Re the 'charter': I disagree with us needing a central governing set of rules as opposed to a guiding set of policy trees that can be malleable as we need it to. My biggest issue with the charter is that it's held aloft as a holier than thou document, a end all be all, and this leads to one of two outcomes: the charter is either religiously followed to the point where there is little room for interpretation by individual staffers, or it's just ignored or forgotten. This is because putting all our rules on one page is silly, it simeultaneously creates huge walls of legalese esque text with very little wiggle room for interpretation, and rigidly implies that the charter is the only thing that should be looked at/matters.

This is all good stuff and I'm 100% in your court here.

Shirk that. We don't need to refer to our rules as a charter, and I'd encourage we don't in order to shatter that cultural barrier. We also need to distribute our rules into sensible, categorized bites of policy and rules and guidelines for us to follow, rather than trying to jam everything into one dense place. Organize, categorize, navigability, those are extremely important when it comes to objective documentation of policy and rules. It allows people to go "See, this policy is here, and here are the rules for how to do this specific thing, right next to examples." as opposed to the current charter.

I've no strong opinions on naming schemes, but I do agree with the rest of this.

Is this part making sense? Am I explaining this well?

I'd say so!

The reviews will have to be staffwide, and I imagine that looking over each individual aspect is going to take time. You're right in that we maybe don't have to look at every nitty gritty detail, but we absolutely need to grab the broad and mid strokes of policy, staff-staff interactions, staff-community interactions, staff structure and hierarchy, and defitions.

For sure. I'll hold off on further questions till we get to the relevant point!

clearly everyone has vastly differing opinions on what the role of this thread is - half of the ongoing arguments are literally just people saying what they think the thread is for while other people disagree with them. i think this is Bad and we should instead not do this. instead, several (two) smaller discussions without as much already laid out should be created:

• what does a charter need to contain
• how exactly should the rewriting process happen
• and new threads created if different topics start to consume the old discussion, much like we'd do in staffchat

This thread will probably need to be redone, and I think it’s better going forward if the OP is kept just to bringing up the topic of discussion, and any notes should be relegated to a reply post on the same thread.

I think the major misunderstanding here is thinking that the original post has any authority whatsoever.

I'm going to be entirely honest with you I still have zero idea what the hell the OP is even saying.

Re the 'charter': I disagree with us needing a central governing set of rules as opposed to a guiding set of policy trees that can be malleable as we need it to. My biggest issue with the charter is that it's held aloft as a holier than thou document, a end all be all, and this leads to one of two outcomes: the charter is either religiously followed to the point where there is little room for interpretation by individual staffers, or it's just ignored or forgotten. This is because putting all our rules on one page is silly, it simeultaneously creates huge walls of legalese esque text with very little wiggle room for interpretation, and rigidly implies that the charter is the only thing that should be looked at/matters.

Shirk that. We don't need to refer to our rules as a charter, and I'd encourage we don't in order to shatter that cultural barrier. We also need to distribute our rules into sensible, categorized bites of policy and rules and guidelines for us to follow, rather than trying to jam everything into one dense place. Organize, categorize, navigability, those are extremely important when it comes to objective documentation of policy and rules. It allows people to go "See, this policy is here, and here are the rules for how to do this specific thing, right next to examples." as opposed to the current charter.

Is this part making sense? Am I explaining this well?

How do we plan on organising this review? What steps are we taking to ensure that this review does not go the way of every other charter attempt rewrite before it (and this would just be the review for starting the rewrite)? When do we know when such a review is finished and don't run into the coastline paradox?

The reviews will have to be staffwide, and I imagine that looking over each individual aspect is going to take time. You're right in that we maybe don't have to look at every nitty gritty detail, but we absolutely need to grab the broad and mid strokes of policy, staff-staff interactions, staff-community interactions, staff structure and hierarchy, and defitions.

In terms of a plan:

1. Gather information.
2. Collate in an unbiased, easy to digest way.
3. Examine how we would integrate elements into governing documents, wording, etc.
4. Determine from collated information what is/is not working under our current systems.
5. Discussions centered around solutions for what isn't working, how we can improve the given system.
6. Draft up wording based on discussions.
7. Review, edit, refine.

This is the process as I see it.

I'm going to lay out here as I have been saying in Mastcord why I think this process is so crucial.

Thank you for porting these thoughts - sincerely.

On many levels, right now, this is overwhelming and its entirely because no clear navigation and organization of policy was ever done before. Which means we have a broken system with no clear centralization or organizational scheme to really build from. The existing charter tried to do this, but it was at its core, a bandaid and half measure on what is really a chaotic mess of poorly understood and poorly reference policy works, that are loose and free floating. I'm fairly convinced this is why we have so much organizational drift, so much scope creep over the years. It's because nothing is clearly and easily linked together, the charter is dense, rushed in its writing, and put altogether in one big chunk.

Absolutely!

This is my opinion, but we need to toss aside the thought of a charter rewrite and completely and fundamentally rethink our approach. We don't need a charter, we need a policy tree, that serves a similar role to the charter, but carries none of the stigma of the term charter, and contains/lays out our policy in sensible, digestable chunks. This will allow us to make each piece of policy serve as reference points, easily navigable, linkable for new staff to review and understand, establish categorical crosslinks from policy page to policy page, etc. Breaking up policy and the charter like this gives us the advantage of creating tiered page systems where a given policy is not buried in walls of text.

