As long as we can have the discussion, I feel like we can kinda snake by without any bans here. We need to be vigilant about this type of stuff in the future. Get a consensus plan documented ITT and use it going forward.

God damnit, Mods delete the bot reply pls

I know that this is very serious, but in the interest of brevity (since you all know what I mean) this situation is an opportunity to appreciate the :volcel-police: culture on the site.

I'm incredibly thankful that this isn't something that transpired between two people on this site, cause it could easily happen in a lot of online spaces and really fuck shit up. II think it's a bit harder of an environment here for that sort of thing to pop up, and I think we should keep it that way.

It's also worth reflecting upon in offline interactions. Let's do good things for people in our community and not get distracted by all kinds of "fucking" drama. Easy for me to say, but sure, I have my own issues that hold me back (we can get into drug and alcohol use etc... as well). Just saying the post has me reflecting and writing some neo-Maoist comradely wisdom into my "Little Red Book 2nd Edition". Maybe it's trash anyway.

Happy you could hang out with us, my friend

more and more people are saying this

Love chatting with you all, but hoping we can gather round and have a nice low-energy thread, take a break from the memes and the struggle sessions

We had a subscriber list going, but I guess comments more than 4 weeks old are inaccessible? Sorry about that...

@Grimble @LiberalSocialist please see my draft below and the parent comment for context (not sure if I could ping you with an edit). Others welcome to give feedback, as always.

Party Chair

• The Party chair is primarily responsible for facilitating votes on resolutions, and documenting the outcomes of votes.

Selecting the Chair

• An election nomination and discussion thread will be posted in c/ttrpg.
• Any Party member may nominate themselves, or another Party member in a root comment in that thread.
• The top two nominees, plus anyone who received more than 10 upvotes on their nomination will take part in the election.
• The election facilitator will be the sitting chair. If the position is vacant, the nominees must decide on a facilitator with a majority vote.
• The election facilitator will conduct a STAR election of all nominees.

Chair rules

• The incoming chair must declare their term, the maximum of which is 90 days.
• The incoming chair must always be a Party member. If membership status is revoked, so is their position as chair.
• The chair's term can be extended by up to one month by a "Vote of Confidence" resolution.
• The chair's term can be terminated immediately by a "Vote of No Confidence" resolution. A Vote of No Confidence must name an interim Chair/election facilitator.

Chair responsibilities

• The chair must facilitate the Resolution process as described in this document below.
• The chair must facilitate elections and transitions of power as stated in the "Selecting the Chair" section above.
• The chair must document the outcome of resolution votes. This can be done in any manner on c/ttrpg.

Party Resolutions

Thread definitions

• Resolutions are drafted and nominated in party discussion thread posted to c/ttrpg by the chair.
• If a party discussion thread is over three weeks old, or has over 1000 comments, the chair must post a new one.
• Resolutions can also be drafted and nominated in draft resolution threads that are less than three weeks old. The chair may choose to post a draft resolution thread for better organization of discussion, but it is not required.
• Only Party members can draft resolutions.
• A draft resolution must be put to a vote if nominated by at least 5 Party members.
• A reply to a draft resolution containing the phrase !#Pass is considered a nomination.

Resolution votes

• A voting thread for a resolution will be posted by the chair to c/ttrpg.
• The chair will post a "voting" root comment in the thread with three subcomments: "Pass", "Don't Pass", and "Abstain".
• The subcomment that receives the most votes determines the outcome.

ToDos

The committee still has to figure out these things, but I don't want to get bogged down in them quite yet:

• Code of Conduct (can just rely on the site CoC for the most part)
• Resolution format

I've come up with a draft resolution, here is the way I see things:

I think that it would be ideal for the Committee to detail structure and processes and bylaws as closely as possible in advance, but I think it's going to be easier and more effective to keep it incredibly slim and build things out once the Party is incorporated. Let's throw down a basic Resolution process so that we can get some people having fun with it. Those of us who want to get in on dialing in the process can do so, and anyone who wants to debate a resolution pledging allegiance to Putin out of pure contrarianism can do that at the same time without waiting for us to figure it all out beforehand.

So, Resolutions are the foundation of the party and will represent the voice of all Party members. The primary goal of the resolution process is to represent the voice of the membership as closely as possible. They are intended to be powerful enough to rewrite the resolution process itself in the future, as the Party matures to suit its electorate. We can add other democratic mechanisms as we desire (or less democratic, if we decide to do so democratically).

We can have a Chair position. Their purpose is to properly format and post resolutions, and document the outcomes of the votes. That's it unless the Party passes resolutions expanding their powers or creating new positions. We should use STAR voting unless somebody is strongly against doing that.

The term of the Chair can be extended by up to one month by a "Vote of Confidence" resolution passed within 5 days of their term expiring. A "Vote of No Confidence" Resolution will trigger the immediate termination of the sitting Chair, and a new election will take place. A Vote of No Confidence must name an interim Chair whose sole responsibility is to facilitate a free and fair election of the replacement.

Resolutions must be drafted in the Party's "General Discussion" thread in c/ttrpg. A drafted resolution that receives more than 5 Party Members who reply to the with the phrase !#Pass in them must be put to a vote by the Chair. The Chair will post the resolution as a thread in c/ttrpg, and make a root voting comment, followed by three subcomments: "Pass", "Don't Pass", and "Abstain". The subcomment that gets the most votes determines the outcome.

Do you mean strictly “referendum” here, as is understood to be “a general vote by the electorate on a single political question that has been referred to them for a direct decision.”

