Minnow Support Project: Comment Period for Governance Changes- (Mini Announcement about General as well)

Minnow Support Project Updated Charter, Governance, and Bylaws

These guidelines have broad support with the Minnow Support Community, but before passing how we're governed we wanted to open up to community commentary. Please add comments below. We hope to pass a somewhat edited version of these rules a week from today. Thanks for your time reading this.

Additionally, we expect the creation of departments to open up MSP to have a lot more interaction with community members. Instead of a single board that runs everything we hopefully expand to roughly 10 boards and people can contribute to how the project operates. Effectively you can participate and help build this place, without the full burden of being a moderator! We hope you find some things that interest you and feel free to get excited about some groups and ways to contribute.

(PS, there is an announcement about how general chat will function now at the bottom of this post).

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Charter

The Minnow Support Project was created by elected Witnesses that choose and chose to operate this public community organization. The primary goals are to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, to help Steemit Grow, and to train and retain minnows on the platform.

Community Standards and Rules

Please find our Guidelines on Community Standards, which form "the spirit" of the Minnow Support Project ( https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@minnowsupport/minnow-support-project-community-standards-the-spirit-of-msp) along with our rules (https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@minnowsupport/minnow-support-project-community-rules), which represent the bare minimum expectations of our community.

Structure: The Board of Directors

The Minnow Support Project follows the directive of "the Board of Directors". The Board of Directors comprises senior leadership with broad oversight. They meet Quarterly on the 3rd Saturday of February, May, August, and November in the PALnet Discord Channel at 11am EST.

The Board is comprised of the Chair who sets the agenda, but does not vote; as well as a Vice Chair that fills in for the chair when they are absent, they can vote, and their vote will split tie votes. Voting members include Sr. Moderators and Managing Witnesses. Non-voting members include Supporting Witnesses and counsel.

The current Co-Chairs are @aggroed and @ausbitbank. The Vice Chair is @followbtcnews.

The position is held for 2 years and then all members of the Board can nominate for positions and vote members into Chair and Vice-Chair. The next election will be held in May of 2019. There are not term limits and people may serve on the Board or as Chair for as long as they voluntarily choose to work on behalf of the Minnow Support Project.

In standard practice motions can be called and seconded, votes can be issued and counted. A simple majority is all that's required for a vote to succeed, but all efforts should be made to build consensus. The chairs set the agenda, but don't get a vote.

The Minnow Support Project daily/weekly operations are comprised of "Services" and "Operations." Services are free public services meant to help commuity members and Steemit accounts. These are externally facing services performed by the Minnow Support Project. Operations are internal functions by the Minnow Support Project necessary for successfully attending to the project Charter.

Witnesses and Sr Moderators appoint jr and full moderators to manage the services and functions of the Minnow Support Project. Weekly managedment is handled in a Moderator team meeting described below.

Witness Tiers

In order to differentiate internally and for public consumption the amount of work various Witnesses do in the project witnesses are split into Witness Tiers.

** Becoming a Witness with the Minnow Support Project**
The Minnow Support Charter was created and is supported by publicly elected witnesses on the Steemit blockchain. In order to be a Witness associated with the Minnow Support Project a person must meet the following criteria.

1. Have an operational Witness that's stable and only goes down for routine maintance.
2. Have a minimum of 10PV of stake weight supporting their Witness.
3. Have a minimum of 100 Witness votes.
4. Write a post declaring intent to help the Minnow Support Project and what you pledge to support the community and the Charter.
5. Promise to be at 3/4 of the annual strategic meetings and 1/4 of the weekly moderator meetings.
6. Be approved by the existing Board of Directors.
7. Annually write a post looking for a continuance as a witness with the project by stating your contributions to it. It then has to be supported by the rest of the board.

Benefits conveyed
You are now allowed to call yourself a Witness with the Minnow Support Project. Your name will appear in Purple and at the top of PALnet. You now have voting rights at quarterly strategic board meetings and at weekly moderator meetings. MSP witnesses will be eligible to be on the comment left by votes from @minnowsupport.

Established Witnesses-
Managing- Managing Witnesses are present for weekly team meetings and help organize and run the Minnow Support Project. A managing Witness must be present for three of the four strategic meetings per year and 2 of the 4 mod meetings per month or lose their status.
Non-voting- Witnesses that provide services, only help make occasional decisions, curate out of the Minnow Support Project, or stop being active for a while are non-voting witnesses who lose their ability to vote.

• Honorary- Non Witnesses that have been brought into the role.