I'm somewhat concerned by this statement because it seems to indicate that we can't even agree (we being the general staff body) what the charter is. A policy tree sounds like a more navigable thing, and I would much prefer it to a super dense document, but to me, the charter is more defined by being a governing set of rules than a specific presentation of those rules. A policy tree would be the charter, because it's the document from which (allegedly) our powers are derived.

But frankly? Our current system, our current structure for 05, staff reference points, and governing policy is utter trash. To begin to approach a rewrite, and thus establishing any kind of sensible organization we have to completely identify all our policies, our staff structure, our accountability systems, the definitions we are using and/or want to be using, what our teams look like, how we're interacting with each other and the community as opposed to how we think we should be, and what in the current charter might be salvageable as a beginning point.
…
Also to be clear, I think we need to reevaluate all our accountability systems in this process, evaluate the role of admins, captains, moderators, and operational staff, evaluate the team structures, evaluate the role of staff hierarchy, how we interact with the community and each other. Nothing should escape review, nothing should escape refinement and feedback.

I lumped these two together because they're of a piece here. I'm concerned about this approach, because, while I really strongly agree with the need for review on a lot of things that have been taken for granted, I think it's worth asking… How do we plan on organising this review? What steps are we taking to ensure that this review does not go the way of every other charter attempt rewrite before it (and this would just be the review for starting the rewrite)? When do we know when such a review is finished and don't run into the coastline paradox?

More importantly than the need for a review is a plan to ensure that such a review is carried out and completed in a "timely" manner. I imagine we'll be seeing a thread detailing the plan to go through such a review soon enough, and I will do my best to help and support when that happens, but for now I just wanted to hear that that's being worked on.

Edit Edit: I also want to clarify that several people have asked the question: Why didn't you just ask the question 'What should the Charter Be'. That's a question none of us can fully answer without assessing the context of what staff is, IE, all the things I've outlined above. If we don't fully break down every aspect of staff, we're never going to be able to create a fluid, sensible governing policy set which we can refer back to and change as we need to. We'll end up in the same place the current charter is right now. Once we understand the aspects of how staff is working, where it's breaking, where its succeeding, then we can rewrite the 'charter' or create a 'policy tree' based on our full assessment. Doing anything before that is setting us all up for failure.

I think I would personally disagree with this assessment. And I think you've hit upon a really important detail in this paragraph - the idea of "a fluid, sensible governing policy set which we can refer back to and change as we need to." That approach is way more important than making sure we understand every granular implementation of the aspect of staff! Context is necessary, but let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good!

We're not going to get this charter rewrite correct the first time. And that's ok! No one does. The important thing is that we lay a good groundwork that helps us along and sets us up well for addressing issues in the future.

(I'm not complaining about this, just pointing it out!)

Cool, so let's move on and talk about the charter. I'll pop back in once we are beginning the meat of this rewrite.

I find this an intensely unhelpful answer. This does nothing to help solidify the actual structure. Again, who are the key decision makers? How are we deciding them? How are decisions being made? These are all questions left unanswered in this skeleton.

I think the point of misunderstanding is that we are not designating any key decision makers, this is a whole staff effort guided by administrators who have a deep knowledge of policy working and policy formulation and who intend to put forward threads like this for discussion, debate, review, feedback, and editing. The whole point is to empower everyone within the staff body to evaluate every aspect of staff, assess, and draft governing policy that will last us moving forward.

Decisions will be made based on staff consensus after multiple rounds of discussion and editing until we reach a point where we're all satisfied.

Again, who are the key decision makers? How are we deciding them? How are decisions being made? These are all questions left unanswered in this skeleton.

I did not write this skeleton, but by virtue of my knowledge that we vote on charter edits as a democratic body and we are currently opening the floor with this very post to gauge and ask for the opinions of all staff including you and me, the answer is everyone. Decisions are made by a collective vote by everyone. Like, I'm being completely serious with this question, why are you missing this?

Let's fast forward to the point where you realize she was just stating her interest and passion for wanting to help and skip it.

Is this really a necessary response

I can answer this really quick. The answer is everyone. Done, mystery solved. We are a team working together to discuss and debate the best way of handling this rewrite.

I find this an intensely unhelpful answer. This does nothing to help solidify the actual structure. Again, who are the key decision makers? How are we deciding them? How are decisions being made? These are all questions left unanswered in this skeleton.

Then by all means, let's do that instead of this current comment chain.

That is what I'm trying to do. In fact I'd argue that's exactly what we are currently doing, I'm just questioning the answers I'm being given.

(I would like to clarify my tone here because I realise the "intensely" and so on probably make me sound more aggressive than I intend - I don't intend any animosity to be present in this response).

Maybe this is semantics.

It is 100% an argument about semantics and I find these to more often then not a utter waste of time and my brain is actively rotting watching these arguments. Let's fast forward to the point where you realize she was just stating her interest and passion for wanting to help and skip it. Also-

My point is that deciding the crewing of this project is an important step and we should be discussing how that comes about.

