<rant>
It’s all pretty depressing.
I try to be a competent and fair and innovative admin on OpenGeofiction.
Half the users hate me – I know this for an actual fact, because I see what gets said on the OGF unofficial discord channel.
And now I’m feuding with the “boss” too. I can’t win – I’m stuck in the middle. I’m not paid for this. So why am I doing it?
Perhaps I should go back to trying to build my own geofiction server and forget this. Although I derive a lot of motivation and inspiration from the OGF community, trying to be an engaged and active member feels like more suffering than benefit, some days. I would do better to not try to change or “fix” things, but that’s not in my character.
I don’t know if the creator of OGF and I really share much in terms of vision. To initial appearances, he seems committed to the “open-” part of the name, and to open source projects and concepts. Yet upon further examination, he seems utterly uninterested in trying to go anywhere toward working out a more scalable and/or sustainable governance model for the site. And for any sizable internet community (or real community for that matter), governance is actually important. So in the end, it’s just a personal fiefdom. I can feel sympathetic to that… – that’s probably how I would set my own site up. But then, what’s the “open” about? Is it just because he used the OSM stack? It feels like false advertising: “Bait and switch.”
This is just a rant.
</rant>
Music to admin by: Robbie Fulks, “America Is A Hard Religion.”
I have to agree with you Luciano: the lack of a structure or plan for OGF means that it can’t evolve and it continues to go down the route of being a sketch pad for scribbling on rather than the work of art it could be.
It’s more complicated than that, though. Some people (perhaps the majority of OGF users) ONLY want a scratchpad, after all.
So what’s really needed is a kind of “meta” plan (not just a world plan, but rather a site-governance plan) that allows room for the scratchpadders and the world-builders to co-exist within the same service – whether that means a segregated map, or two maps, or what, I’m not sure.
My current conflict is about whether FSA and Archanta more generally couldn’t provide a kind of low-quality “scratchpad-land”, so that the rest of the world can move forward.
From a true, comprehensive world-building standpoint, perhaps what’s needed is an invitation-only planned world, built in the right order: geology -> ecology -> history -> communities -> motorways!
Yes. Logically, you’d have the artwork and the sketchpad in different places. They have to be different worlds – or you end up with scribbles on part of your painting. .
Structuring the approach would also be important. A governance model that allows creativity within defined parameters and with major decisions agreed by consensus.