New Witnesses

Various Steemians have started and continue to get support as Witnesses from the Minnow Support Project. Going forward Witnesses that are seeking support from the Minnow Support Project must-

1. Author a post seeking a vote from the Minnow Support Project.
2. Attend a Board meeting and pitch your case.
3. At a minimum we will only support Witnesses that meet the following.
   a. Be in alignment with the charter.
   b. Share how you as a Witness will support the charter.
   c. Be a Witness for no less than 1 month before receiving a provisionary vote without public support.
   d. Be a Witness for no less than 2 months before getting a vote and public support of their witness from the Minnow Support Project.
   e. Pledge to attend at least 1 Board meeting a month.

Voting for Witnesses

Witness votes are reviewed the first meeting of every month and voted on by the Board. In the case votes are not approved a summary of why and requests for alterations in order to earn a vote will be issued on the block.

Votes are assumed to stay unless a voting board member calls for a vote on a particular Witness. Discussion will follow, and votes will be approved or denied.

MSP officials and community members alike are encouraged to proxy their witness votes to @minnowsupport

Moderator Tiers

The three tiers of Moderator are still in effect.

Jr. Moderator- The current minimum requirements to become a Jr. moderator-

1. Be approached or apply at a time MSP is accepting new applications.
2. t!rank minimum level score in the mid 20s, which shows engagement in the PALnet community
3. Have a service project- MSP is both a community and a community service project to a broader community. All moderators have to have a service project they manage (these can be MSP Services and Operations or separate).
4. Write a post indicating their intent and desire to moderate with a description of their service project and promise to deescalate conflict within PALnet and on the Block as well as pledge to live by community standards.
5. Approval by consensus of the Board of Directors

Full Moderator- After a minimum period of 1 month a Jr Member may be promoted to Full moderator. This requires consensus approval of the Board. Standards include-

1. Active member and leader in one or more departments or services.
2. Ability to work peacefully with themselves and other moderators
3. Familiarity with Community Guidelines, MSP operations, and Onboarding Procedures.

Sr. Moderator- Full Moderators that have shown incredible dedication such that they spend the extra time to be involved across the entire organization. They are appointed by the Board of Directors.

Community Membership

Members- Have an account with Steemvoter and have a voting rule on @minnowsupport for at least a 20% vote (dolphins and whales are excluded from this but still asked to vote)
Delegators- MSP asks for support from it's members through delegations. Please use the https://mspdelegator.herokuapp.com/mspdelegator website to delegate to the Minnow Support Project.

Weekly Moderator Meeting

The board will have broad oversight across all aspects of the Minnow Support Project. The moderators take guidance from the board and execute on it weekly basis.

New decisions and variance from common practice are made in a weekly meeting run in Discord. Standard application and communication happens in a hidden discord channel called mod-pit.

Structure-
CEO-sets agenda, runs the weekly mod meeting, veto power- @Aggroed,
Cheif Service Officer- Followbtcnews/Crimsonclad
Chief Function Officer- @Ausbitbank

Decisions that effect the whole community are often brought up for a vote. Motions can be issued in mod-ppit to be added to the Mod-Meeting agenda by CEO.

Voting- Votes
-Managing Witnesses
-Sr. Moderators
-Moderators

Non-Voting- May attend, may not vote
-Jr. Moderators
-MSP Medal Winners
-Support/Honorary Witnesses
-Operation and Service Leaders (non moderators)

Quorum a mimimum of half the voting members must be present to make changes in policy.

Voting- votes shall be by majority rule, but efforts towards consensus should be taken.

Mod-Pit

To help the general operation and to allow inter moderator consultation the moderators and witnessess will have access to a private moderator chatroom called "mod-pit." Mild amounts of life discussion are allowed, but the focus is MSP business.

Moderators can put forward motions for the Chair to consider for the agenda. Moderators can put things to an unofficial straw poll to get a sense of consent, BUT NO RULING IN MOD-PIT IS BINDING without a true vote at the mod meeting.

If policy has been already been set and the discussion revolves around how to best effectively execute on it then it's highly encouraged. If the discussion is based on brand new policy or a large change to the rules then the discussion is encouraged, but action should be stalled until after a vote at the moderator meeting.

MSP Operations and services

MSP Operations and Services are subsets of the overall governance of the Minnow Support Project. Each Operation or Service will be managed by one or more Moderators or in the event of a vacancy on an Operation or Service Leaderhsip team a well known and trusted community member shall be allowed to serve as a leader (t!rep level 20+).

Each Operation and Service Leadership Team should consist of Moderators/community leaders and a team of community members. The leader will report into the weekly meeting.

Once established the team should create a problem statement, vision statement, mission statement, and guidelines for how the team will meet and operate.

