User:Doug/2025 position system proposal

Current

The position system is described:

• canonically in the constitution: https://kanthaus.online/en/governance/constitution#positions
  • with a kind of more readable description here https://kanthaus.online/en/governance/positionsandevaluations (which is duplicated on this wiki: Positions and evaluations)
  • our implementation involves the maintenance of the Residence record

Closely connected are the various additional documents and structures regarding visitors:

• linked from the constitution, the "Visiting" website page: https://kanthaus.online/en/about/visiting
  • which links to a pretty old document I wrote named "Visitour": https://kanthaus.online/en/about/visiting/visitour
• the collective agreements has a section on "Hosting Duty": https://kanthaus.online/en/governance/collectiveagreements
• this wiki has a pretty empty page Newbie induction
• 3 additional printed documents lying in a folder on my desk
• certainly other reflections...

Issues with current

• the existence of the residence record presents a noteworthy privacy risk, adds cognitive load to those considering pseudonyms and others recalling them
• access to the residence record creates an additional dimension of social hierarchy (must be given private git access) and technical hierarchy (empowerment to navigate plain text in sourceforge context)
• the maintenance of the residence record is reproductive work of relatively high complexity, making it hard to pass on and error-prone
• the residence record and scripts built on top of it introduce a level of technical complexity and in the current form, brittleness (e.g. if residence record not up to date and correctly formatted at time of CoMe, results in error)
• known-and-trusted people with the visitor position "should be evaluated (§6.) as soon as possible after they have cumulatively spent 3 weeks (21 days) at Kanthaus (since their last evaluation, if applicable)" even though unnecessary—this can be an emotional load, to know that you are technically "due for evaluation" as soon as you come back, and provides an incentive to deviate from the formal structure
• until now, 88 of 384 evaluations (~22%) of evaluations were visitors applying to remain visitors, may or may not have been unnecessary

Proposed changes

• Eliminate the residence record
• Evaluation periodicity for volunteers and members based exclusively on time since last evaluation. (e.g. "A Volunteer should have their next evaluation in the period starting 2 months (60 days) after their last evaluation up to a deadline of 6 months (120 days) after their last evaluation.")
• No scheduled evaluations for visitors 😱 instead:
  • hosts required to enter visitor residence periods > 2 days into people calendar (expected already really)
  • we expect all hosts to check-in with their visitors once a week
    • up to one other vol-mem can and preferably should join
    • informal
    • simply announced that they should happen at CoMe
    • should cover:
      • residence intentions (e.g. just another week? wanting to stay-stay?)
      • needs and contributions
      • issues
    • host writes summary message to ~vol-and-mem
  • 3 check-ins (i.e. at least 3 weeks) required to apply for volunteer, evidenced by host messages
  • host must change after 3 separate visits or 3 weeks continuous residence

Comments

The position system is a complex beast with incredible inertia. That is has inertia is obvious: it outlines our formal rules for power. But I honestly believe a lot of the complexity was a result of much more nerdy/techy culture at the beginning of Kanthaus, where the idealistic urge to create pure, crystalline structures was much stronger, which has now been tamed by the messy reality of human community.

I think I outlined my motivations, but for transparency: partly to reduce (complex) reproductive work, largely to reduce governance complexity and the technical implementation thereof, to eliminate a privacy risk (or at least reduce the granularity of it: Mattermost presence can still be used for triangulation) and—hopefully—to improve on-boarding and empowerment of visitors.

The specific implementation of this would require changes to Constitution, Collective Agreements, Visitor page and whatever the canonical visitor checklist is—a significant unit of work 🥲