I can answer this really quick. The answer is everyone. Done, mystery solved. We are a team working together to discuss and debate the best way of handling this rewrite.

I wanna get this ball rolling as much as you, but that requires actually understanding what we are doing first, and how we are doing it.

Then by all means, let's do that instead of this current comment chain.

I want to make it clear that you are entirely incorrect in this assumption. I can attest that due to our involvement in the current efforts to catalog and organize existing policy that Bleep and I are in a unique position of knowledge. We are the ones in charge of organizing O5 Command and more likely then not continue to be after team purview is readjusted by all of staff's collective input. We have valuable insights into these matters and I will politely ask that you not disregard it as "irrelevant".

This is, again, not what I am arguing about. I am saying it is irrelevant to the question of *how* someone might get this level of influence, not *why* they might have this influence. Of course these factors are relevant in deciding someone's level of influence, in deciding why. I do not believe it is relevant in deciding how. Maybe this is semantics. My point is that deciding the crewing of this project is an important step and we should be discussing how that comes about.

Further more, can we please start talking about what needs to change about our garbage fire of a charter instead of talking about how we should be talking about fixing our garbage fire of a charter. Lets get this ball moving please.

Explicitly no we cannot. The process by which this is done is incredibly important, and rushing past that is a significant problem we have had in the past. I wanna get this ball rolling as much as you, but that requires actually understanding what we are doing first, and how we are doing it.

The status of MAST, your position within it, and its current projects (relevant or irrelevant to charter rewrite) are, at least for the moment in my opinion, irrelevant to this question.

I want to make it clear that you are entirely incorrect in this assumption. I can attest that due to our involvement in the current efforts to catalog and organize existing policy that Bleep and I are in a unique position of knowledge. We are the ones in charge of organizing O5 Command and more likely then not continue to be after team purview is readjusted by all of staff's collective input. We have valuable insights into these matters and I will politely ask that you not disregard it as "irrelevant".

Further more, can we please start talking about what needs to change about our garbage fire of a charter instead of talking about how we should be talking about fixing our garbage fire of a charter. Lets get this ball moving please.

Well my understanding is that if somebody wants to be part of the active work, they are welcome to, so long as they have the understanding that we'll be focusing on fulfilling the goal of making a clear, future proof, and workable Charter for our needs as staff on the SCP Wiki

This response doesn't really inspire any confidence in me on this project. You are an admin and a leader of the this project, it seems, and 'your understanding' is functionally the project bible until it is written more clearly. Beyond that, and more crucially, for a project of this importance "if you wanna help you can" is not a useful method of crewing. How do we decide what roles people have? Who has what roles? Can one simply pick a role, or must they be assigned it? I'm very glad to hear we're open to anyone being part of this project, but there is a crucial difference between that and simply saying "if you wanna help you can so long as you understand our goals", which is nebulous and fuzzy in a way that is going to make the project further down the road messier and harder to follow.

As for what a stakeholder is - that would be the Staff for now, and once we have a solid workable draft together, probably presenting the new Charter to our community as a whole. I say "workable draft" and mean "something close to finished, requiring tuning" - as it's not the community's responsibility to have to know what's best for us to do our work. Or, rather, they should not be expected to know insight into why we construct and iterate and manage the Charter, but should be presented a near-final-version for commentary and outside perspectives to give input.

This is good to know, but a project like this should have started with these kinds of questions, rather than receiving an answer in response to a question under what is supposed to be the project outline. We should have started by asking "who do we think the stakeholders are?" because, even with this answer, there are questions on this front left unanswered. If community members are considered stakeholders, does that give them influence over what the charter looks like? (I believe so) What kind of community member is considered a stakeholder? Are offsite community members? What about INT community members? Former staffers? Content creators who rely on the site content? There are a lot of people who are conceivably affected in some measure by what this charter is now and could be later - whether or not they are stakeholders is (at least in my opinion) an important and fundamental question to a project such as this.

Who is involved and for what parts is 'this person is committing here to contribute, and will do everything in their power to not drop their ball'. We invite people to commit to specific segments themselves as we cannot assign roles like this to individuals - every time someone has been assigned on a task relating to the charter, it's slipped out. Here, we can keep track of who, and when, and what has dedicated eyes on it.

I find this answer quite concerning. If I am reading correctly, this allows individuals to simply pick a section and choose to be working on it? Do I misunderstand? If so 1) that is incredibly unclear from the OP and 2) that's not an effective method of managing a project. I imagine I *am* misunderstanding, but the fact I am able to is half the problem here. The structure for crewing this project is immensely unclear from the OP and the responses here have not vastly cleared it up for me.

Anyway - do you have any specific segments of the skeleton, or aspects of the Charter as it's written now, that you'd like to help with, or give insight or opinions on?

I absolutely do, but this is skipping what should be the first step in this process IMO. I'm in agreement with Lucio that the first step should be a conversation about what a charter is and should be, divorced from any notions of the current charter.

