Edit: Resolution 001-1 passes 24-8
Note: this is an RPG/LARP thing that some of us are interested in messing around with. Original inspiration here: https://hexbear.net/post/226706
Summary
This resolution will establish provisional bylaws to establish the Hexbear People's Committee. The committee is tasked with developing the necessary structure to form a Party that will be capable of representing the territory of Hexbear.
The territory of Hexbear has a population of 21,491, currently only occupying virtual space. The ruling class is a "benevolent trust" that has some transparency, and is widely popular with the territory's population. However, there is a lack of democratic mechanisms in the territory, and a Party would be able to provide a forum and structure to ensure that the population has a strong and clear voice.
Actions
@hexbear_partisan, will chair the People's Committee and guide it through a series of pass or don't pass votes. Anyone with hexbear.net account is welcome to join and vote in committee discussions.
Votes will be cast using comment votes, with the Committee chair creating a "Pass" and "Don't Pass" comment on each resolution. In case of a "Don't Pass" vote, the resolution will be revised until a "Pass" majority can be achieved. A minimum of 5 votes is needed to pass a resolution.
Schedule
The following topics will need to be voted on and resolved before the Party can be incorporated:
- Party roles/positions
- How to appoint and recall Party roles/positions
- How a resolution is drafted and put up for a vote.
- How a resolution is voted on.
- How the Party canon is managed.
- Incorporating the above into a draft set of Party bylaws.
The current plan will be to have one day of initial discussion about a topic, after which the Committee Chair will draft a resolution which will be open for one day of voting. In general, one "discussion post" and one "resolution vote" post will happen in parallel. This schedule will change depending on offline requirements of the Committee leadership.
Provisional Code of Conduct
The committee takes its mission of representing the territory of Hexbear in earnest, and as such memes and jokes in Committee/Party related threads are not allowed. Any such topics including meta-discussions can happen elsewhere on the site.
Committee members are advised to address one another as "Comrade [name]" when replying to one another, as a matter of decorum.
Process
This post will serve as both the voting and discussion threads on the topic of creating a Peoples' Committee. Voting will conclude when this post is 12 hours old, at 05:00 UTC.
This reminds me of a point Matt made on a cushvlog probably years ago when defining “the grillpill.” It was something along the lines that most of us - because we’re terminally online - are constructing world encompassing models that only make sense to us individually. He used the metaphor of building a ship in a bottle, knowing it would soon flood, rather than going out and perfecting our individual craft of rigging, or sailing, or what have you so that when the flood comes we can collectively pool our abilities to create a ship in the moment when we need it.
That’s a long way to say that this fascinates me that rather than emerging into the world to find where our individual components fit into it we’re instead now collectively building a ship in a bottle. It’s incredible, it’s perverse, I love it and I hate it at the same time. Let’s go team! WOOOOOOOOOOOO
As a firm backer of the Hexbear Party experiment I see your point, but I've decided to approach this from a completely different angle.
The way I see it, this is not meant as an alternative to, much less an example of Real organizing. Obviously every single individual here who's able to should put aside any excuse not to organize and then do it however they can. This should be literally everyone's TOP PRIORITY, including over any of this. I wish I could crawl through every user's screen Ring-style and shout some variation of that into their faces, if they havent already heard it.
This little roleplay is partly for fun, but just as much a user-led experiment to build a hypothetical well-structured "party" and learn from the ensuing mistakes and successes. In turn, we can all use that knowledge and experience to some extent in real life organizing (again, TOP PRIORITY). It's not meant to take much effort, certainly not enough to get in the way of real praxis.
Besides a neat LARP, what I see it as (or hope it turns into) is a small-scale educational model of sorts, with results we can measure, compare, and interpret into something that's still useful when we log off. Thats why I think we should put serious thought into the research especially. By summarizing points made in discussions, creating some interesting scenarios for the "party" to handle, analyzing the results, and learning from any failure, I honestly believe there's merit to doing this.
Another reason this could be useful is that not everyone here is on the same page abt how to successfully organize or how to behave within an org. This may not get everyone to agree, but can at least give a number of users a baseline idea of how things work. I have a feeling the most crucial insights will come from the meta research though.
In an earlier thread I called this "controlled LARPing." That's to say, RPing in a semi-realistic controlled environment instead of IRL, simply to study the outcomes. Better to discover obstacles to unity now in Regime Simulator 2022 than when you're face-to-face with comrades keeping a real org alive.
No one really knows the way forward, and there is no one way forward, so the least we can do while lurking this site is put our heads together to get some idea of what works and what doesnt.