Subject:
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Taking LUGNET to the next level
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.announce, lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.org, lugnet.general, lugnet.build, lugnet.publish, lugnet.trains, lugnet.starwars, lugnet.castle, lugnet.space, lugnet.robotics, lugnet.lego.direct
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Followup-To:
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lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.org
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Date:
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Fri, 20 Feb 2004 08:00:38 GMT
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Chats with people at BrickFest PDX last weekend got me thinking a lot more
about LUGNET and its role in the community.
I’ve bounced some of my thoughts off of various people (including three
people from LEGO) and responses varied from positive to very positive.
Suzanne has been encouraging me to go in this direction for some time now
and I’m very excited about what this means for everyone.
I am still working hard on my book
project, which is coming along nicely but is needing all of my free time.
When explaining this to someone this past weekend, I suddenly realized that
the book project had become the first priority in my LEGO life and that
LUGNET had slowly become the second priority. I don’t think that’s healthy
for LUGNET, and so...
The time has come to open up LUGNET and entrust it to the community.
I want to take LUGNET through a two-part transition, essentially metamorphising
it first from a monarchy into an oligarchy, and then from an oligarchy into the
analagous online form of a representational democracy or a constitutional
republic.
In the short term, this means that this week I’m assembling an ad hoc
advisory committee. Those people are Steve Barile, Tim Courtney, Frank Filz,
Suzanne Green, Christina Hitchcock, Kelly McKiernan, Matthew Miller,
and Larry Pieniazek, and their job is to help me with the first step of the
transition.
The first step includes interesting things like laying the basic foundations for
the second step, setting up a new server with multiple user accounts for
developers, and rethinking LUGNET’s ToS, as well as a lot of boring things like
how to turn LUGNET into, say, an LLC or a non-profit organization.
In the long term, the second step means that the community will choose who
will be running the show. We will need to define “the community” carefully
and clearly, as well as what “running the show” means; just because
something is community-owned or community-run doesn’t necessarily mean
that everyone gets to participate in every single decision. The desired
outcome, rather, is a system in which people are elected and/or appointed
to various positions for various amounts of time, and are entrusted with
decision making and task execution. LUGNET needs, for example, a treasurer.
Moving forward, I’d also like to see much closer relationships between LUGNET
and other umbrella organizations such as ILTCO, SciBrick, FLL, etc., as well
as community sites internationally such as 1000steine.de, and I can imagine
there being representatives from each of these organizations to make sure
their individual interests are kept in balance. Our community is finally
large enough for this to make sense.
In catching up on discussions from over the weekend, it seems like it might also
be a good time to think about releasing LUGNET’s source code under GPL and its
content under OCL, since one of the largest concerns about LUGNET being
privately held is what happens to such things in a disaster scenario.
There are innumerable details yet to be worked out on many levels, but I
hope that I’ve given you a reasonable overview and have communicated the
gist of what lies ahead. People convinced me this past weekend that LUGNET
has the strength and momentum to make this transition and emerge from it
thriving.
Finally, please rest assured that I’m not about to abandon the community or
any of my current LUGNET duties. I’m looking to reduce my involvement
proportionally to increasing others’ involvement. By the end of March I
want the hand-off to be essentially complete. With any luck maybe I’ll even
be able to build a MOC to take to BrickFest DC in August. :) I’ve got a
LEGO room with 12 linear feet of storage containers stacked 4 feet tall and
filled with LEGO and I haven’t built a darn thing in over a year.
--Todd
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