Having tried to much the same twice before myself, I'm sympathetic to the cause. I'm even tempted to jump in. But I also know from experience what will happen to a purely momentum-driven project here, and it's not good. It'll start off well. You'll gain a couple of percentage points, and on paper it looks like the numbers might work out. But as soon as you've energized the peripheral regulars enough to actually drive close votes, once you've grabbed the low hanging fruit, you're going to run into what I call Garbage Valley. And Garbage Valley is a very smelly place. When you hit it, you might find it difficult to breathe.

Garbage Valley is what I call the approximately 800, usually heavily assumption-laden, unanswered questions we have that can be characterized as "might be interesting to a lay user, given a sufficiently exhaustive negative answer--an answer telling them why this makes no sense--but which are absolutely uninteresting to an expert user who would be qualified to answer them." This is diagnostic of our problem as a community. We cannot retain two contradictory userbases, we have to choose--that's just textbook community management. But this is not our problem as such. Our problem is our decision-making process is so atrociously ineffective (I would say nonexistent) that, in four years, we have not managed to reach a resolution on the basic question of what users we are trying to retain.

We can't push through Garbage Valley with pure momentum. It's just not possible. We also can't just whimsically decide. If we want to actually fix this and not just flail around between 78-85% answered depending on the season and which way the wind is blowing, we need to get behind Christiaan, organize a community meeting like we did the last two times, get all the mods in the damn meeting for once, then focus entirely on reaching a consensus on decision-making that guarantees continuous progress. Once we have a decision-making process, people can go out and apply that process to the Meta backlog autonomously, knowing that the mods will support them. Over time, if enforced, the decisions will become ingrained and automatic.

I suggest we (that means you, mods) set a firm date and time, agreeable to all of you, several months in the future. A new question to organize might be an idea.

Having tried too much the same twice before myself, I'm sympathetic to the cause. I'm even tempted to jump in. But I also know from experience what will happen to a purely momentum-driven project here, and it's not good. It'll start off well. You'll gain a couple of percentage points, and on paper it looks like the numbers might work out. But as soon as you've energized the peripheral regulars enough to actually drive close votes, once you've grabbed the low hanging fruit, you're going to run into what I call Garbage Valley. And Garbage Valley is a very smelly place. When you hit it, you might find it difficult to breathe.

Garbage Valley is what I call the approximately 800, usually heavily assumption-laden, unanswered questions we have that can be characterized as "might be interesting to a lay user, given a sufficiently exhaustive negative answer--an answer telling them why this makes no sense--but which are absolutely uninteresting to an expert user who would be qualified to answer them." This is diagnostic of our problem as a community. We cannot retain two contradictory userbases, we have to choose--that's just textbook community management. But this is not our problem as such. Our problem is our decision-making process is so atrociously ineffective (I would say nonexistent) that, in four years, we have not managed to reach a resolution on the basic question of what users we are trying to retain.

We can't push through Garbage Valley with pure momentum. It's just not possible. We also can't just whimsically decide. If we want to actually fix this and not just flail around between 78-85% answered depending on the season and which way the wind is blowing, we need to get behind Christiaan, organize a community meeting like we did the last two times, get all the mods in the damn meeting for once, then focus entirely on reaching a consensus on decision-making that guarantees continuous progress. Once we have a decision-making process, people can go out and apply that process to the Meta backlog autonomously, knowing that the mods will support them. Over time, if enforced, the decisions will become ingrained and automatic.

I suggest we (that means you, mods) set a firm date and time, agreeable to all of you, several months in the future. A new question to organize might be an idea.