After some recent developments in this community, I have decided it's necessary to fully outline my perspective on the inner workings of the management of Gridcoin's social media and public image. This is in response to the ‘Twitter election’ that Vortac has just called for. I’ve done my best to remain as impartial as possible, in spite of having been personally involved in some of the topics covered here.

As this is a complex subject, I don’t think it’s fair to vote on Vortac’s proposal without considering the current processes and structures which determine the content that gets posted to Twitter. The proposal doesn’t do itself any favors in omitting that information; One simply cannot form an educated opinion of proposed changes to a system they know very little about. Being that this is a topic this proposal neglected to address, I think it’s important that I now shed some light on it.

Section 1 - History and Structure

First, a brief history

For those unaware, a private Slack channel was created by quezacoatl on September 28, 2017, entitled 'Official-social-media'. The channel was created with the purpose, “To talk about official social media channel posts.”

In this channel, there are currently 14 members from a wide variety of efforts. Mainly, this roster consists of operators of various social media accounts, operators of communication platforms, developers, hosts of podcasts, those involved in marketing efforts and more. While the intent was to be inclusive of all social media platforms and important venues, the primary conversation in the channel has consistently (but not exclusively) revolved around Twitter.

How it operates

In terms of the management of Twitter, the objective of this group has been simple: To source, discuss and vote on a variety of content to post to our Gridcoin Twitter feed. This content is often then mirrored on our other platforms if it is an item of greater significance, such as Facebook. The discretion to post is left with the operator of those other pages if the items are not considered critical.

Certain 'regular' posted items go without debate, such as the Developer Updates and State of the Network reports. The reason being is that there is no merit in voting on items whose essential content has been agreed upon many times over. Everything else, however is subject to a vote.

Without rules, there is chaos

Early on in the channel’s history, a number of rules were established through voting consensus. These were generally thought of as necessary to ensure the fairness and neutrality of the content vetting process:

• Our current standard is to have half of the active participants give the okay before a given post is considered approved. (2 plus the person who proposed it). If changes to wording are suggested, we discuss and/or vote again on this new version until one can be agreed upon.
• Content should primarily focus on Gridcoin, BOINC, and related scientific developments
• Monetized content was decided to be too controversial to post. The primary reason is that there is an obvious conflict of interest that can arise; particularly if the author of the content is also one who has posting or voting privileges.
• Politically-charged content is to be avoided
• Content should be evenly spaced out, and have a consistent frequency

Section 2 - Transparency and inclusiveness

Private OP groups are everywhere

The existence and membership structure of OPs and the private channels they communicate in is not new or unique in this community. In fact, it is the way virtually every single platform we are familiar with here has been managed.

Generally, the way it works is this: Members who cared to maintain a specific Gridcoin page or platform created one and did so. The platform's credibility of being 'Official' (Even if it's not referred to as such) was then established through time and effort put into it, and the greater community's use and acceptance. Whether it's posting permissions, mod status or otherwise elevated roles, these were given out from the account owners to other people in the community they considered reputable or trustworthy.

This is the way all Gridcoin platforms have been and currently do function. Reddit, IRC, Discord, Twitter, Facebook and so on, all hold true to this principle. Essentially, each of these platforms have trusted OPs, and they each have their own private communication group dedicated to its administration. This is also true for Twitter, as outlined below.

On transparency

Our Github Roles Wiki does not have current and accurate information on who is running what platform in this community. This includes the members of this social media administration channel. Gridcoin documentation as a whole is severely lacking, and it's no surprise to see sparse information in this section as well. The onus is essentially on the individual operators of platforms to indicate their roles if it is not otherwise public information. This is something that can be easily fixed.

The existence of this channel was announced and discussed on a number of occasions in Slack. That being said, it would be unsurprising to hear that a large part of the community remains unaware of it. If it's not constantly listed in the channel sidebar, it would escape the attention of most people.

The membership of the channel

I was personally invited to this channel on July.31 2018 after an in-channel vote. As of a month ago, the membership list below was accurate. The list has since changed, as I’ll expand upon later. Historically, the first 8 have been the only ones who participated in the content vetting process. The first 5 are now the only ones that have been recently active.

barton26
geebell
vortac
an0n
fkinglag
CM
jringo
NeuralMiner
caraka
G_UK
ifoggz
Mel
Peppernrino
quezacoatl
ravon
Noah Blaker

Are the doors closed?

As described above, this channel's current membership was based on a small group that Quez brought in. After the fact, existing members discussed, voted on and invited specific people one by one. But as far as new members, this roster has been subject to an invite-only basis--the same approach used by all other private admin groups.

This doesn’t mean that the community has no say in the content that goes on our Twitter. In fact, the community has been frequently encouraged to submit content to Tweet. In Discord, there is a dedicated channel called "Twitter-proposals", in which anyone is free to participate. The Slack Marketing channel has also been pointed at as an outlet free to those who want to make content suggestions.

