admin blues

<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.”

3 thoughts on “admin blues”

  1. 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.

    1. 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!

      1. 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.

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