Admin privs and responsibilities proposal
In light of a discussion (via email) with existing admins about the process for adminship and what adminship means, I'm throwing out a strawman of procedure/decision tiers that we might want to have on Appropedia.
Note that it's probably not worth much time to have this discussion drawn out - before we get too meta in managing ourselves, we should have sufficient numbers of "ourselves" to manage, and sufficient amounts of content and productivity to warrant the meta-restructuring. So I would advise going with a structure, considering it a strawman, and fixing it if/when (probably 'when') it breaks or fails to scale. Mchua 21:18, 11 August 2008 (PDT)
Bureaucrats
All decisions not otherwise indicated on this list are made by unanimous vote by the bureaucrat(s). (This works because we only have one right now.)
Admin Council
The admin council is composed of all admins. The Admin Council can be invoked by a Hivemind request (that is, a Hivemind requesting an Admin Council decision is necessary and sufficient to call an Admin Council vote), or it can be invoked by a Bureaucrat. Votes and decisions are made by majority consensus of the admins who participate in voting (Admins have one week from the time of posting to state their vote, otherwise they are counted out of the vote). In event of a tie, the Bureaucrat(s) choose the outcome.
Things the admin council can decide (limited to this list, to grow as the Bureaucrats decide - only unanimous Bureaucrat decisions may add/remove functionalities from the admin council)
- whether a nominated admin prospect gets adminship
- whether admin privs will be removed from someone nominated
- whether a user will be blocked/banned
- to grant privileges currently granted to the admin council, to the hivemind as well
- to revoke privileges from the hivemind
Appropedia Hivemind
A hivemind is composed of N or more (suggest N = 3) admins in consensus about something or other.
Capabilities of a hivemind (these capabilities can be added/removed by the council, or the bureaucrats)
- nomination of a new admin
- proposal to remove adminship
- proposal to ban/block a user
- formally warn a misbehaving user that they will be under consideration for banning/blocking on a next offense
Other
People who are not admins can request admin attention by posting requests to some sort of 'for admin attention' queue, then pinging Admins they know of. If a Hivemind takes it up, it escalates through the process above.