Topic: Forum governance? (Read 1334 times)

You should maybe re-read all of the above...

theymos himself doesn't even know who really owns this website

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/forum-funds-155000
read the contracts. that should explain it (and more). the list haven't been updated for sometime tho.

Thanks, shorena that pretty much answers all my questions.

Does someone happen to know what that "treasury agreement" is theymos mentioned in the post quoted above?

So in that case, who takes decisions about how to use that money?

If the money doesn't belong to theymos but he has effectively the right to freely decide how to spend it, it comes down to the same thing, right?

That's what I mean with governance: Is the forum a private entity (ie, theymos) or if it's somehow community-controlled, how is this done? Implicitly, if at all?

I've decided not to create an official announcement thread today. But I will answer some questions.


I've answered this before.

The forum was created by Satoshi and Sirius. Without any explicit agreement or assignment of ownership, it came to be the case that I am now chiefly responsible for forum management. The domain is owned by Sirius. I have no way of forcing him to do anything with it. (Though I recently did gain partial access so that I can change DNS records.) I control a lot of the forum's money. Sirius cannot force me to do anything with this. Various treasurers control other forum money; they're bound by the treasury agreements.

I am not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure who the forum's owner is legally-speaking, and this is irrelevant to me unless I'm dealing with legal stuff.


I've answered this many times.

I control most of the money. I consider it my responsibility to appropriately manage this money for the non-profit benefit of the forum, Bitcoin, and the world. I take this responsibility seriously. However, I retain sole control over how the money is spent. No one has any right to influence my decisions, though I can be convinced by reasonable arguments.

The rest of the money is held by treasurers bound by the treasury agreements. Under the treasury agreements, I have a lot of decision-making power, but I can be over-ruled in some cases.

Again, talk to a lawyer if you want to know who owns the money according to governments. I don't care about this unless I have to.


No. I avoid the term "non-profit" in official materials to avoid giving the impression that a government has assigned the forum with a non-profit label, but the term does accurately represent the philosophy of the forum. No one gets or will ever get any kind of dividend from forum revenue.


The most popular forum software is:
- Old.
- Written in PHP, which sucks.
- Written insecurely and messily.
- Difficult to modify, especially safely.
- Not much more featureful than SMF, if at all.

There are a handful of newer forum software packages which solve some of those problems, but all of them are very sparse in features.

The goal of this software project is to create new, open source forum software which will compete with SMF, phpBB, etc.


This isn't completely defined yet. It'll have almost all features that we have now. A main goal will be improving filtering and data presentation so that users can more easily manage the flood of posts both board-wide and within threads, while simultaneously reducing the need for centralized moderation.


The total cost will probably be around $1 million. The $350,000 covers several months of work, after which I will evaluate the performance of Slickage Studios and choose whether or not to continue. In any case, the code will be open source, so no work will be lost.


About one year from now.


No.


Yes, there will be 2FA.


Maybe. I don't see any harm in that if it isn't too difficult/expensive.


Yes, though some advanced functionality may be unavailable without JavaScript.


Some of the treasurers do store funds for free, but extremely-trustworthy people who will do this are rare.

Forums donations aren't for Theymos personally otherwise he would be a millionaire by now , 1.5 million (5,853 BTC now) is basically going to be for the new forum software to get developped , some others should be for moderators (I hope one can confirm) and for administrators but ti's not that much if we compare it to their hard work I believe .

Not speaking directly about the blocksize debate, but triggered by the discussion about censorship etc.

What I wanted to ask is: Who does the forum belong to? Is theymos the owner and he has the right to decide whatever he wants? In that case, donations have been made to him personally and people have to live with his decisions on how he spends it and runs the forums.

On the other hand, are the forums something that belongs to the community (whatever that means) and while theymos is the administrator of it, he's not the owner and does not get ultimate power of what can be published in this forum and what cannot.

Again, independent of the current debate I wanted to know whether there exists some sort of formal or informal contract on theymos role wrt to the questions above, and whether this has been discussed anywhere.

Hello,

Could someone explain to me how the governance of this forum is handled?
Or, if this has been explained before in a complete manner, point me in the right direction?

Cheers