and then trying to address that with an idea that sounds good to those people. So, what went wrong?

It turns out that the people Rob talked to before the proposal was written have a different view of how the club works than the people who saw the proposal for the first time when it was posted in Command to talk about. The narrow audience thought it would make posting easier by relieving the stress of people who are trying to post, the wider audience thought it would make posting harder by increasing the stress of people who are trying to post. Everyone agreed that people were feeling stress around posting, and that some action needed to be taken to solve that problem. We couldn’t agree on the action to take because we don’t have a shared understanding of how the club works; we have at least two different understandings, and probably more.

The lack of a shared understanding regarding how the club actually works is the most significant problem facing the club today, because it prevents any change at all from taking place.

We need to re-establish a shared understanding of how the club works. To do that, we need to talk to each other about how the club works, so that we all have the same understanding and thus might actually be able to succeed in taking action together to face the problems before us today. This idea, of having conversations so we all understand reality similarly, is what I mean by realigning the membership.

I’ll be a little honest here, I haven’t actually asked anybody directly if this is something they’d be interested in. But I have a feeling people would be interested, because conversations on how the club works occasionally break out spontaneously on Discord; when they do, the whole atmosphere of that server changes. People who mostly lurk start paying more attention, perk up, and want to talk about these topics. Unfortunately, because this happens in Discord, only a minority of the club gets to see it at all, and only the smaller number of people who happen to be online at that moment actually get to participate. It also happens at random, so actually trying to participate in one of these things in advance is kind of like catching lightning in a bottle. Rob tried to make live meetings happen regularly with his “Voice of the Club” events, but they weren’t scheduled very consistently and only a small number of people were able to go to them.

To have a successful realignment, we need to have conversations that include everyone who could possibly want to participate, and they need to happen on a regular basis. The most inclusive place on Earth for us to have a conversation is our website, because we all use it. We all post at least once every ten days, so I think a weekly cadence makes sense.

So, as President, I will start a conversation once a week in Command, just to talk about how the club works. Just to talk about how things are; not to file a report, not to debate a proposal, not to parse legalese, not to grandstand like Space Ministers of the Space Parliament arguing with the Other Space Political Party, and not to do any of the other things that people find tediously boring or combative about Command. It shouldn’t be combative because we would just be talking, so nobody should feel like anything in particular is under threat, which is how most of the combat in Command actually starts. I’m thinking I’d just write a little post on Sunday morning to get the conversation started and then we’d just go wherever it takes us; if people want to keep talking about whatever it is, we can keep talking about it. If it’s a boring topic, then we don’t need to talk about it anymore. To prevent the thing from descending into me giving tedious lectures nobody wants to hear, I’d be willing to field requests for topics. I think I’d also probably pick the topic based upon something going on at that particular moment that we can all see, so we don’t talk about anything so abstract as to be boring.

I think after the first few conversations, our shared understanding of how the club is working or not working would start to converge on a set of identifiable ideas that we can treat as facts. Once we have those, then we can think about what changes to propose to improve things around here, because we’ll be starting from the same fact base. It’ll be easier to have those discussions that we traditionally have that now seem so daunting.

Anyway, I’ve talked enough about that for a single post. Feel free to ask any questions you might have about that (or anything). I might give a practical example sometime later if people are curious what this might look like.

Joe

I can appreciate this viewpoint, and look forward to this happening should you be elected. I do have a question, however.

How do you intend to keep the conversation civil and non-combative? Many have tried to do that, and it has almost always devolved. So how will your approach differ from the previous administrations?

James Sinclair

I’m going to answer the question here anyway even if it may not be 100% procedurally proper according to the Election Ship rules (I’ll let Geoff weigh in on that). I think it’s a good question that deserves an answer regardless.

I think the primary mistake most previous administrations have made is to over-moderate Command. That is, they start with the attitude that any post in Command is just a riot waiting to happen, as if the club is full of children who will throw food at each other given any opportunity to do so. So they quickly swoop in to chastise anyone for saying anything that’s the least bit off-color during the course of a discussion. That raises the stakes for participating in quite a bit, more than most people are willing to put up with. The people who still want to post in Command after that, feel like they need to make very formal posts in this kind of highly-regulated environment, so the result is that people start conversations there with giant, fully laid out proposals in pseudo-legalese with proposed bill text. Bill text is almost never quite right no matter how much effort people put into it, so people reading it the first time usually start proposing edits or changes to the text, rather than discuss the idea itself or the problem it is trying to solve. So it’s kind of an escalating cycle where the people who wanted to just do something simple end up developing a kind of siege mentality because all these people on the internet are talking right past their concerns.

We need to have low-stakes conversations in Command. If we start by focusing our conversations just on what reality is without a concrete proposal to debate, that should avoid most of the conflict up front, because we won’t be starting from the question of “are you for or against this great idea I have?” So it should be less threatening. Then when we’re re-acclimated to being able to talk about reality in a productive way, proposals for new things to do can emerge more naturally, and we can talk about them before we need to start being very formal with bill text. That would also create the kind of environment where you can actually end up getting better behavior by moderating less; you can treat people like adults instead of like children, because you can expect a normal conversation instead of a cafeteria food fight.

Does that make sense? It ended up as a more abstract and counter-intuitive answer than I imagined at first, so I apologize if it’s not as direct an answer as you might have been looking for. I’m happy to expand or clarify any way you need me to.

Joe