"I'm going to go way out on a limb and actually respond to you as though you are truely asking this for the sake of the organization."
Well, I’m not. My interest is the mission.
Me from way before and another thread "Any idea how Imminst could possibly improve its hierarchy formulation to avoid getting misrepresentation of data meant to attack individuals by members of its staff?"
"Ok, for starters. Imminst doesn't have "staff". Everyone here is a volunteer."
Whether for monetary compensation or not, you have a managing staff. You used to have a list of them and their official designations or titles but I’m not so sure that is presently available on the new mistakenly released forum. Lets see if I got this right from memory. Your staff is made up of a president, an executive director, a treasurer, a board of directors, advisors and navigators? Whatever, it is a staff and it does have a hierarchy.
What I am mainly wondering, if I may try to rephrase the question in hopes of explaining it, what is causing staff (and loyal members most likely) to not be genuine in their communications (such as this claim that Imminst does not have a staff)? What can be done to correct this forsaking of reason and logic especially if it appears amongst those who have become entrusted with greater responsibilities than others for the functioning of Imminst?
Well, it seems the symptom needs better elucidation for the prognosis and suggested strategy to improve serving the mission. The combative frame of mind that seems prevalent amongst many can be summed up, I believe, as belief in the idea that proclamation trumps reason. You can deny that there is a staff and others may chime in and agree too as if that is all it takes to make it true. Our legacy as far as our social experiments go, is at fault. It is a poor legacy. We are coerced from a young age to believe in the validity of our current social experiments as if they were not experiments. It is a real taboo for many to consider our social experiments as not perfect and in need of change and even replacement in many cases.
The executive director of this organization recently communicated to me by PM claiming that Imminst is a constitutional democracy. From the first use of that word it did not mean all that much as many people were not included nor served. I like kind of approaching a rather idealized interpretation of the word democracy but, so far, it has been used as a claim to validity by many different social experiments, some quite egregious in how they treated humans and life.
I do believe in democracy but I think the only way that word has merit is if used to describe an organizing strategy that seeks to serve all people. Perhaps some day it will involve an elective process but currently, things that pass for democracy nowadays often seem to depend on a lack of knowledge and awareness that is actually promoted and sustained by a set of taboo considerations, essentially who actually runs things behind the ruse of being a “democracy.”
The organizations I see that do approach seeking to be of service to all people are basically consciousness-raising ventures by small groups of people. They have real presence and are doing much to enlighten many successfully, making money in the process and continually expanding their presence in new ventures or helping others take off. I look at these organizations to see what they use successfully to find the suggestions I make to Imminst if the people here are really concerned about furthering the mission to end the blight of involuntary death. Now I see that “ending the blight of involuntary death” could be interpreted as being for only a few and not all in which case the strategy of Imminst to seek this is not a leaning towards seeking the rather idealized concept of democracy. Instead it becomes a means to attain greater power and freedoms for a few, something a forum inherently entails.
If the idea is to seek ending the blight of involuntary death for all as soon as possible, then Imminst has something that it can sell and for which there is as large a market as there are people. That is a good thing if you want a successful venture so I suspect this rather idealized concept of democracy is a viable one. The knowledge denial and power-over-reason strategies of the non-inclusive leaning organization fails, often totally and with much violence, as far as I can tell.
"You are not dealing with customer service reps paid for nothing else than being nice to you as you do nothing but complain. (ok. we recently we did hold a full member vote for our first and only paid position. The pittance we give him is probably (hopefully) just enough to keep his wife from leaving him for all the time he puts in here)"
Besides the obvious slur of another character assassination attempt, you are exposing a strategy that is subject to mistakes and failure. A volunteer run organization is not a viable strategy. You should seek only the manifestation that asks for no sacrifices, win-win strategies. For the technical necessary functions, you need well-paid technical expertise. If you largely depend on volunteers then you are subject to having the mission in the hands of people who are not into getting fair compensation, not the kinds of people who can be trusted to not make mistakes such as engaging the new forum before it was ready. Seems to me if the mission were more important than the forum then you would have quickly restored the old forum and put the development and testing of the current forum out of the public eye until it was good and ready. That you now appear to be using the public to test and report problems with the new forum, communicates incompetence, a bad marketing decision.
I do suspect that when one does not have a concern and desire to be of service and benefit to all, the degree of seriousness placed in the making of communications is not all that great. It takes an altruistic desire to seek good grammar, use of words, etc. in order to make ones communications correctly understood. If the desire is to just be the most powerful fighter in a struggle to the death (basically the “lizard brain” gestalt behind special privilege seeking) then saying things that are easily misconstrued, hard to interpret and grammatically as well as logically incorrect makes it easier to spin your actual intent to counter any arguments or criticism as debased. E.g. “you do nothing but complain.” That is not meant to communicate. That is an attempt at blanket derision and false for any one who wants to consider the evidence.