1) What are our extant policies? What policies are working? What policies are not?
2) What is staff supposed to be responsible for? How is staff shaping policy? What is staff actually responsible for.
3) What does staff structure look like? What about staff structure is working? What about staff structure is not working?
4) What is staff hierarchy? What do we think it should be? What parts of it are currently not working?
5) What are each of the current positions within staff doing? Where are individual staff positions causing problems? Where are they working well?
6) What definitions and terms should we be using to describe different elements of staff? What are our current definitions and terms? Are they causing problems?
7) How are staff interacting with each other? Where are inter-staff interactions causing problems? Where are inter-staff interactions excelling?
8) How does staff interact with the community? How do staff actions affect the community? Where are staff interactions causing problem for the community? Where are they causing benefits?
9) What are the current strongpoints of the extant charter? Where does it fail? Where could it be done better?
10) How do we rewrite the charter to centralize, yet break up and provide easy reference points and a sensible, and most importantly, navigable presentation for Policy, staff structure, staff accountability processes, definitions, staff resources, team hubs, etc.?

Answering these questions are a crucial part of the actual charter rewrite process because they will tell us where we need to begin, what we need to target, how we can improve on the existing charter, and how we need to document and encode staff policy, structure, etc.

I'm going to lay out here as I have been saying in Mastcord why I think this process is so crucial.

On many levels, right now, this is overwhelming and its entirely because no clear navigation and organization of policy was ever done before. Which means we have a broken system with no clear centralization or organizational scheme to really build from. The existing charter tried to do this, but it was at its core, a bandaid and half measure on what is really a chaotic mess of poorly understood and poorly reference policy works, that are loose and free floating. I'm fairly convinced this is why we have so much organizational drift, so much scope creep over the years. It's because nothing is clearly and easily linked together, the charter is dense, rushed in its writing, and put altogether in one big chunk.

This is my opinion, but we need to toss aside the thought of a charter rewrite and completely and fundamentally rethink our approach. We don't need a charter, we need a policy tree, that serves a similar role to the charter, but carries none of the stigma of the term charter, and contains/lays out our policy in sensible, digestable chunks. This will allow us to make each piece of policy serve as reference points, easily navigable, linkable for new staff to review and understand, establish categorical crosslinks from policy page to policy page, etc. Breaking up policy and the charter like this gives us the advantage of creating tiered page systems where a given policy is not buried in walls of text.

For examples of a sensible and functional category tree for policies I'd encourage everyone to look at the Fallout Wiki's policy/guideline tree. Click through several pages, look at how policy is neatly connected together by categories. It's an exemplary model for the kind of thing we should be striving for.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki:Policies_and_guidelines

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki:Policies_and_guidelines/Sitemap

It's not a 1:1 conversion, we have a fuck ton of policy, far larger responsibility sets, and a much cleaner beuracratic and team-structure system with a lot of guides, team hubs, and resources, and we need to find a place for all of them.

But frankly? Our current system, our current structure for 05, staff reference points, and governing policy is utter trash. To begin to approach a rewrite, and thus establishing any kind of sensible organization we have to completely identify all our policies, our staff structure, our accountability systems, the definitions we are using and/or want to be using, what our teams look like, how we're interacting with each other and the community as opposed to how we think we should be, and what in the current charter might be salvageable as a beginning point.

This skeleton isn't perfect. But it understands what we need to do in order to move forward.

Ocuin asked earlier in this thread why I believe I should have a lot of influence on this approach and method but this is partly why. (I really don't know if I should, and I don't know if I will given my time constraints, and I wasn't really trying to imply I should even though my post comes across like that. We haven't even reached a point where we've decided who's going to lead which thrusts.) I know what good policy organization looks like on a large wiki scale, and have experience with helping create policy category trees.

This is why every charter rewrite previously failed, and why we needed all of staff to retool and focus down on this. We're staring into the abyss, and we've gotta find a way to bridge it.

Edit: Also to be clear, I think we need to reevaluate all our accountability systems in this process, evaluate the role of admins, captains, moderators, and operational staff, evaluate the team structures, evaluate the role of staff hierarchy, how we interact with the community and each other. Nothing should escape review, nothing should escape refinement and feedback.

Edit Edit: I also want to clarify that several people have asked the question: Why didn't you just ask the question 'What should the Charter Be'. That's a question none of us can fully answer without assessing the context of what staff is, IE, all the things I've outlined above. If we don't fully break down every aspect of staff, we're never going to be able to create a fluid, sensible governing policy set which we can refer back to and change as we need to. We'll end up in the same place the current charter is right now. Once we understand the aspects of how staff is working, where it's breaking, where its succeeding, then we can rewrite the 'charter' or create a 'policy tree' based on our full assessment. Doing anything before that is setting us all up for failure.

Edit Edit Edit: And yes I realize that's going to be a grueling task, but that's unfortunately the situation we are in due to a surprising and concerning amount of neglect towards sensible organization of anything regarding staff policy.

3. That's what this thread is for, largely. So I'll actually take a moment to ask - What does a staff charter need to be, in your eyes? There's some essential, critical aspects it must fulfill in order to do what we need it to do as a guiding document, but I want to know what you see its function as and the most critical parts to be.

4. Good call, though authors should be cognizant that drafts will be eaten if they're not saved quick enough. Drafting on a dedicated set of sandboxes is the best call, I think. If we largely agree on that point as a group we can set up guidelines and a hub thread on here.