Sorry I crossed "Resolution" (which would be through internal party process) vs "Referendum" (like you said, an electorate driven process). I think there's a place for both processes to exist in parallel.

Like with many topics, we can start with a "Resolution" process, and later pass a Resolution that establishes a "Referendum" process.

for a referendum by the general Hexbear populace can appear before the Committee (via a post)

The Committee will dissolve once the Party is incorporated, its only purpose is to create the Party. I am thinking that for a "Referendum" there is a petitioning process (a draft of the Referendum must get "x" upvotes to be put to a vote, but what is x?).

I'm in agreement with your last two responses. I do want to distinguish between "Chair of the Committee" (me) and "Chair of the Party" (voted on later, may be me, but I'd love to see it be someone else). I was leaning toward the role of the Chair to primarily be formatting Resolutions/Proposals and putting them up for a vote based on the decided process. The Chair has no veto power and is duty-bound to follow the democratic process, but then you get into the technical details about how to hold a vote of no-confidence outside of their purview. Maybe that's taking it a layer too deep.

Absolutely agree, I originated this concept myself, but I don't want to put it on rails toward anything in particular, so I wanted to see how this initial discussion thread would evolve. My feeling is that some people are less interested in these initial stages and we'll pick up some momentum once we incorporate the "Party", and start telling our story.

Part of this is a balance between spamming the site with our own niche activity (which will tick off the BC), and posting to generate activity. Hopefully the three of us can draft a Resolution that people can discuss. Easier for people to dogpile a draft Resolution that may have issues than it is to create one, which should generate some participation. I've been tied up with some offline stuff this week, but I may have time tonight or tomorrow morning to write something up that we can put to a vote, if reading this wants to do the same based on the comments in this discussion post, they're more than welcome (post it in this thread so we can review it before putting it to a vote).

I definitely understand your mindset as we work through this, Comrade @Grimble, party infiltration and wrecking were things that Comrade @LiberalSocialist discussed in both of your most recent replies. From my perspective, I think it's worth taking a step back and examining the conditions under which the Party will exist:

In contrast to many of the movements of the past which might inspire us, our small online territory is nearly unanimously neutral or friendly to our cause. The Hexbearians (??) are relatively content to be under the leadership of the "benevolent council" (aka "admins"), and it seems to be working out so far. It is key to acknowledge that the rulers of our environment are not in opposition to our Party as they are in so many other places (whether historically, current, online or offline). How fortunate this is for us! I can only imagine that security forces of the BC (mods) would clear out explicit expressions of reactionary sentiment during a Party vote or discussion for us, would they not?

My inspiration for leading the effort to create this party is not that there are reactionary elements on Hexbear that must be defeated (certainly "quelled" to the extent that they may exist, but it's already a nominally communist website/territory). I think that it's time to give ourselves a voice! Let's experiment with the democratic process to bring our humble territory of Hexbear.net to something more than a simple shitposting corner of the internet!

For roles and positions I think it makes sense to add them as necessary

I think this is a core point that the three of us involved in the discussion (so far, others please contribute) agree on. Everything else you said is relevant, but could be postponed for future discussions or resolutions. I think that we need to figure out what is absolutely necessary (perhaps even "no positions, only process") to get this started. If we can get something minimal bootstrapped, participation in the Party will likely increase. Maybe we should orient more toward process, and the roles (if any) will reveal themselves in that discussion.

I guess I have three questions for you, Comrade @Grimble , and any other participants in committee discussions (as a reminder, anyone with an account is welcome to participate) :

• What should the process be for drafting a referendum? (open to discussing terms besides "referendum" too)
• What should be the process for voting on a referendum that has been drafted?
• Are there any leadership roles that are absolutely necessary to the process?

I am thinking that as long as the process allows for editing the process, everything will be ok once we get going. Both you and Comrade @Grimble appear to have understandable concerns about protecting the integrity of the process, which I will discuss in a reply below.

I think technically they're both grammatically correct, but the implication is different for each one. People's probably makes the most sense though

My opinion is that we hold on to this one until we are able to create some sort of propaganda department lol

A question I asked myself when naming the Committee: "People's" or "Peoples'"

I'm not opposed to diverging from the "Hexbear" terminology altogether, but it obviously makes sense to stick with it and go with "Hexbear People's Party" or something as well.

I read your post, and I would be interested to see how you would envision a set of roles and positions. Comrade @Grimble and I seem to agree that we should keep the set of titles pretty slim to start out with, but we could provision them early on and leave them unfilled until a certain point in the future. I do think that for our purposes simpler is going to be better. I think we want to keep Party business accessible to our comrades who want to drop in and participate in the occasional discussion, and too much bureaucracy and process could stifle that.

I believe every Hexbear citizen should be automatically made a Party member.

This seems broad, and I think we would need to define that more in depth. Is everyone with a Hexbear account granted citizenship AND membership status? Is it only true initially, or are future accounts granted citizenship and membership as well? Who will manage membership records and how?

i have my own thoughts on some of these, but I think that the logistics are what can really kill us.

The good news is that reactionary causes have failed to derail us, and Committee Resolution 001-1 has passed, so we officially exist as a committee now.

I'll say that as a leader I would likely get purged for for not doing enough to effectively resist counter-revolution. I think we are fortunate enough to exist in an overall sympathetic political environment so it will hopefully never come to that, but it's something that the rest of the Committee should keep in mind going forward.