my personal writing; not an SC statement
Sorry for the chaotic post; I’ll start out with some responses (bit reactive), and then get to the interesting stuff, or maybe read all of it, idk. I blame slow mode 
General vibe and CoI
I feel the same.
I also agree that moderation generally did a good job towards the community, and I’m grateful for that.
I do wonder what degree of drama the SC eliminated by resolving issues before they would be public and unnecessarily controversial, but this is impossible to quantify.
I admit we made a big mistake in our communication here. 1 CoI change shouldn’t have been a big deal, despite it being a controversial company, but we failed you on that by not communicating it sooner. You’re right to hold us accountable for that, and I can assure you we don’t have other problems of this sort, and he does not hold power over the rest of us.
Let me know if there’s other events that made you lose trust. I am aware of the need for more transparency.
I guess you really are that desperate to recruit new Lixers - no offense to the Lix project, shoutout to them.
Apparent misconception about moderation
Classic mistake, I would say, except you’ve taken this out of context. I know full well that “objective” is not possible. I said more objective, meaning to refer to situations in which subjective decisions have lead to the CoC not being upheld, making mods’ work unnecessarily difficult in the long term.
Some clarification around removal
No intent to “frame” here. We did remove a moderator for their conduct, and I can see this was communicated in a minimal way, but also we weren’t asked this question. My verdict: both parties could have done better in terms of communication, but not much better was to be expected because of tensions.
I don’t want to paint a target on anyone’s back. I believe all moderators had good intentions, but some resisted any effort towards accountability. This had to change.
A general attitude of refusing to work with the SC, and some moderation decisions or lack thereof, which may well have been excusable if they were cooperative. I’ll explain why this is truly important, and just something about SC power.
The SC is the elected body governing the whole community, including various powers to intervene when it deems necessary. We don’t do this lightly, and this power can not be limited except by constitutional change, which can be undone by future SCs.
This is good, because SCs are elected by the community, which means that the community retains its power.
Democratic context
For good outcomes to occur, we need all links to work reasonably well. In reverse order of “accountability to”:
- community members select good candidates
- the SC uses its power appropriately
- teams collaborate with the SC to improve
We (2) have established an instance of dysfunction in (3) and now you (1) are inquiring us (2) to see if we are dysfunctional, because (3) has signaled such.
This is the democratic process doing its job, so thank you.
It is decidedly not a failure of governance (however much I wish it went smoothly), but a feature of democratic governance, which you are part of.
This is complicated, and one of the things that makes democracy difficult. I hope we can focus on the issues and their causes, and not jump to conclusions based on the overall vibe, as it happens all too much in real life democracy.
I don’t think apologizing for other representatives is good democratic culture. It would suggest that we are not independent of one another, but we are independent; by design and even enforced by CoI rules.
Analogy with moderation
I believe both the SC and moderation were operating in “damage control” mode, each in their own way:
- The SC was too careful about their public communication, the “speaking with one voice”. This had a calming effect at first, but ultimately made us too “shy” in public
- The moderation team was making too many political calculations. This made their job harder than it needed to be, served their reputation well until now, but ultimately would not be sustainable, even if we had not demanded any change
Where the analogy breaks down is that the mod team only had to be accountable to us (which I feel should have been straightforward except for circumstances), so the community is happy with the relative calm, whereas for the SC that’s quite the opposite.
So the goal for me and the new SC is to build and rebuild trust with a mostly new moderation team.
Communication breakdown due to tension
Communication has been less than stellar in the SC/Moderation shared private channel.
A lot of this can be traced back to a lack of trust.
- As an SC member I often felt held back by a lack of agreement or other certainty when talking in the channel
- My assumption is that moderators were fearful for interference by the SC.
- No automatic transparency. We were not offered automatic access to more info than the broader community, and we clearly did not feel empowered to demand this. This circumstance steered conversations towards mere facts, leaving less attention for insightful discussion if that were perhaps possible
- As we made more suggestions that slowly turned into a somewhat hostile attitude between some of us (some SCers vs some mods)
All that said I don’t want to paint a picture of it being all terrible. A lot of good things also happened in the channel.
The main pain points I feel about this are the general friction, and the excessive need for political maneuvering because of the low trust in both directions.
It would have taken absolutely superb communication to overcome our strained initial setup, but alas, not the strong suit of most of us nerds [affectionately], and having to somehow act together as SC and individual representatives made the whole setup a minefield to navigate.
I hoped that we could improve this over time, but with these resignations, the good news is that we can accelerate work to increase trust with new moderators and with that, start making process changes in support of accountability.
Accountability to the community
Going back to moderation accountability, this is of course a sensitive activity.
For instance, as others have also observed in this thread, detailed moderation logs can not be public, because that would cause a severe compromise of privacy.
This makes accountability directly to the (1) community impossible, so in order to establish accountability, we need an indirection, and currently that indirection is the SC.
That could be arranged differently, but I’d be wary of anything that introduces a direct mandate from community factions to individual moderators, as well as anything that further dilutes community power through more indirections or bureaucracy.
Most importantly though, we have not yet even observed accountable moderation in practice, so changing course right now would be premature.
Some final words
As for the accusations I’ve read in this thread, they’re pretty ridiculous.
I’m a progressive, if you haven’t got to know me. I’d gladly out any fascist conspiracies if they’d happened, but one elected man changing jobs in line with his past career isn’t that. Democracy isn’t perfect but we have a handle on this. I’ll keep you posted.
I was elected without a strong stance on moderation. I’ve helped in implementing the new governance as part of the SC. I believe this can still be a good turning point for moderation, where have an opportunity to advance past the misconceptions about our roles in the system. Where SC and moderation can communicate safely to learn from each other, and both can build trust with the community as a whole.
I may have gotten something wrong in my post. We’re in slow mode, so I won’t be able to respond quickly or possibly at all in this thread. I didn’t have to write this, and my neck is on the line, but I think it’s important to keep you in the loop and to engage in an honest conversation. I hope to do more of that and less of the careful maneuvering that only really brought us here anyway.