Why remain private?

There have been internal arguments made that this particular group is not inclusive enough of other community members; That its membership is not transparent and that the channel's nature is 'secretive'. While I wouldn’t describe the channel as inherently secretive, I agree that efforts should certainly be made towards increasing its overall transparency to the community.

But are there merits to the group remaining private? I would argue that in principle, yes. If you have a group of individuals who know each other and are confident they can work well together, there are undoubted benefits of being able to go about this work without "external noise" chiming in at every moment. While outside feedback can at times have value, we have all seen how easily just one or two specific unruly community members can derail a conversation.

Some people may have assumed that our social media content has been posted largely without discussion. I think the notion that there has been a reasoned and deliberate approach to handling our public image and social media content should be encouraging, not shocking to learn.

The community needs to be able to trust that this group has its best interests at heart. But does that mean we need to immediately disband the entire group, and open up memberships to the community polls that are either vulnerable to exploitation or monetary influence?

Section 3 - Trouble in paradise

The current issues

No administration effort comes without its challenges, and this group is no different. There are several issues that have arisen recently. The main ones are:

1. Lack of content

The primary issue that plagues this group is a lack of content. Out of the 15 members, there has unfortunately been a maximum of 6 people in this channel who ever participate in the overall process. Even fewer seem to vote or propose content.

2. Delays

When content does get proposed, it can take too long to discuss and gather the necessary votes for. Being that half of this group lives in opposite time zones, and combined with real life priorities, this often is the reason for a significant delay in getting content out the door. This issue is most evident when there are critical updates that urgently need to be delivered to the community and nobody with Twitter permissions is available.

Possible solutions

The aforementioned problems faced in this channel have been relatively minor. There are potential solutions to these problems; both of which come with pros and cons:

1. Keep the existing structure

New members are invited to a private channel via internal discussions and votes by long-standing OPs and reputable community members.

Pros

• The existing members who actively participate in the process can work well together and trust each other’s judgement.
• The team, in spite of having recent conflicts, has demonstrated it can be quite effective at producing content
• Having multiple people involved as opposed to just a few not only welcomes a variety of content to be proposed, but ensures critical updates can be posted without significant delays
• The private channel is free from outside noise

Cons

• Some people may feel that the channel is secretive and lacks transparency
• Some people may feel this group is not welcome to new members (Yet nobody has ever sought out membership outside of the CCT announcement post)

2. Open it up to the public

Pros

• Some people may feel this is more inclusive of the community as a whole
• Opportunity for publicity in announcing this proposal

Cons

• The proposed method of voting is not democratic, in the sense that 1 person does not equal 1 vote. All formats of in-wallet polls available are either capable of being exploited (CPID count or wallet count) or are given a fate decided by only a few whales (Balance and magnitude). This means that the poll can be easily swayed by just one or two people.
• The proposed method of increasing inclusiveness not only opens a door to risk, but brings an unexpected form of unfairness. The alternative to internal votes of reputable members is wallet polls where the votes of a couple secret whales can easily dominate the outcome.

Section 4 - The channel’s fallout

The Immediate impact

In the wake of some significant and drawn-out disagreements, the channel recently lost two members: jringo and CM. The dominant arguments seemed to have been about whether or not to allow Tweeting monetized content, and whether or not we needed more people with posting privileges. The loss of these two members resulted in two things:

• The proposed content and subsequent discussions came to a near-standstill
• CM removed himself from the agreed upon voting process without any notice or alternatives, and began posting content of his choosing. This was effectively the final nail in the coffin, as he was the last remaining active admin with posting abilities.

The takeaways

• Continuous arguments make it difficult to accomplish what we set out to do: Producing quality Twitter content on a consistent basis
• A single Twitter OP with posting abilities who ignores the agreed upon consensus process will have his posting abilities revoked by an admin. This is the exact thing that happened when Peppernrino used his former Twitter access to promote his other “Official” Gridcoin Twitter account. See Sept.09 2018 in Discord. In this scenario, the group can recover.
• A single Twitter admin who unilaterally decides to abandon the agreed upon consensus process and starts posting content without discussion will immediately derail the entire group. Basically, one admin can single-handedly overrule 1.5 years of policy and effort if he simply feels like it; OPs can be removed if they misbehave, but admins cannot.

