Influenced dictations

[SoftWareRevue]

Do you allow your members to influence or dictate the direction of your community?

I'm all for gaining feedback from members and using that information when I'm making decisions regarding expansions, enhancements, and enforcement of new guidelines.

But I can't think of a community whereby it would be in the best interest of all to allow members to dictate what and when those should be. I'm interesting in learning if there are communities that are lead by the members alone.

If you have, or are part of, a community where members dicate policy, please tell us about it. I wanna know! :)

If you have, or are part of, a community where you do not allow any voice for members to influence policy, please tell us about it. I wanna know! :)

If you have, or are part of, a community where members are encouraged to express where they'd like to see the community go, please tell us about it. I wanna know! :)

Have a seat. :couch:

Let's talk about how members fit into your policy making decisions.

[Jon]

We do, but only to a certain extent. We are a very community-driven forum and pride ourselves on maintaining that as much as possible, despite the fact that we've grown too large to hold many of the community values we were fond of in its early years. Most major forum changes start with a public poll, allowing all members to vote and voice their opinions, suggestions, comments, etc. on the matter. That does not go to say that everything is decided on popular demand, but being volunteer staff, we know that we don't know everything.

Members enjoy being able to participate in the path their forum is taking. It's why I've been a part of OCForums not long after it began, nearly 8 years ago. They get to see their visions of that forum materialize and know they had a part in it. Participation - that's is the key element. Anyone can post on a forum...not everyone gets to help make one grow.

However, on the flip-side, forum policy for us is a different manner. We typically run by a set of guidelines that are quite elastic when we need them to be. Not all administrators and moderators have the same outlook on certain things at our forum, and our guidelines allow us all to work within that frame. We can actually taylor those guidelines to our administrating/moderating preferences. The good thing is, is that it gives the appearance that we're all pretty well on the same page in any situation...to the general public, at least. Grey areas always arise where private discussions must take place so that we can decide on a common grounds for specific situations. That's life though.

Policy itself is determined as the forum grows. We stick to our original guidelines (and they are really original - nearly 8 years old), adding or modifying as we see necessary, but without ever taking away. We hold very true to the original foundation the forum was built on and I find that the most important thing to any member - stability.