Headmincharter v19

[conrad]

I am totally stealing this question from spookuni 'cos I think it was really interesting.

What will be your preferred established charter for the upcoming term if you are elected?

Clarifying from spook's same question last election:

A standard part of headmin team formation is the establishment of a formal (or informal) 'charter', which is just the general setup all of the headmins agree to abide by when making decisions / doing headmin stuff.

As an example, this is the charter from our (Rave/San/Spook) term

Policy: Informed
Complaints: Informed, action taken against an admin by upheld complaint unanimous
Ban appeals: Uninformed
Candidacy Acceptance: Unanimous
AC -> Trial: old system (Unanimous to pass, extend trial on majority)
TA -> GA: old system (Unanimous to pass, extend trial on majority)
GA -> special: Unanimous
Deadminning: Unanimous
Batcaves: Uninformed (batcaves are private discussions between headmins and specific admins for anything from promotion to review to explanations as to the decision to deadmin someone)
For AC -> TA promotions, and policy discussions, if a headmin goes fully radio silent for longer than two weeks, move to uninformed voting, with the same caveat for AC promotion delays if it's 1 yay 1 nay

Where
Single - headmins can do whatever
Uninformed - a simple majority of headmins can take action, whenever
Informed - a majority of headmins can take action, but all headmins should get a chance to state their opinions
Unanimous - totality of headmin support is required

I'd like to see what ideas you bounce off each other in this and why (and I think this is a fun question to ask as well each election)

[kinnebian]

Itd be impossible to actually predict as the charter is something all 3 headmins would have to agree on, but I'd like for Uninformed or Single for Ban appeals , Batcaves and AC-TA

[Timberpoes]

Single is unlikely to work in practice for ban appeals, without caveats, since if the other two headmins disagree they will "double single" to overturn it. The same for promotions.

You'll often find as the headmins figure out their combined working styles that individual headmins get trusted more. More flexibility to work individually. This was the case with me and appeals in both my terms.

In that sense the charter tends to be a starting point, and in moments of need it'll be broken to get things done, as well as amended if it's not working out.

[TheRex9001]

I'd wanna work together with the other headmins on this one. I feel like a charter is pretty important and not something one holier than thou should decide.

[Tegun]

The example charter looks pretty good. Policy, complaint and ban appeal related stuff should have some leniency towards uninformed and single, obvious examples being a batshit insane complaint with no basis on reality. Debating a one day ban for two weeks might not be time well spent, and if it takes two weeks, it probably is worth leaving as a note.

Admin candidate to trial admin promotion should probably be single, we're picky with both admins and trainers so we'd probably hear if the candidate made any death threats towards players in their training tickets without having to look into it with 3 headmins. It's being candidated in the first place and the trial period which count. On the other hand we're not exactly drowning under a pile of candymins needing their promotions, so the extra attention is affordable.

[Timberpoes]

Be cautious with suggesting single headmin for decisions without thinking what a single vote winning means in practice.

You just promoted someone to trial under single vote, but both your co-headmins think they are not ready yet and need a bit more time and training. What does your term do?

Get into an argument? Demote the candidate back to trial? Start an actual race to the bottom where someone logs on at 1 second past the week mark to beat the other headmins to the punch in promoting?

Single can never be an option for positive decisions, because you have to decide which headmin wins.

Is it the first to make a decision, creating a competition between the headmins to be the first to decide on behalf of the others?
Is it the first to approve of something, allowing any single headmin that says yes to overrule both other headmins saying no?
Is it the first to say no to a change, re-creating unanimous votes by accident?

Of those three, there's only really one reasonable implementation and that's the one accidentially mimicing unanimous - the veto power where all three must say yes and even one no vote means the vote fails to pass. That's more for negative decisions - i.e. a single person can decide the headmin team doesn't perform an action rather than deciding they can.

[Tegun]

You just promoted someone to trial under single vote, but both your co-headmins think they are not ready yet and need a bit more time and training. What does your term do?

What's to be gained by extending candidacy? A couple of training tickets and being shown the buttons is not much to evaluate a person by, a ton of their focus and effort goes on getting even the basic stuff done in a timely manner. Of course my line of thinking here comes with a whole bunch of assumptions, and as we all know assuming things is bad, but candidacy is usually a very short period where the biggest selection was already done at becoming a candidate. Unless their trainer starts DMing things like "I've created a monster", I don't see a reason to not send them further and evaluating them based on more interactions. One of the many assumptions here is also that other headmins would see it that way and nobody would be rushing to prevent them becoming a trialmin, which would beg the question of why they were a candidate in the first place then. Perhaps something of an issue with candidates from an earlier term. On the other hand, while I do see it mostly as a tiny step, the trialmin role does come with a bunch of goodies and the value of gatekeeping it might come from things other than making sure players get treated well. I try to talk like a nihilist but by the end of this paragraph I find myself thinking I am naive and trust people too much.

You bring up some very important stuff about single headmin decisions though, but as you said earlier knowing your fellow headmins makes it easier to bend the charter. It's one of those things where you have to have a really good feel about the issue and what the others might think about it, and you might still get it wrong. Other aspects are of course how big of a deal the issue is and how urgent it is. Takes a lot of mutual respect. If the headmins were somehow really antagonistic towards each other it'd probably be a good time to set everything to unanimous and start a metacord to talk about how unreasonable the others are.

[Timberpoes]

Keep in mind you're going to be part of a team and will need to work with people that have higher or lower standards to you. That's going to lead to disagreement. The charter's key purpose is as a social contract setting out what each team member expects to happen in cases of disagreement - If everyone agrees, the charter doesn't really matter.

So in the hypothetical case of admin promotions during training, extending is usually a compromise step that comes as an alternative to failing. The goal is to give feedback and then allow time for that feedback to show fruit, when the candidate is otherwise below the standards of promotion.

You may not care that a candidate opens their tickets too aggressively with a choice "What are you doing fucko?" or "Why the fuck did you do that?" - but if the other headmins do care and think feedback plus another week as candidate will be useful then the charter exists to figure out who wins.

This same logic can pretty much be applied to every headmin decision. That's why single vote is very difficult in practice and limited to veto via unanimous voting. It makes a topic more about the individual headmin rather than about the headmin team. Thus unanimous tends to get saved for almost exlcusively promotions, demotions and upholding admin complaints as these tend to be """serious""" in nature and require a unified headmin team. An admin once promoted is not trivially demoted. A conduct strike once upheld is not easily overturned if it turned out to be incorrect later. Consider how long and how much effort it took for the last super major conduct issue - that's super secret and admin only and it's on the admin forums you know the one it's that one - to be solved.

If any of that makes sense?

[dragomagol]

Policy: Informed
Complaints: Informed, action taken against an admin by upheld complaint unanimous
Ban appeals: Uninformed
Candidacy Acceptance: Unanimous
AC -> Trial: old system (Unanimous to pass, extend trial on majority)
TA -> GA: old system (Unanimous to pass, extend trial on majority)
GA -> special: Unanimous
Deadminning: Unanimous
Batcaves: Uninformed (batcaves are private discussions between headmins and specific admins for anything from promotion to review to explanations as to the decision to deadmin someone)
For AC -> TA promotions, and policy discussions, if a headmin goes fully radio silent for longer than two weeks, move to uninformed voting, with the same caveat for AC promotion delays if it's 1 yay 1 nay

Honestly this seems fine to me, and more or less what I did in my first term. There's no reason this needs to be set in stone, so if issue came up later in the term with this, I would be open to re-negotiation.