Section 5 - On Vortac’s proposal

A number of things

There are a variety of different concerns that come to mind when I look at this proposal:

• There are absolutely no rules, guidelines or even timeframes outlined in Vortac’s proposal. Without any of those important parameters defined, this is essentially reads as seeking a blank cheque to post whatever one feels like, and for however long. Incidentally, these are all things that are established in the official-social-media channel. What content is forbidden? How long are these positions supposed to be valid for? Do they automatically expire, or will they have to be voted out? These should be clearly spelled out, not defined after the fact.
• Having exclusive posting abilities on our most popular social media outlet, and Tweeting one’s own monetized content is what most people would describe as a conflict of interest.
• There is a general lack of interest of people from the community to be the sole contributors of Twitter content. Notably, only one person volunteered, ‘forcing’ Vortac to volunteer himself for the positions that would be created via his own proposal.
• The wallet voting process is not an accurate representation of overall community approval. In this case, votes = money. See section 3.
• This proposal was posted without considering the feedback from the other active members of the official-social-media channel. Major concerns which were brought up from the beginning were essentially dismissed by Vortac.
• A significant issue we faced on a number of occasions in the official-social-media channel was being unable to post critical security or network issues in a timely manner, due to only having two people with posting abilities (Actually 3 before jringo left). This proposal gives no thought to that glaring problem, and still suggests an inadequate number of users be given posting abilities.

Section 6 - Conclusions

Considering these things

This very lengthy post can be boiled down to a number of considerations, which form the basis of my objections below; None of which involve my own opinions of the proposed candidates, aside from the aforementioned conflict of interest regarding monetized content. While I agree that it’s a noble idea to seek out more community involvement, I don’t think this is the best way to do so for a number of reasons.

• The in-wallet voting system is particularly unbalanced. The poll types which aren’t simply exploitable, are extremely unbalanced in that it gives disproportionate power to a select few individuals who hold a large amount of Gridcoin.
• We already have open doors for people to participate. All community members are free to propose content in the Discord Twitter Proposals and Slack Marketing channels.
• My personal experience with being a part of the discussion process of the official-social-media channel has given me an important observation: More people should have posting abilities, not less as this proposal suggests. I’ve seen several distinct instances where critical information was not able to be delivered because the few people who were actually able to post were unavailable. Not only do many of us live in opposite time zones, but we have real life priorities as well. This proposal ignores the very obvious issues that we had been experiencing with regards to being understaffed
• I have seen this channel function very effectively. It has only been as of late that disagreements have hindered this process. Based on my experience, I do believe that this is the best system available. All it needs is to have a clear set of rules, trusted community members who want to actively contribute, and more than 2 people with posting abilities so as to avoid unacceptable communication delays

The future of the private official-social-media Slack channel should definitely be discussed. I feel that this channel’s sole purpose has been wrongly attributed to being exclusively for the discussion of Twitter content. I think it’s important to have a private channel for the admins of various platforms and significant endeavours to speak with each other and alert each other of important content that should be delivered.

This can be separate from a channel which is home to only active participants of the discussion process. I also think that a developer such as Barton should remain part of it, as to be the bridge to forwarding critical network or security items needing announcement.

My conclusions

• Private OP groups are commonplace in this community, and are neither inherently bad nor secretive
• In spite of recent hiccups, I believe the current content vetting system that had been working effectively can continue to be effective, if it undergoes some minor adjustments and fine tuning.
• The current official-social-media slack channel should be restructured to include only OPs which wish to communicate to OPs of other social media platforms
• Another channel should be created to include only the existing OPs who have been actively participating in the content consensus process. As there was an obvious need for more members was apparent, this group should vote to invite more members to participate.
• There has never been a substantial desire from the community at large to be involved in the vetting of Twitter content. * This is obvious both in looking at the lack activity in Discord’s Twitter-proposals channel, and how only one single person who was not a member of the official-social-media channel indicated they were interested in this proposal.
• Subjecting the Twitter admin candidacy to a demonstrably imbalanced voting process is arguably less democratic and secure than internal votes of existing reputable OPs
• This proposal omitted a very critical aspect. Without defining any rules or guidelines to accompany these positions, what exactly is the community supposed to be holding them accountable to? This in itself is reason enough for me to vote against this poll.

Personally, I have enjoyed being part of the creative process of vetting, constructing and discussing the Tweets which ultimately end up defining Gridcoin’s public image. It’s actually been quite rewarding to see the Tweets on scientific publications that I’ve constructed make it onto a Twitter feed of 15K followers.

But in spite of that, I still think it’s an overall far better approach to have a group of dedicated minds of different perspectives working together, as opposed to just two who have the final say on everything. At its optimum, the current process is comparatively more balanced, more democratic, provides more people for backup when life priorities take over and critical messages need to be rapidly delivered, and was mostly working well before the recent flood of arguments drowned out any productive discourse we were having.

Basically, this proposal strikes me as totally backwards, as it suggests to boil the essence of the content vetting process down to the very aspects that were found to be the most problematic and controversial: Few contributors available instead of many, nonexistent feedback in the absence of a larger vetting group, conflicts of interest, inappropriate wallet voting mechanisms, and so on.

For all of the numerous above reasons, I have voted No on this proposal. Basically, if it ain’t broken, don’t break it.

I'll also link to Jringo's take on this proposal as well:
https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jringo/in-response-to-current-conflicts-regarding-social-media-and-engagement