Overall I think we're all largely on the same page. Your major points correspond to the OP's "Staff Heirarchy and Definitions", "Accountability? Useful Accountability?", and "Staff definition and purview list/responsibility boundaries", which lines up well.

So I suppose it comes to - Do you have any input on things you think would be essential to keep in mind as we proceed to move forward?

Edit: seems Dexa has already responded to these concerns, but Wikidot didn't show the comment. My point stands, though

Please don't take any of this as talking down or being angry or frustrated - I can come off as less conversational and more blunt and caustic in text.

you're all good here, don't worry

The skeleton here is only as a starting point. I feel that Admins needed to take the first step simply because we needed to take the responsibility to set it forward, and since few OS and Mods have actually worked in any appreciable amount on past Charter versions, we could at least have a first step of what we know for certain should be considered, and put the conversation in the right direction.

i agree with you that admins should be guiding the rewrite, but i think this post has gone significantly further than a first step has to - this is at least the second step, if not the third

This process requires extremely defined planning to actually work out.

planning that should have been done with the involvement of the rest of staff much earlier on

What are your suggestions for how we should approach this? You've given your opinion it should be more or less all on 05, so we generally agree there.

(also going to touch on that specific concerns thing here too)

firstly i think we should start again from square 1, or. square 2 i guess - MAST's collection of existing policies thing is fine. the first thing that should go on 05 is a very general discussion where people can say, without any super structured initial post telling them how it's going to work, both how they think a charter rewrite should be handled and what they think the charter should actually be. there was a somewhat recent staffchat discussion in which people had massively differing opinions on what's necessary in a charter - a significant number of those present in the discussion thought a charter should be very brief and largely filled with objective information e.g the definition of staff, with policies that are more likely to change kept to some sort of policy list. so we absolutely should not proceed without a far more general discussion about what the staff body thinks a charter should be. i can't really suggest further steps until i know what the staff body actually wants in a charter, because they'd vary too much

My instinct is that actual drafting being done here as well, but with a mix of docs or Discord discussions to draw up the basic outlines and initial versions (only cause drafting directly to Wikidot posts is unnecessarily difficult and extremely often it eats drafts).

this would be nice and convenient for staff but for users following along they'd have absolutely no idea what's going on behind closed doors. drafting in wikidot sandboxes is fine - copy the page source before saving anything and there's absolutely no issues. so i think it can all happen on 05 easily, and definitely should as this should be a process users can follow the whole time

We should not be beholden to the old Charter, but we should use it as a rubric at least for things that we absolutely need to improve on and consider.

Oh I completely agree, that's why step 2 is there too.

Step 1 is just so we can have a fresh, free-of-preconceptions mind. I don't want to fully ignore the charter, but once we start arguing and discussing the current charter we can't go back, so let's do the part that requires us to ignore it before we get out hands dirty. People will take the old one into account otherwise, even if by accident or subconsciously, and make us beholden to it by extension.

What's your perspective on what's needed in the Charter?

Ok so I didn't even read what you wrote (really big on "no preconceived notions"):

• Staff structure at the basic level. What's a JS? What's a mod? What do those roles mean and why should you earn them? Who decides who gets what?
• The role of staff in relation to the site. Everything else should be built on this. Does staff rule the site, or is staff shaping the site as it grows? If site and staff disagree, who's right? When?
• How to change the charter. Self-accountability measures, people.
• How staff teams should function. Who should lead? What's their core responsibilities? Do they need a hub? ETC

This is what I got for now. Ok, now to read what you wrote.

Ok we agree lol, but I missed Methods of Accountability. This probably should be in the charter too because it should be something that's hard to take down, but most importantly, the methods of accountability in the charter should not change freely based on the function of a team. As much as possible they should remain static, even if staff changes around them.

I especially like point 1. "What do we want the Charter to be?" is a critical question to ask. I think as a whole we each have a generally congruent set of ideas of what we understand it should accomplish, but specifying a definition or set of definitions we can work under is critical.

I think that completely avoiding the old charter is a bad idea though. We should not be beholden to the old Charter, but we should use it as a rubric at least for things that we absolutely need to improve on and consider. We haven't had this conversation recently but in the past admins (or rather, thedeadlymoose and the rest of admins) have discussed what parts of the Charter are unworkable in the modern SCP Administration World:tm:. It should be a framework to springboard improvements off of, at least initially.

I do believe points 2 through 5 are actually outlined or intended to be outlined by the Skeleton, but I can understand where your disconnect in your post comes from.

So okay, though. Let's focus on Point 1 - What's your perspective on what's needed in the Charter? I think it should outline the Responsibilities of Staff at each level (the intended roles of Admin/mod/OS/JS etc in broad strokes), Methods of Accountability (disciplinary matters and processes, how to remove or add staff, responsibilities to the wiki and other members), and What Is Expected of Staff (both with how work should be carried out and etiquette as staff). Not that I think these should be the sole specific sections, but theyre like… I guess the tenets I'd like to keep in mind of what should be included in the Charter.

This misses the point I was getting at really, which is that how who is a "person who's involved throughout the process" is decided is unclear and yet people seem confident in claiming positions of extreme influence. Beyond that, this is also a very charitable reading of what was said. This is not to say I have a problem with Bleep having such influence, but she said she will have such influence, when how and why she will have such influence (and more importantly how and why *anyone* will have *any* influence) has not at all been discussed.

