Experimental thought, but something I want to do in near future.
Basically admins and mods are selected sortitionally( randomly) from people who apply.
All admins and mods have fixed term limits.
Existence of Mod or Admin trials where a public chat(court) decides consequences for their actions, if they misbehave, could lead to
Ever since I learnt about the sortition system, I was incredibly curious how it would work irl, hence this idea.
Look, I am not going to claim this is a solution to anything, till ones actually up and running I think it’s hard to say which direction it will go. But still, I want your opinion on it.
On How to encourage people to mod a community?
By making mod duty easy for them, have small term limits, and in those term limits they only have to work for 4/3 days a week. Term could be just few weeks. Also get lot more mods and give them specific time slots beyond which they are vastly not needed unless an emergency.
And @cinoreus@lemmy.world : Another democracy idea I recently wrote down somewhere, was the idea of German clubs / organizations I’m familiar with. That can be anything from a few people do sports once a week, maybe your boy scouts, or KDE e.V. or the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
That’s a legal status. Comes with minimum standards. But I think one clever thing about it is how it tends to push democracy down to the members / people involved. Like: you have to come up with your individual statute, you’re responsible to appoint your management board. And your highest body is the general assembly. The people in power are more in a role to execute what the organization wants. Specifics are down to what the members like to implement.
And the authorities don’t care too much(?!). There’s standards on how clubs have to operate. Like your group needs to follow a purpose and write it down. Simple majority rule for regular decisions in the general assembly, 75% majority votes to change the statute. But you do it as a community, you do your statute, assemblies, subgroups and elections and then you get to identify with it. Government doesn’t hold your hands too much from my perspective. They’ll read the statue and care if it meets the requirements. And later on they’ll simply need to (occasionally) check whether your organization is up to their own statute. Especially once there’s complaints. (And Germans love to complain, so you can be sure there will be feedback once something remotely goes wrong.)
And in practice, you’ll get things like a regular general assembly. You can come as a member, listen to the board explain what they did, what issues they faced, what they spent your membership fee on… Maybe you’re in a position to vote on something or elect the next board. Or give your opinion on whether you’re alright with what your old board did. Sometimes you can send in ideas as a member and make people decide on it. And someone is going to write a summary so there’s accountability for third parties in case they’re interested.
My idea was to push people towards something more like a grassroots democracy. Maybe as an admin I don’t care too much with making exact rules that fit for every community. Maybe democracy should be done and be alive / lived by the involved people themselves. That’ll strengthen their group cohesion. And they need to live it anyway. Make them come up with an idea for a community along with goals and rules, the first board of moderators, signed by 7 people and off they go. After that you (as an admin) just check on them. See if they do general assemblies at regular intervals, if those meet your minimum democratic requirements. But other than that they get to live democracy and the community put in the work to make it happen. And what they have to do is send back some accountability to retain their status as a democratic entity.
(And depending on the minimum requirements set, this might even include an Athens style democracy, if a communitiy likes to come up with a statute like that.)