"Basic members are members of the forum. Full members are members of the organization. They demonstrate some level of commitment to the institute and it'd goals."
Note that you place the institute first before “it’d goals” (lol).
"Indeed, there are several full members who can not afford the membership dues (some students) but demonstrated their commitment to the community."
No need to be committed to the mission? Is the community the cause? How about the community known as humanity? Would you find people committed to the success of humanity to be an enemy of Imminst since the community that is the participants in this forum, no matter their category, is not all humanity?
"I know how much you abhor a monetary exchange having any part in the organizations hierarchy."
Well you do not present any evidence of this blanket extreme characterization of me and if you had gone about trying to use real data in the formulation of this statement you would have realized that I definitely see a monetary exchange as playing a vital role and have elucidated this a few times here and there. Basically the organizations that seem to approach serving all and making a lot of money through a web presence appear to depend on being a news portal. By providing a real consciousness raising service, they get traffic and then small means of web based revenue turn into nice monetary exchange. As an example,
http://www.buzzflash.com now appears to be 45% towards their goal of $150,000 by Jan. 1 though we are only 40% through Dec. Amazing that they are doing this without banner ads or Google ads, just premium sales of books and DVDs.
http://www.enn.com appears to depend on banner ads though seems they are presented as embedded rather than prominent as Imminst is doing. I suppose it works for them because they are receiving a nice traffic flow of people who find their service of value.
http://www.newstarget.com also appears supported by sales of items but mainly from another site and not obtrusive at all in their web presence. They recently added a means of seeking more news writers and their “presence” has increased in breadth and relevance, wise considerations for success.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ is another one worth researching as it is being tremendously successful. Apparently they use both premiums and banner ads.
"But as it turns out we don't live in the soviet union, and monetary exchanges are essential for our success."
Again, this appears as an attempt to denigrate my character with a negative association not based on any real data at all, not an attempt on your part to be genuine but only to be combative and misleading. Is Imminst functioning properly if members of its staff attempt to mislead people, perhaps even the self? Something is wrong here and if you guys can’t figure it out and must go on with the debased “good guys verses bad guys” approach your mission becomes just so much hot air, not real at all, just an excuse to seek more rights than others, to partition the world into a worthy elite and an evil opposition.
"But even if we had billions of dollars in the bank i would still support a modest membership fee just so we know members have even the slimmest level of commitment. So there is an answer to that part."
As far as I can tell, this commitment you speak of is to the institute and its staff, not the mission. If the goal were the mission then if you had the money to do without requiring a membership fee, then you would put that money to the service of the mission and open up your membership to include all humanity and maybe even the life that makes up our support system. I guess part of the problem is your not having congealed a sufficiently realistic mission yet. I see your founder alludes to immortality as being a real goal. As long as you do not embrace a logical purpose, I’m afraid you will see the experiment as more important than the delivered product; being of real genuine worth will not be a priority.
"Members (from here on out when I refer to "members" I mean "full members") elect directors to do a lot of the management. Directors see what volunteers they can get to help (navigators, advisors etc.)."
So, it appears the purpose of the directors is to provide for the operation of the forum. What about the mission?
"Directors are not above full members. If anything we are below because we have to deal with people who do nothing other than complain and think their opinions should be taken above all others, who have demonstrated zero commitment to the organization but feel entitled to getting what they want out of it, and yet we have try hard to prevent ourselves from responding in kind (ok, we're human) "
Besides another attempt of thinly veiled character assassination, you seem to have a rather strange idea of what hierarchy means. When mapping out the hierarchy of a system you find the population of various mutually exclusive states of being in that system and use that to rank the parts, just the numbers in each category. Directors do have higher status than most others in such a ranking. If you want to claim there is no hierarchy then I suggest you try to convey what you mean by “hierarchy.” When I use the term I am speaking of a set of information control characteristics apportioned amongst a finite number of categories of states of being.
"Members have every bit as much right to putting together a proposal and having a vote brought on it as those in leadership do."
Full members maybe rival the “leadership” or staff in bringing changes about (highly dubious as they would at least need the collusion of the staff) but not most members. I suggest you try to use consistent terminology. By stating earlier that by members you mean “full members” you just take the consideration of most of the users of your system out of the equation, which is not giving you a functional viable fruitful perspective.
Oh well. Imminst is an experiment. Each of us is an experiment. Humanity is an experiment. Life in general is an experiment. My allegiance lies more with the last three than the first, which is why I am in concert with a rather broad interpretation of the mission. Me thinks it is more feasible to seek change in our institutions that could facilitate positive development and preservation of our biological existence than use our physical beings to serve institutions.
BTW, I tried using the quote tags above but was given the message "You have posted more than the allowed number of quoted blocks of text" and they did not materialize so I went back and replaced them all with quotation marks. Talking about going way out on a limb, my efforts here may be totally wasted upon individuals who do not want and/or do not have the capacity to consider deep thought. Maybe only shallow communications are acceptable, another symptom of the disease?