the openstreetmap foundation , American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the python software foundation allow anyone to vote for the board of directors, they take membership fees which reduces some of the risk, IIRC someone tried to game the election for openstreetmap but they caught it, maybe we can learn some of there procedures to prevent this from happening.
That is a possible solution, but it has its own problems. Making it dependent on money means that mainly people from the middle class in Europe, North America and a few other countries will be able to participate democratically. But poor people from the same countries, and most people from the global south will be unable to pay these fees.
You could also open membership to people who actively contribute to lemmy, say moderators and testers, also could have country specific fees (say attached to the median salary of the country of the one trying to join).
Wikipedia also has elections and needs a certain number of edits to qualify for a vote (and to be on wikipedia at least three months i think), maybe a similar requirements could be made so a user has to submit a certain amount of content (only to active communities where if it is a bot someone will probably notice).
Its definitely a complicated topic, but also an important one. I think for now such a coop is not necessary, because it is still easy for a single person to follow all the discussions. That will change if Lemmy keeps growing, and then such a democratic process would be very important to have. So its good that you being this up now, because we can discuss it without being in a hurry.
In general I think there are many possible solutions all with their own pros and cons, and many questions to be answered first. So it would be useful if you create a separate thread concerning a democratic participation in Lemmy, where we could discuss it in more depth.
I opened a thread here, btw it’s a bit harder to follow long discussions on lemmy, you have to keep “hunting” for new comments (unless they were direct replies to what you said), nothing beats email and RSS when it comes to long discussions (clicking to mark message as read, and even the ability to mark as unread).
It should become a platform coop where the users can become members and have a say in how it is governed.
I like the idea, but a big problem is that few users can easily create many sockpuppet accounts, and get more influence than they deserve.
the openstreetmap foundation , American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the python software foundation allow anyone to vote for the board of directors, they take membership fees which reduces some of the risk, IIRC someone tried to game the election for openstreetmap but they caught it, maybe we can learn some of there procedures to prevent this from happening.
That is a possible solution, but it has its own problems. Making it dependent on money means that mainly people from the middle class in Europe, North America and a few other countries will be able to participate democratically. But poor people from the same countries, and most people from the global south will be unable to pay these fees.
You could also open membership to people who actively contribute to lemmy, say moderators and testers, also could have country specific fees (say attached to the median salary of the country of the one trying to join).
Wikipedia also has elections and needs a certain number of edits to qualify for a vote (and to be on wikipedia at least three months i think), maybe a similar requirements could be made so a user has to submit a certain amount of content (only to active communities where if it is a bot someone will probably notice).
Its definitely a complicated topic, but also an important one. I think for now such a coop is not necessary, because it is still easy for a single person to follow all the discussions. That will change if Lemmy keeps growing, and then such a democratic process would be very important to have. So its good that you being this up now, because we can discuss it without being in a hurry.
In general I think there are many possible solutions all with their own pros and cons, and many questions to be answered first. So it would be useful if you create a separate thread concerning a democratic participation in Lemmy, where we could discuss it in more depth.
I opened a thread here, btw it’s a bit harder to follow long discussions on lemmy, you have to keep “hunting” for new comments (unless they were direct replies to what you said), nothing beats email and RSS when it comes to long discussions (clicking to mark message as read, and even the ability to mark as unread).
Fair point.