Aha that tracks. Well my understanding is that if somebody wants to be part of the active work, they are welcome to, so long as they have the understanding that we'll be focusing on fulfilling the goal of making a clear, future proof, and workable Charter for our needs as staff on the SCP Wiki. From the OP:

This would also be a good place to mention if you are interested in helping with a particular step.

So, Bleep's saying she'd like to help with the whole process.

As for what a stakeholder is - that would be the Staff for now, and once we have a solid workable draft together, probably presenting the new Charter to our community as a whole. I say "workable draft" and mean "something close to finished, requiring tuning" - as it's not the community's responsibility to have to know what's best for us to do our work. Or, rather, they should not be expected to know insight into why we construct and iterate and manage the Charter, but should be presented a near-final-version for commentary and outside perspectives to give input.

Essentially, to answer your questions -

1. Who is involved and for what parts is 'this person is committing here to contribute, and will do everything in their power to not drop their ball'. We invite people to commit to specific segments themselves as we cannot assign roles like this to individuals - every time someone has been assigned on a task relating to the charter, it's slipped out. Here, we can keep track of who, and when, and what has dedicated eyes on it.

2. Stakeholders are us on staff first, then the community at large.

I hope this is clear.

Anyway - do you have any specific segments of the skeleton, or aspects of the Charter as it's written now, that you'd like to help with, or give insight or opinions on? If not that's okay, this is going to be a very involved project and honestly I do not anticipate everyone will be interested or equipped to directly contribute the early parts of it.

Honestly this is what I have the strongest opinions on.

What I think Bleep meant was she intends to be a person who's involved throughout the process, and not that she will be steering the wheel or dictating direction.

This misses the point I was getting at really, which is that how who is a "person who's involved throughout the process" is decided is unclear and yet people seem confident in claiming positions of extreme influence. Beyond that, this is also a very charitable reading of what was said. This is not to say I have a problem with Bleep having such influence, but she said she will have such influence, when how and why she will have such influence (and more importantly how and why *anyone* will have *any* influence) has not at all been discussed.

I also think we're having different definitions here, I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "stakeholder", and you're the only one to have used that word in the thread. Could you expand and explain what you mean when you use that word? It might help us answer questions.

A stakeholder is someone with interests or stakes in the events and project and how they unfold.

If the purpose of this thread is to facilitate broad thought-sharing and opinion-gathering, rather than opinions on a presented plan, then it is a damning indictment that all posts but mine, Lucio's, Gee's, and Fabled, have amounted to "yeah this seems cool".

If admins intend to source opinions on what the plan should be for rewriting the charter, then the post should have amounted to a single question asking exactly that: How do you believe we should rewrite the charter? The OP here is too broad to allow for useful discussion of it as a plan, and far too narrow to facilitate such broad discussion on what plans others may seek for charter rewrite as you seem to intend for it to have done. (I apologise for that sentence but I can't think of another way to phrase it.)

If the thread exists to seek answers to the questions I pose, why are those questions not the only thing present in this post? Whatever this post *is* feels very confused.

I also think we're having different definitions here, I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "stakeholder", and you're the only one to have used that word in the thread. Could you expand and explain what you mean when you use that word? It might help us answer questions.

and note that I will be a large and potent driver in helping to design the navigation and structure of the charter.

Why?

This is a serious question. How are we deciding who has the power and influence in this process? Who is considered an important stakeholder? For such an important step in our policy reorganisation, we should be starting with *the most fundamental questions*, and so far those decisions have been opaque to the rest of staff.

Several of your questions are actually explicitly what this thread we are posting in here is for.
You ask-

Who is leading this project, if anyone? How are decisions being made? Who are the key decision makers? Who are the key stakeholders? What are the to-be-agreed-upon elements of the rewrite structure, what is considered non-negotiable?

And the opening post states-

What is to follow is a discussion, here on O5, for your recommendations for the process, and additions as well as any comments or concerns regarding the above. This would also be a good place to mention if you are interested in helping with a particular step.

This thread is a place for us to actually answer your questions. I haven't made my own post yet - I left a to-be-added-on post above when this thread was made, because I haven't yet had the ability to sit down and get my thoughts down. But I feel if I had, it'd have at least helped present some suggestions to answer your questions.

As it is, all admins are explicitly part of this, and we are opening up for others to come and offer insight they might have, opinions and expertise* they may have from other communities or experiences, and any specific parts of the charter they might have a specific direction in mind for.

If you have an issue with the skeleton, it may stem from what I perceive might be a misunderstanding of what the purpose of it is. This is our plan for how we will be approaching all charter discussion, our pre-pre-discussion prior to actually beginning our work, the document wherein we decide upon the key points to attack and approach this critical document rewrite as planned and prepared as possible.

I'm inviting you to present your perspectives and insight. For example, your final paragraph opens with how the skeleton 'ultimately ignores the actual reasonf or fixing the charter' - what do you believe is the reason to fix the charter? There are more-or-less correct answers to this question, but it's not black and white.

