Run it as a business owned by a few people will probably work for a while - but what happens if the owners change their minds? Or get bored? Or hit by a bus? Imagine a community site owned by it's users, run in the cloud. It could continue to exist as long as it had users, and grow beyond its original founders - become something far greater.
I've seen this happen with small communities. The Clock Crew, particularly, has had a number of sites for the same community since 2001. At this point it's pretty much just a bunch of old regulars hanging out on the last site that was left up and a couple of chat rooms, but when things were moving along you might even have two or more significantly active sites at a time. Sometimes you've got to change sites and the guy who owns the old domain disappeared for a few years so you register under something else. There was a while, though, where we had one site on one server and it changed hands several times. We never really had a system for it, though. A site would go down or people would get banned or get sick of the current staff and branch off or whatever. Eventually we got democracy and things honestly kind of stagnated, but that was a bit of a different situation and I think it'd work better for something like Hubski.
Whether that's what the Hubski admins want to do with this or not is a different question.
It'd definitely be cool to have something with a sort of decentralized ownership system ensuring that the best interests of the users would always be served regardless of economic incentives placed on possible future management a decade or whatever down the road when they go into something else.
Awesome! That's good to hear! I'd definitely make sure to set some controls in your charter that limit the changes able to be made by future admins down the road. You don't want some future iteration of your staff to up and decide to take over and monetize or give some advertisers special treatment in exchange for some money on the side. What you've already done with sharing and filtering basically puts users into a system where they're encouraged to act in a certain way. If you can find a way to extend something like that to future administrators, you could have your hands on something that it's really hard to corrupt. I guess the first thing you've got to do in that case is ask yourself what admins are capable of or might be capable of in the future and what they should be capable of to keep the site healthy, the users content, and the ball rolling. Then you've got to cement that philosophy into place in your charter and make it either impossible or incredibly difficult to change. Is it possible to make a charter for a non-profit that's legally binding? Barring that, maybe some oversight can be put into place that has the authority to remove admins who disregard the charter? Say you get tired of administrating hubski a few years from now and pass the torch on to someone else. Well, instead of actually completely passing the torch you can give over the every-day functioning of the site and what not but retain control passively simply in case of an emergency situation where the charter has been ignored and you need to change things back to normal. This situation, of course, assumes that you won't sell the site a few years down the road for a huge sum of money. I'm not really sure of a contingency for that. A legally binding charter, if that's even possible, would be the ideal solution I'd think.
Interesting thoughts. I would think with a talented lawyer, we could create something in the form of what we are looking for. Currently, our goal is to meet these technical scaling challenges. Also, we still have a long way to go before Hubski is what we envision it to be. One of the drawbacks of this kind of governance will be that although likely be good for stability, it will not very effective at executing vision that deviates much from the status quo. Speaking for myself, I am no where near burn out, and I plan to carry this ball quite a bit further.
Well, you can always set up the governance in a way that separates the meat of continuing to add to the site in order to advance what it should become and dealing with users and policy. In any event, this is long-term. Obviously with your vision for the site you want to run with that and do everything you can. I can tell from the way you've set things up that you want to make something that's got some real integrity and I don't see you deviating from that path, I'm more talking about way down the road. The one thing you might want to do to protect your project from yourself is make something that protects it from being sold to some huge company that doesn't care about your ideals, unless you can somehow legally hold them to the charter. But we've had situations before where we had coders and what not who had very little to do with the every-day running of the site in terms of user related stuff. It was really best when they were kept above the internal politics of the staff and of the site at large. Again, though, this is basically several 'generations' of staff members after the first site, we're talking years later. The members of the original staff that we did still have on board were exactly those guys I described. They'd sit back, work on their project, let the young guns handle the users and argue about policy with one another, and work on cool additions to the site or occasionally swoop in to set things right when the staff is a shit show. We actually had a guy who was still around in that later capacity years after he stopped coding stuff for the site. It's not a bad contingency. Of course this is all from a site that had about 1000 active users at its peak. If Hubski ends up scaling up to something much larger than that, it's a pretty different ballpark. I would think the same principles should still apply to the staff though. But yeah, that's all a long way off. The best way to have things is to keep the founders in there, active, and giving a shit as long as humanly possible. You're going to have a better idea of your vision for the site than someone who just wanders in thinking "oh, cool, huge internet community" after things take off. Even then, you should watch out for admins who don't understand your vision of the site. You don't want to allow them to undermine it. Even when you're around I'd imagine you'll eventually need some help if the site gets huge. Although honestly, I've never seen a site with this sort of design before. The worst a new admin could do is, what, overzealously delete posts? That'd be pretty easy to review if it's at least just a soft delete. Are you guys having to delete a lot of spam as it is or do you mostly just let the filtering handle it?