Well? How did we get here?

Who's running this forum? That's a good question. There's a staff of us involved, and we're all sharing in running this forum. But I think the more interesting question is, who is setting the direction and policy of this forum?

Before I answer this I want to go into the history a little.

A year ago a bunch of us were using visforvoltage.com and having a good time. And then a certain hacker dude ruined that paradise, and sent us searching for a new home. In November and December last year we had a bit of an emergency on our hands. At first it was, "okay the forum is ruined" and "should we try to replace it", and "where the heck is Ken (the owner of that forum) anyway"? Ken never showed up, and I spoke up saying "I can replace the forum" so people started pointing at me. I set up a replacement forum but a trouble happened along the way to acquiring visforvoltage.net. Someone had bought it the night before. That someone turned out to be GMAN. I did end up owning visforvoltage.org.

This has led to a collaboration of sorts which at times was extremely frustrating, and other times kinda okay. For whatever it's worth, I want it known that I bear George no ill will, I know he's a good person, and I know his family loves him. There is something though between us which isn't working so smoothly.

In the midst of the emergency we thought "This is a temporary setup". We thought Ken would return and restore the old site and we could go back to using visforvoltage.com. Because of that George and I never made any formal agreements over the site, we just fell into an unspoken splitting of responsibilities. The way I understood it, George was responsible for the moderator team and I was responsible for what's essentially the engine room (administering the server, the forum software, etc). It turns out that George thought his responsibilities were wider than this, and for my part I simply relented all forms of control and policy setting to George.

I've been pondering -- who "owns" this web site? George owns the domain, sure. But the site can be known by any domain name. The current domain name has some value in that it's beginning to be well known as visforvoltage.net. What do I 'own' here? And for that matter what do you guys, the members of this site, own? I think of an online community as akin to a coffee shop or bar. Such places are for people to meet each other and socialize, but the place is 'owned' by someone and that someone wants to get something out of operating the place. While Starbucks owns the store, do they own the camaderie of the people who hang out there? No.. and the people can abandon a place if that's what the crowd decides.

I think by most measures anybody would agree that it is I who own this site. That George owns the domain name we go by adds a bit of murkiness to the picture. And of course whatever it is we own is placed at your disposal for your use in the hope you'll like it and hang out here.

In the early days George set this policy where the moderator team would be anonymous. He explained this is necessary to avoid risk of identity theft, and in any case how can you verify that anybody's identity is who they say they are? Okay, sure, but in my mind all I could see was Ku Klux Klan as the result of anonymous justice. In a way the moderator role is a combination of kitten herder, police, prosecutor, judge and jury, all rolled into one. In the history of mankind every time justice has been anonymous and cloaked in secrecy, it has turned into an oppressive force. I fought against anonymous moderators but I'm afraid my anger got the best of me, and in the end I relented to Georges insistence on anonymity.

Another thing which happened is George's work with "The Practicums". I still don't know just what they were doing, and that's after repeated questioning and a variety of answers. I know that George has an interesting vision of what this site could be, and where the EV industry is going. The Practicums seemed to be helping plan that vision. But it's very murky, and shrouded in more secrecy than you can shake a stick at.

A month or so ago some of us in the staff began questioning just who are they (Buzz and vrecoveryteam), what are they doing, and why are they speaking as if they have management authority? Some of the recent unpublished postings (such as that poll) were pulled because the postings were written as if they had management authority, but they weren't from someone who was understood to have that authority. "Management authority"? I mean someone with the appropriate role or ownership to make decisions related to the legal container of this site. Again there's this question of 'who "owns" this web site'.

This web site, like all others, has a location. It is housed in a server which I rent, and I have a few other web sites housed on the same server. The domain name is an owned thing. There is some level of liability and risk involved with running this site. And there are costs and decisions related to owning this infrastructure which only an owner can make. You guys, the members of this site, cannot make decisions about that because it is not your money on the line.