What I think you are asking (or should be framing your mindset as) would be more something like the following -

"What are our collective opinions regarding the key problems with the Charter as it exists right now? We should start off with also a general idea written in this thread as a central place to identify what to avoid in the rewrite, and try to structure the new version to avoid and solve the problems presented by what we have now."

This thread is to help start the conversations of how we're going to do this project. It IS a pile of bones, but we're here to put the meat on starting with square 1. The how, the where, who, and what should all be touched on here, and we as staff are inviting everybody to give insight and suggestions if they feel comfortable giving. As per the opening post-

What is to follow is a discussion, here on O5, for your recommendations for the process, and additions as well as any comments or concerns regarding the above. This would also be a good place to mention if you are interested in helping with a particular step.

The skeleton here is only as a starting point. I feel that Admins needed to take the first step simply because we needed to take the responsibility to set it forward, and since few OS and Mods have actually worked in any appreciable amount on past Charter versions, we could at least have a first step of what we know for certain should be considered, and put the conversation in the right direction. This process requires extremely defined planning to actually work out.

Your second paragraph though actually is a great question. I think that a majority of work here should be done on 05 (despite the fact that I dislike how clunky it is on mobile). My instinct is that actual drafting being done here as well, but with a mix of docs or Discord discussions to draw up the basic outlines and initial versions (only cause drafting directly to Wikidot posts is unnecessarily difficult and extremely often it eats drafts).

What are your suggestions for how we should approach this? You've given your opinion it should be more or less all on 05, so we generally agree there.

And what are your more 'specific concerns'? I'm interested in those.

Your second paragraph is actually explicitly what this thread we are using here is for, actually!

What is to follow is a discussion, here on O5, for your recommendations for the process, and additions as well as any comments or concerns regarding the above. This would also be a good place to mention if you are interested in helping with a particular step.

This thread is for trying to come up with the best way to answer the questions presented in your second paragraph ("There's too many points…"). We have the "what we need to do" in the skeleton, or how admins as a whole identified we should start from. This thread is to hammer out what direction what each segment should even be, and what steps we should take for each segment.

We DO need multiple threads for this, I absolutely agree. But this is the first step - We aren't going to throw up chunks instantly, we need to plan every step out and clearly have a gameplan and a 'win condition' before we can approach any given thread.

As much as I'd adore to be able to have a small team of admins and mods build out the charter themselves, that demonstrably has not worked historically. So for this attempt, everybody is invited to offer their perspectives and, if they happen to have workable and relevant experience and perspective, offer their insight to build on others'.

So in light of that - do you have any specific suggestions for people to keep in mind? Or some idea of what a definition of heirarchy as per this project should be? How would you break down the charter?

This is an open discussion about the nature of this skeleton. It's entire purpose is to be discussed, edited, and refined. The points so far are attacking the skeleton as if it's a finished thought, there's no need to attack the skeleton as if it's a finished thought, instead suggestions on what you think the skeleton should be, what you think would be better going into it, how to refine it, what should come first. This isn't finished/polished proposal by any means and we're open to suggestions and fixing.

Additionally, I want to point out that the most flexible part of the skeleton is after the first phase. The first phase, which is already partially in progress, is entirely pointed and poignant in assessing the following crucial details that will be important for the charter rewrite:

1) What are our extant policies? What policies are working? What policies are not?
2) What is staff supposed to be responsible for? How is staff shaping policy? What is staff actually responsible for.
3) What does staff structure look like? What about staff structure is working? What about staff structure is not working?
4) What is staff hierarchy? What do we think it should be? What parts of it are currently not working?
5) What are each of the current positions within staff doing? Where are individual staff positions causing problems? Where are they working well?
6) What definitions and terms should we be using to describe different elements of staff? What are our current definitions and terms? Are they causing problems?
7) How are staff interacting with each other? Where are inter-staff interactions causing problems? Where are inter-staff interactions excelling?
8) How does staff interact with the community? How do staff actions affect the community? Where are staff interactions causing problem for the community? Where are they causing benefits?
9) What are the current strongpoints of the extant charter? Where does it fail? Where could it be done better?

Answering these questions are a crucial part of the actual charter rewrite process because they will tell us where we need to begin, what we need to target, how we can improve on the existing charter, and how we need to document and encode staff policy, structure, etc.

From there it's a matter of discussing how to establish accountability systems, editing, and ensuring wording and longevity runs into the future.

the main issue i have with this skeleton is that it's really just a pile of bones. i don't know how they're going to fit together or how they're going to get put together. it's good that this post acknowledges that we actually need to think about the community and staff members who are not admins but again, it doesn't actually say how we're going to be doing this.

is it going to be all on 05? because if we are actually considering the community there's no way we can be doing that in staffchat. hell, if u want to consider anyone except admins and the loudest voices in staffchat you can't be doing it in there. id go as far as to say that too much has already happened in non-public spaces — realistically this 'skeleton' shouldn't have been made without consulting both the rest of staff and the wider community

i have other, more specific concerns regarding the information that's actually here, but how i express them will rely on the response to the concerns above so they'll come later

There's too many points for us to narrow down on any single one specifically, yet there's a lot of options that are preemptively excluded by the way this is built. This claims to be a skeleton to work on, yet seems to miss a definition for the hierarchy or even how to break down the charter. A lot of these questions are useful and ones we should be asking, but they're kind of thrown on there without much rhyme or reason beyond "we'll need to do this."

