Mainsite Mirror of this thread on O5.
Note: Take a look at the "Policy and Voting" section of this prior to reading the proposal, otherwise it won't make any sense.
As requested, bringing the conversation on why we don't post more on O5 to O5.
It's come up several times in staffchat that, even setting aside the benefits of making things public, many discussions would be much easier to follow if they took place on O5 rather than Discord. It has also come up that people feel that a certain level of polish, official approval and formality is required for an O5 Discussion, and so conversations stay on Discord even though the majority of people would like to move it to this forum.
I can't do much about this, but I can suggest the creation of a new subforum.
We'd leave this "Policy Discussion" forum as it is, for formal discussion of policy proposals. We should edit the description to "Discussion & Debate on policy proposals to enable Staff to serve the community better." This is the place for the formal Policy discussions described in the site charter, which can result in changes to policy if nobody objects, or can be advanced to a vote.
We also create another forum for "Informal Discussion", as a space for "Staff conversations on potential policy solutions to problems". I'm not sure exactly how this should work, I think we'll find out as we go, but the basic idea is that this is specifically for formulating ideas - nobody is expected to have all the details worked out, or even to have decided on a policy to address it. It's for highlighting specific problems and asking the rest of us if we have any ideas. This is the kind of thing Discord is great for when there's only a few of you present, so I'm not saying all of these conversations will need to take place here, but often you need to get broader input and that's when long discord threads can be very difficult to recap and contribute to. Let's try bringing some of those conversations here - it's the kind of place I'd have put this thread since it wasn't an attempt to create policy directly, it was instead just a useful way to poll staff on what they thought the best solution was.
Nothing in these informal discussions would be implemented without a proper Policy Discussion as follow-up, so nobody on staff or in the community should feel obliged to follow or get involved if they don't want to. I'm rather indifferent as to whether or not we require a mainsite mirror for these threads, but I think it's probably best to play it safe and still create one, just in case the community has a useful input on the topic.
I figure this is worth a try, it's a pretty minor change but it should make people more willing to try stuff out on O5. Unless there are any serious objections to trying this, I figure I can just ask someone with the appropriate permissions to make the changes in a weeks time.
