1. Make leadership communication public for reading by members.
1a. Leaders should still have the *option* to post privately in leadership discussions, but members should be made aware of those posts.
1b. Membership discussions should be created on the side for all leadership issues.
Heh, I brought forward a motion so that all leadership discussion would default to the full member level after two weeks except content vetoed for a specific reason a half hour ago. I trust this essentially would achomplish the above?
Not entirely, but its a great first step. The main idea is to bring leadership closer to the membership and make leadership more transparent. One valuable benefit of brining the discussions to membership immediately, is that members can essentially discuss issues with leaders as they arise. That is also a great way for leaders to get to know the opinions of the members.
2. Make moderation logs available to members.
2a. Censorship in moderation
2b. Make it possible for members to remove moderating powers from a leader.
As far as censorship goes imminst is extremely lienient. There are some things we need to tighten up so that we can better achomplish our core purpose (conquoring the blight of involuntary death).
As explained in length in the link I provided: members need information to make choices. Its fine that you say censorship is lenient, but that's still your opinion. Let us see the facts and make our choice.
On one hand I don't think all full members need to know that such and such person was admonished for some action
Everything posted by members is by default public, so the choice of making something public has already been made by such a person, right?
I agree with your 3rd point (for full members). There exists a mechanism to remove a director, why not a moderator as well. I do think that if you brought up a referendum removing the moderation privliges from a navigator and it passed the directorship would probably follow through on it now, but I have no problem with codifying something to this effect. Perhaps you could think of some specific language to be inserted into bylaw A as a start?
Just to clarify: I am not talking about removing moderators from their position. I am talking about remove the right for ANY leader to moderate the community. They could still remain in leadership if needed. But members need to know what the moderator has done to make a decision. Right now we have no way of knowing.
3. Implement alternatives to non-anonymous voting.
3a. One solution could be to mail new members a voting code to a physical address.
I personally prefer non anonymous voting.
That's a great idea. People could choose to vote anonymously or not. The current mandatory non-anonymous voting is a consequence of a security issue. It effectively makes it a requirement for Directors to validate any vote. How that validation happens is probably fuzzy and potentially a conduit for abuse of power. Also, anonymous voting often brings people to make seemingly unpopular choices if they are right.
4. Implement alternatives to global moderation.
4a. One solution could be to implement a post/topic filter on an individual basis.
4b. RSS feed of recent individual posts.
something along these lines has been planned for some time, but due to technical issues haven't implemented. After the forum upgrade it should be. And the forum upgrade actually should be happening very soon. We've just voted on the funding needed to make the forum upgrade happen finally.
Excellent.