This isn't really a skeleton as much as it is a pile of assorted bones in the corner of the room. You could build a skeleton from these, with time, but a lot of bones are missing and there's a lot of bones that you're pretty sure aren't even human.

I'm rereading the first post over and over, and I think the main issue boils down to the following: we needmultiple threads for this. Most of these issues are going to be multilayered and complex, and we don't need to throw them all onto one thread like we did here. "How do we start collecting data" and "how do we do the actual rewriting" are two great questions which should be each given their own space, otherwise they'll mix together.

I could address the points made here, but the formatting of this all already has a lot of problems with what it assumes we should agree on along with how it's structured, that I don't feel like I should do so for now.

I'm sorry to be so blunt about it but this tells me very, very little about how we plan to structure the actual overhaul of the charter. Who is leading this project, if anyone? How are decisions being made? Who are the key decision makers? Who are the key stakeholders? What are the to-be-agreed-upon elements of the rewrite structure, what is considered non-negotiable? This point in particular seems to have been brushed over - "Breakdown: Where can the charter be broken down into smaller bites?" is a phrase indicating we have already decided that the charter shall be broken down in order to be dissected (something I do not necessarily disagree with doing!), when in fact no such thing has been discussed. I feel its pretty obvious this kind of project should from the start be discussed with the whole of staff, but it seems this project has started from the top down without initial preliminary discussions on structure and leadership.

Each section of this skeleton feels like a diluted version of a step that might exist in a more comprehensive and detailed plan. Whilst I recognise this is supposed to be a skeleton, the result of that here seems to be very little actual *plan*. Just the vaguest idea of what a plan might eventually some day look like.

In my opinion, this skeleton ultimately ignores the actual reason for fixing the charter - the problems it currently presents, and the problems it could fix. IMO, a much more useful starting point for rewrite - before we even reach the planning and skeleton structure phase - would be to first identify and discuss the problems that the charter currently presents, and the problems we feel it could fix but which are not present in the current document. Perhaps I misunderstand the purpose of this skeleton, but as it stands this feels like it has skipped the most crucial step in fixing a policy document and as such is missing the key structural hold points that the overall project will rely on. There's arms and legs here, but no spine, and so the skeleton feels pretty unfinished.

I am very much willing to assist in redesigning the staff hierarchy (as someone who is presently studying Industrial/Organization Psychology and has both been promoted to and rejected from each individual staff level exactly once) and the community's interaction with staff. I can help in other sections, but I am not particularly as specialized in those subjects.

I believe staff should begin our charter rewrite with a redo of how the policy adoption process works (our current system is discussion then vote). After that, I believe we should focus on the roles of staff and designing the hierarchy to be much less top-down.

EDIT: In response to what appears to have been a big misunderstanding of the intent of this thread: What is to follow is a discussion, here on O5, for your recommendations for the process, and additions as well as any comments or concerns regarding the following. This would also be a good place to mention if you are interested in helping with a particular step. The skeleton below is left intentionally open-ended as a springboard so as solicit what we as a staff in whole want to see from this process, and how we think it should flow from here on out.

1) Assessment: Where is the best place for staff to start Charter Overhaul. A few important topics that must be included somewhere in the Charter rewrite process:

• Screen and identify our current starting set of policy. [Currently in process via MAST]
• Staff definition and purview list/responsibility boundaries.
• Staff Hierarchy and Level Definitions
• Pain Points: Admin (Where does the admin role create difficulty for the site/what are the difficult parts of the admin role.)
• Pain Points: General Staff (Where does general staff create difficulty for the site/what are the difficult parts of general staff roles.)
• Pain Points: Community (Where does the community create difficulty for the site/what are the difficult parts of being a community member.)

2) Breakdown: Where can the charter be broken down into smaller bites? This shouldn’t be a difficult part of the process but is very important. How should the Charter be presented, section by section, for clarity and completeness?

Steps:

• Requirements for our use, versus the requirements for the document’s structure.
• Blockers (What is going to get in the way?)
• Charter inclusion vs Sub-document - Would a segment of information work best as a direct part of the Charter, or as a connected sub-document?

3) Review: How well will this all come together, per each section? A set of guidelines for authors to consider throughout their discussions and rewriting process. Each section being broken down should be analyzed through this lens.

• Accountability? Useful Accountability?
• What possible harm can come from this section? How can it be mitigated?
• Longevity? Will the SCP Wiki Staff of 2032 be doing this exact same thing? How often should Staff be reviewing the charter for updates?
• User Friendly? Will staff actually be willing to run through these processes? Is the information presented in a manner that future staff can understand the intended use?
• Assignment Mechanism? How will this section be assigned to people? What kind of expertise or insight should be prioritized? What happens when they fail to do this work?
• How does the user base interface with this? How can they assure accountability?

Discussion is open for one week to all staff, as MAST works on assembling our current set of policies.

EDIT: Discussion has shifted to the following thread, with additional clarification: http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-14580540/discussion-charter-overhaul-skeleton-ii:electric-boogaloo

Main Site Mirror: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-14576417/discussion-charter-overhaul-skeleton