This second week was filled with a mix of frustration and hope. Frustration because of course when I decided to run for SC I was ready to dive into a conflicted entity —which it is— but I didn’t expect to encounter so much operational dysfunction. I’ve been surprised several times by the lack of clear processes, which slows down our work and makes coordination harder than it needs to be. For instance, when I first tried to submit motions for a vote, it wasn’t clear how to formally trigger one. Should I wait for a meeting? Could I post in the chat and count 👍/👎 reactions as votes? I asked, but didn’t get a clear answer at the time. More generally, it wasn’t obvious how the SC conducts its day-to-day operations, which made me confused. I imagine it was also the case of the other members that got elected at the same time as me, because to my knowledge, there is not really any kind of internal documentation that we can read that helps understand day to day operations.

On the same line, we also had our first real meeting. 2h before the meeting, we still had no agenda and even the meeting time was unclear to some of us. The meeting ended up quite chaotic, and I felt we struggled (myself included) to take turns, follow the agenda, or make meaningful progress on the topics we care about (for example concrete steps to rebuild the moderation team).

When a governance entity has internal disagreements like we have, every action, every decision, every communication is the outcome of a compromise. The weight of this can only be made more bearable by extremely efficient collaboration processes, which I cannot say really exist right now.

On the other hand, I feel hope is not lost. Given these observations, I have given myself the mission of creating a formal structure (a set of rules) for the operations of the SC. I feel like giving ourselves a set of rules on how to work together has a double benefit: it will help us be more efficient and use our time more respectfully, but also be a basis we can pass on to the next SCs! Instead of being confused about how work could be done when I got elected, they can use these agreed upon procedures to start getting stuff done. My first proposal was about async voting. Now we have a formal way to trigger async votes and publish results publicly, which I think is a tremendous step forward!

I also want to propose some rules to help us have more productive meetings, but it might take a bit longer before I have everything figured out. One thing that worked pretty good in my past experiences is to choose a (rotating) leader for each meeting. It is the role of the leader to find a meeting date that works for everyone, properly send calendar invitations, ensure we have an agenda in due time, and during the meeting be careful that we follow the agenda properly, that we allocate our time budget correctly to cover all points, that people listen to each other, that nobody hogs the conversation, etc. That would already go a long way in my opinion.

Another reason to be hopeful is that we finally got concrete stuff done! The Steering Committee has adopted the constitutional amendment that makes vacant seats count towards reelection in a no confidence vote. I take this as a symbolic achievement, of course, because this amendment covers a specific edge case of our constitution, but an important one nonetheless because it shows that this SC is able to find compromise on reasonable propositions, even if personal affect might be at play.