Postby jwocky » Thu Jan 26, 2017 8:04 pm
Oookaayyy, three days are over and I read what happened in this thread since.
@Bomber: As you wrote, never ever in history someone stepped voluntarily away from any position of power ... only, we are in this mess because I did actually that. Instead of just using the ban-button (and I have one, as any forum owner has), I decided to file a complaint, as any other forum member can do. I limited my own position of power to the powers of a regular user and yes, the moderators sent me a mail too about things, I shouldn't do. So I did. So, you are obviously entirely wrong with your assumptions about what I do here and what not because this started with me exactly doing what you claim, will never happen.
@Val: I see, you try to engage Lydiot in something productive. Well, good luck with that, but don't hold your breath. I don't think, he contributed to anything in FG or any aircraft ever.
@The Lydiot: The simple fact that you are still here proves, your signature is a lie and a trolling ploy, nothing more. If I or any other mod or admin would be like "the Führer", you would be history already. Thus your comparison is wrong, simply wrong because you lack the parallelity. And to make the point also clear about the "Eichmann" comparison. I compared in this case the actions of a mod who actively banned and censored members on another forum on behalf of the board owner and, well, whatever T's position is over there. Eichmann's famous defense was, he only followed orders, without any consideration of ethics or personal integrity. Therefore, the comparison is valid because the mod at Curtis' forum did exactly that.
However, if you obviously believe, your signature can be used as insult without factual base, this rule would also apply to anybody else's signature. So I could for example change mine to "Lydiots: Terrorist loving trolls" ... and, according to the principle, you play here, it would be entirely valid. You set the precedence case. Just as an example. I am not enough of a lydiot to do that and aside of it, it would be against the sense of the verdict, I got from the mods. But just think about it. And think, that this principle would also apply to all other member here. So maybe someone else finds the idea funny, who knows?
@IAHM-COL: I am no fried of public hangings or lynch democratics either. The popular vote, especially without technical possibilities ot verify it, can be a dangerous thing, so there have to be rules. We have only few rules (you listed them in your post above already) and those are rules, we, the mods and admins, made up out of our sleeve (like "noooo, we don't want to censor people" and so we didn't). I think, we need, in some future, an attempt to formalize this more, but who has time for it at the moment?
Here is the general take on it, from my point of view. Lydiot is not important, just let him die in his corner. The things, Val hints at are the big things: FG. A project like that is at the moment far beyond our reach, we have to do a lot of things first before we can even consider stemming it and one is creating an infrastructure. Infrastructures have to be organized and run and administrated ... and there we are again. The other thing is also stability. We have not enough people and not enough stability, we are by all means, a hobby group, that means limited time and resources.
Now, to make things not too easy, we have currently the USA Tour (coming to an end slowly), the Festivals , TerraGIT (I have to ask IAHM-COL what the status is on his work on Marvin), FGMEMBERS and all those aircraft, we have one MP server and we have this forum. We also have attempts to make other recurring MP events. Each of these "operations" is run by a different group of people, in some cases, there are overlaps, in some are not. There is no central leadership (and I doubt, there needs actually to be a strict leadership) and no central information exchange (and that would be a useful thing to have). So, on y technical side, before we even think core development, we should figure out this infrastructure and see, how we can recruit more people into our community. Which then brings us to the question, how do we want this community look like, lets say two years, five years, down the road?
We can follow Bomber's hints: Base democracy with the occasional public lynching. Which, as Bomber argued, won't happen because people never give up positions of power. Well, he said that to people who did, so something with that argument seems to be a bit wobbly. But then, the idea of public lynchings makes me quite uneasy, so personally, he won't get my vote for that.
So, here I am ... again ... quoting Dr Martin Luther King (and if someone accuses me to be a fan, o be it): "I have a dream!". I have this crazy idea to get all the groups involved (event organizers, plane tinkerers, pilots, terrain makers and last but not least those running infrastructure) as equal groups into a system we can develop into democracy. Not unlimited democracy, that would be impossible because due to the different numbers in each group, that would only lead to underrepresentation of essential parts of the whole. So, I haven't figured it out yet. As I said, currently, it is just a dream. Consider my vision as kind of a free heaven where we can fly, tinker, sometimes talk about flying-unrelated subjects ... a community. To be honest, those little physics discussions with Bomber were not entirely flying related and it was fine. SkyBoat and me had talks about the history and the Bible, it was fine too, even it had nothing to do with flying. Why not? IAHM-COL talked occasionally about haplogroups and music. Why not? We did math lessons for high school purposes, sometimes a little motivational speech in rl issues and and and ... and why not? We have (I don't want to discuss Lydiot here, but otherwise ...) a bunch of people who dedicate time to a technically quite complex hobby. The average IQ here is easily 20-30 points beyond the average population. People here are sometimes maybe grumpy, very few malignant, a lot are funny and nice, but there is one thing, people here are definitively not: stupid! And since that is so, there is a lot more to talk than flying. So it happens. We should give the room for that.
But since flying is on the core of it, any organization or infrastructure aims at flying. The rest is luxury. So, how do we bring those groups doing all those different things (plane tinkering, terrain, ATC, pilots, maybe in the future core, ...) equally on one playground without the danger that one thing just steamrolls all other because of group dynamics or simply numbers AND develop at the same time a mechanism that enables the community (not single people like me) to run this show? That is the question, I want to put up to the community. Not as a poll, just as an attempt of brain storming and an opportunity to add something constructive.
I have to come back to Bomber. Simon's ideas of how things are and work are imprinted by bad experiences from other Internet communities. I agree to a point, it happens usually, someone makes the policies and everybody else has to swallow it or go. There is also a big amount of group dynamics and bullying involved in many forums. All of that is true. However, does that mean, we have to do it the same way? Or can we figure out something better for ourselves? Bomber, maybe it is time not to let yourself run by bad experiences but a little more by what you want and wish for?
See, if we can, as long as we are still small, under hundred people, if we can still in this phase figure things out, we can promote that picture to the outside. If we can make that work effectively, we can maybe at some point draw more people and thus have more resources to stem also bigger projects. As it is now, we are too small, not enough, to do the bigger things on FG. We need to grow and we can't as long as we haven't figured out what we want to be down the road. I can give this forum a place. I can't and won't beat the community in shape, all I can do on that level is making suggestions. So the ball is now in everybody's field here.
Free speech can never be achieved by dictatorial measures!
) Not everyone is like that, I know, but in this there's black and white - don't make a holocaust reference without my thinking about the honored dead.