Guild of Writers

Ok, I see. These people will be the simple figureheads of the guild and the Directors will be mostly internal. So some official wants to get hold of some guy labeled as PR-Chief he can.

This could work pretty well. I can see you folks reasoning here now.

Read everything up to now, no questions (actually I was mostly up-to-date with the thread on 14th, but the markets saw to my being busy again).

Anyway, go for it and have fun...

--TSK

I agree with most of the proposal, I especially like the flexibility of the Directors positions. I also think that it is important to mark a clear separation between the purely administrative tasks for the Councilors and the more productive tasks of the Directors.
That being said here are a couple things:

Durations:
Numbers can easily make or break any system.
Councilor inactivity: 4 months: way too long IMO. When you have such a small council every person is important and every person should be aware of his/her responabilities. If someone goes away for over a month without warning his colleagues he/she doesn't deserve the position IMO (except for obvious special cases: health matters, accidents, other important personal issues etc). A lot of things can happen in four months. I'd suggest 1 month no more.

Proposal discussion prior to vote: 4 days; too short. If someone goes on vacation they usually go for at least a week, so what about 7 days? Case in point: this very discussion was posted on a sunday evening, which makes for the end of discussion on a tuesday evening, but not everyone can during the week take the time to discuss this (or even just to browse the forum). Obviously one could always vote 'No' to the proposal, but isn't the whole point of the discussion period to avoid that kind of 'default' vote?

Representatives inactivity: 3 months: Again I find that a little long, but that's less of a problem here.

Representatives
I know I'm propably just arguing semantics here, but this name bothers me. Representatives look a awfull lot like regular Guild Members in the traditionnal sense, so for the sake of respecting long established naming traditions in the community shouldn't those simply be called Guild Members? (as opposed to simple forum members)
Technical question: How to keep a list of the Guild Representatives? Would a specific members group on the forum be setup?

Lack of an official PR/contact/spokesperson
This seem to be a recurrent problem, especially now that Dox has resigned. This is a very specific position, not something for a Councilor, but not a Director either IMO. It is specific because it's something that will at times be more important to the rest of the community than to ourselves. People outside our Guild need someone, a single person to identify easily, whose name should be on the front page of the site, and whose position should be clearly written in his/her signature on other Uru forums. And this single person would in turn interface with the council/directors. Also this IMO should be a permanent position.

I think a specific position should be created for that job, not a 'Director of PR' (although practically it would be the same thing).
Maybe simply a 'Guild Spokeperson'?

The 'only 3 councilors' issue
As has been pointed out 3 councilors is fine most of the time, but it can easily go down to one...(even zero if we want to be pessimistic) So I agree about the 'spare' councilors idea. If only just as an unintrusive security measure. This should be much like substitutes in sports: they who would be usually inactive, and only called in office for a given time when one (or more) of the regular Councilors are away/MIA.
As they would usually be 'inactive' they whould be allowed to be Directors, but in case they are put to use as fulltime Councilors, they should name a new director to replace them. (no voting here to speed up things)

"Make the Mods and web-Admins be in a class of their own (permanent and non-partisan"

That's an interesting point, mods in particular have nothing to do with all the political and decision making aspects of the Councilors/Directors.. mods by nature are supposed to be objective and non-partisan. So I agree they should be a separate entity. They should either be voted on or named by the councilors, and could be kicked by popular demand (ie: Proposal)

Aloys wrote:Councilor inactivity: 4 months: way too long IMO. ...... I'd suggest 1 month no more.

I agree

Representatives
I know I'm propably just arguing semantics here, but this name bothers me. Representatives look a awfull lot like regular Guild Members in the traditionnal sense, so for the sake of respecting long established naming traditions in the community shouldn't those simply be called Guild Members? (as opposed to simple forum members)

Well, as far as I can tell it's been a long standing viewpoint of the GoW that we don't really distinguish between forum members and Guild Members.
(Though I wouldn't be against changing that). The representatives aren't really Guild Members - they are people who indicated that they want to be involved in the process of making decisions here. There are probably a number of people who consider themselves Guild Members, but don't really want to be involved in said process.

Lack of an official PR/contact/spokesperson
This seem to be a recurrent problem, especially now that Dox has resigned. This is a very specific position, not something for a Councilor, but not a Director either IMO. I think a specific position should be created for that job, not a 'Director of PR' (although practically it would be the same thing).
Maybe simply a 'Guild Spokeperson'?

I agree with you about the importance of such a person here.
In my view he/she would be a director (for all intents and purposes) - but without the "director" nametag.

Well, as far as I can tell it's been a long standing viewpoint of the GoW that we don't really distinguish between forum members and Guild Members.
(Though I wouldn't be against changing that).

I would be against changing that. Guild Members are people who are working on Ages, or helping people do that work. Helping to organize Guild operations is a different task -- a valuable task, but not for every Writer.

I think having "Members" is a really good thing. Basically this wouldn't be anything more than showing you are responsible for voting (thus keeping the political world of the GoW from stagnating).

On "Members": Members are anyone who visits this forum and considers themselves a member. Members are not required to vote on proposals. (for the simple reason that they usually don't, and it skews minimum vote counts) The idea that anyone not voting on proposals is not a member is silly because there are a lot of people who do useful things in the guild, but don't vote on proposals, be it because they're not interested or anything else.

A "Representative" is nothing more than any member who has officially noted that they want to vote on proposals within the last month or so. (I agree that 3 months is too long)

While it makes me all levels of warm and fuzzy to think that, because someone joins here, they're all part of one big family, I think that we should have a "members" group. It's not that "members" are better than other people, but that these are the Writer's forums and we need a way to quickly tell if a member is a part of the Guild or not. The Maintainers have quite a nice system with groups for each Guild. This doesn't mean that you have to belong to one Guild or another, just that we'd like to know which Guilds you belong to.

I agree that the idea that "those foreign guild people" are messing with our polls is just paranoia, and that's to be expected in any group you look at. I don't think there's anyone skewing polls and throwing elections. If people are maliciously doing this over a game, I say let them be idiots. Let's move on. The idea that Guild operations aren't for every writer is also just wrong. That's like citing American voter apathy as a reason to let citizens of Canada vote in our presidential elections (or, more accurate in this case, calling them American's as well). When you look at this, it's an awful lot like nationalism, and that's not the right reason to do this. This should be about identification.

Lastly about the "representatives". As one of the many who went through the Liaison mess, I feel these little urges to curl into a ball and wait for the nesting voting jokes to start flowing, but I think the name doesn't matter. The reps seem a good way to get things done (in a way the whole "power to the people" thing didn't).

For the love of the.......

Just kidding. I'm out and about with no realiable internet to speak of. I'll be back full force on monday.

So, lets keep this discussion down to a low rumble if you all don't mind.

(Short post sorry--brain is fried)

We didn't define Guild Members for a reason. Representatives are just those who wish to have an input on the decision-making process. Just because you come here and make ages doesn't mean you care about XYZ Proposal.

PR guy falls under the Counciler of Intra-Guild Relations at a last resort. I have always advocated the entire Council being the PR unit.