Call for Directors

Put your name below if you are interested in becoming a director of whatever legal entity lfgss will become post 16 March. Keep in mind that in the case of a Ltd company or CIC, your name will be on a public register at companies house and the role does come with legal responsibilities. Saying that, either some people step up or we all move over to Discord!

1. Lebowski
   

1. Lebowski
   
2. andyp
   

your name will be on a public register at companies house

And your address

I'll consider this short term

1. Lebowski
   
2. andyp
   
3. Skydancer (short term)
   

I'm up for this.

1. Lebowski
   
2. andyp
   
3. Skydancer (short term)
   
4. DoubtfulAce
   
   

Yes, unfortunately you can't use a PO box any more. But you can use a friendly solicitors address or pay for a company address.

The one time I don't want to fuck up a list it doesn't work, but happy to share some blame/responsibility. My details are already available as a director of another company so no real bother.

Happy to help if needed, mainly experience as a charity trustee.

Happy to do this. Am already Director and trustee so am on the lists.

Be clear what this involves, this is one of two roles that is critical.

It is this role that takes the liability and manages the risk, this role that makes your name known, that can be correlated with LinkedIn, etc.

I'd love to see this work and all the roles filled, but I believe it only works long term if the people stepping forward do so eyes wide open.

As an officer of the company you get the liability of the online safety act, and you get the responsibilities of a company director... Meaning clean up and closing the company are yours, filling accounts ultimately is yours, etc.

The tasks are simple, but it is responsibility.

If people step forward eyes wide open then it is a great thing and offers the possibility of this working out.

The other key role is the secretary/treasurer role, which is whom I assume will be the name on the open collective for fundraising, and who will pay the bills, and ensure the company has meetings and notes are taken. This also requires name and address to be known and visible in places due to anti money laundering laws.

Yep, good call. One thing I would say is that for years the responsibility, stress, effort and risk have all fallen on one person. If we can get enough people to step up, all of that responsibility is then shared.

If we can get a number of directors (10?), then there are 10 names on the register, not just one. I believe that even with Open Collective, you can have a number of named admins of a collective, so again, that responsibility is shared.

To be fair, each named person bears the same level of risk, but at least they know that if they go down, others are going with them!

Risk should be minimal if the forum assembles a team of moderators who just kill everything out of line with fire. Hopefully the membership will by then understand the consequences and it will be a matter of dealing with rogue actors

Thanks @Velocio , that’s a helpful summary. I’ve been a company director previously so understand the legal responsibilities. I agree with what @Lebowski has said in that sharing these responsibilities is probably the best way forward, so if other people are interested please express that interest.

Risk should be minimal if the forum assembles a team of moderators who just kill everything out of line with fire

I thought about this just this morning.

If some programmers have time you could build wide-scale community moderation.

i.e.

• If you've been on the forum longer than n time and have posted more than x times... you're on the moderation team
  
• Anything reported creates a thread in a hidden forum, and a notification to all moderators something needs acting on
  
• No single moderator can do anything, a consensus would have to emerge, i.e this protects against a bad moderator, and also means in the messy cases the majority opinion wins... this is a "vote for ban", "vote for delete", "vote for shadowban" type thing... whichever gets the most votes on some scale would be auto-applied
  
  

This kind of thing would mean you don't have to have one or two, or even 10, people be a moderator... you'd have hundreds immediately.

The tuning of "default actions after x time" would be something the site admin does to reduce the risk to Directors... but otherwise you could groupthink the moderation and diffuse it widely.

For this to work you'd need basically every long term member to be familiar with the moderation guidelines and 18 types of harm in the Ofcom guidance etc... for example, as Dammit was saying, can we be sure that a majority of people are going to correctly interpret freedom of expression etc. rather than just deleting things they don't like? Personally I feel like it's easier to have 10-50 people who are familiar with the moderation rules in depth and encourage other users to make liberal use of report functionality.

I think it might also be a little sketchy if we then have a single person who is liable for the decisions of a random group of anonymous people doing moderation through consensus, without any ability to overrule things when they feel that the wrong decision has been made and puts them at risk of Ofcom intervention

As an officer of the company you get the liability of the online safety act, and you get the responsibilities of a company director... Meaning clean up and closing the company are yours, filling accounts ultimately is yours, etc.

I'm happy to do the risk part of this, and sign off on accounts if needed, sign my life away for the cause. I'm not on LinkedIn and am easy to track down IRL already.

Happy to do some moderation too, I'm on here enough. Some way to quarantine a post quickly and then get a consensus with another couple of mods before actual action would seem a good way to be able to remove things/people quickly but share decision-making around so no-one goes mad with power.

Personally I feel like it's easier to have 10-50 people who are familiar with the moderation rules in depth and encourage other users to make liberal use of report functionality.

Agree, much easier to manage. Also people with different areas of expertise can be allocated different sub forums like at present to some extent. A smaller group can collectively discus and reach consensus easier for tricky issues

This sounds as if it could foster bullying and cliques in a way that would be hard to track but unpleasant to experience. A smaller, selected group of moderators can also indulge in some of that but at least they'd be accountable.

I'm less worried about deletion of things moderators don't like than falling foul of the OSA. I'm confident that common sense would prevail. Perhaps start with applications for moderator posts. Everyone's contribution to the forum over the years is their CV so you know who you are getting. I'm sure that @velocio has a few trusted friends on here they could ask to review applications.
Happy to put myself forward as a potential moderator and won't cry if I don't make the cut

I'm sure that @velocio has a few trusted friends on here he could ask to review applications.

they.

This community knows who the good people are, I consciously chose to have very few moderators years ago... just @hippy and I, and then a few people for the Ladies section and Polo section.

IMHO you want as few as possible to satisfy yourself that you never have a gap in moderation (coverage across time and when people go on vacation, etc), and the criteria is something like:

• Kind by default
  
• Virtually never takes things personal, or at least remains very unbiased despite people being asshats
  
• Patience of a saint
  
• No desire for power (I've found the best mods are those who never ask for it, hippy certainly didn't)
  
• Decisive, even if the decision is not to act
  
  

Things like consistency come from experience, but also consistency can be gamed... smart people who are trying to bully someone learn where the line is and go right up to it, I try not to make a fixed line, it moves at times, what is acceptable is a fluid thing... or at least, it was before the OSA, you might all deem it to be a very fixed risk averse thing now.

Another forum I've used has a downvote button. Once downvotes for a post reaches 10, it's automatically removed for moderation, then either deleted or reinstated once someone gets a look at it. This would remove harmful content from being visible very quickly and uses the entire user base as a first stage moderator in a sense. Works pretty well

I'm in

1. Lebowski
   
2. andyp
   
3. Skydancer (short term)
   
4. DoubtfulAce
   
5. Aroogah
   

1. Lebowski
   
2. andyp
   
3. Skydancer (short term)
   
4. DoubtfulAce
   
5. Aroogah
   
6. mashton
   

This is awesome. Just tidying the list up a bit with some people who volunteered ^^.

1. Lebowski
   
2. andyp
   
3. Skydancer (short term)
   
4. DoubtfulAce
   
5. Aroogah
   
6. mashton
   
7. snottyotter
   
8. Oliver Schick
   
9. frank9755
   
   

If you haven't seen it, it's worth taking a look at this post from Velocio. If we end up going down this road, this group could possibly take on the Director roles within a CIC, with someone as Secretary/Treasurer who can set up lfgss on Open Collective and sort out the payments and money management.

Hopefully @Velocio (if they were willing) and a team of dev volunteers could help sort out the tech side.

Then we just need some mods and a whole lot of people to switch their donations to Open Collective and lfgss can live on.