MSP Operations

PALnet Oversight- PALnet is the Discord home of the Minnow Support Project. It currently has just shy of 5,000 active members, 400+ people sitting in channel most of the time, 40+ sub channels and hundreds of active text chatters and voice conversationalists. It takes a team of people to moderate the channels, help new channels form and make sure that we're registering and onboarding new members successfully.

While all moderators and witnesses are at least in part responsible for making sure that PALnet is working smoothly and people feel good and view it as a safe fun community some Moderators choose to help shape how it should run by serving as leaders on the PALnet Oversight Committee.

Core Duties
-Channel Moderation
-Channel Development
-Channel Engagement
-Registration
-Discord Role management

PALnet Oversight Leaders: @crimsonclad, @juliakponsford @sammosk

Community Curation- This is powered by all the moderators and a handful of selected curators from the community. MSP uses a program called MSP3k to allow community members to manually upvote and resteem posts from @minnowsupport. MSP uses a Discord bot which has the posting key to @minnowsupport to curate from the main account.

Community Curation Leaders: @isaria, @juliakponsford @sammosk

Finance- Make recommendations to Board on investments,general guidelines for funds use, appropriate publicly accessible money making ventures

Finance Leaders: @followbtcnews ,@swelker101

Human Resources- The HR department serves to write posts, share posts, create contests and bounties, to help with recruitiment to Steemit (and MSP specificially) as well as improve communication and public relations. Affairs are broken up between the two major charter objectives: bringing new users to the platform and training and retaining minnows on the platform.
-Steemit- Contests/Bounties, Recruitment, Public
Relations
-External- onboarding new Steemians from irl/steemit to msp.

HR Leaders: @sammosk, @kubbyelizabeth

Product Department- Programs that enable us to do our job better, faster, cheaper, and impact more people positive fall within the Product Development. These new products may well create who new services that helps the MSP community support the Steemit community even better.

Product Leaders: @followbtcnews, @crimsonclad, @sammosk

Information Technology - IT exists to support all other services and operations through technological support and automation help.

IT Leaders: @ausbitbank, @sammosk, @r0nd0n

Development- the Minnow Support Project is a community. The community is enriched when donors contribute to the proejct, community Witnesses are supported, and the coffers are full. Members of the Development operation assist bringing in and retaining delegations and witness votes to support the mission.

Development Leaders: @aggroed, @kubbyelizabeth, @sammosk

Services

Make a Minnow- The Minnow Support Project runs a bimonthly contest to award a minimum of 5k SP to an upstanding community member.
Account: @msp-makeaminnow
MAM Organizers: @sammosk, @juliakponsford
Health- Check in on the mental and physical well being of MSP community members.
Health Leaders: @travelnurse, @swelker101 - physical
Steemit Community Development- Use MSP programs to help build microcommunities around community bots and Discord Channels/Servers.
Community Development Leaders: @aggroed, @swelker101, @sammosk
Sheriff's Department- There is often abuse on Steemit and sometimes abuse within PALnet (The Discord home of the Minnow Support Project). Sheriff's are authorized to act on behalf of the community to deescalte as they deem necessary breaches of the Peace and/or Community Standards.
Sheriffs: @discordiant
Writing Assistance- The central medium of Steemit is writing. It's essential to growth on the platform to learn to write better articles.
Writing Assistance Leaders: @sammosk
MSPWaves- We have our own radio station! you can listen in at http://mspwaves.com/listen. We have rights to stream 18M songs. We have 20+ DJs and shows across many nights of the week and we have a backfill bot that plays music or recorded video shows.
MSPwaves Station Leaders: @r0nd0n
The Peace Academy- This is a new service that will be launching soon. It's meant to help relatively healthy people (physically and emotionally) learn how to demonstrate peace as frequently as possible. It is not a rehabilitation service at this time, but designed to help Steemit and MSP community members learn to interact peacefully with one another and what that looks like when executed well. More details will be forthcoming. Peace Academy Leaders: @aggroed, @isaria, @sammosk
MSP Library- It's important to spread knowledge and have a central repository for knowledge. The highest priority is Steemit Development. The library is collecting articles to help grow the development knowledge and community.
Library Leaders: @aggroed, @sammosk

Right to Change

The Minnow Support Project is barely 4 months old. We reserve the right to change our operating guidelines so long as it fits the mission and we make changes public on the block.

Changes to operating guidlines can be introduced at moderator meetings and voted on by the group. Broad strategic differences can be brought up at the quarterly strategic meetings and discussed there.

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Announcement: General Chat has been split into two now. First group is the "shallow end" and the second is the "deep end." This is a pool reference because we are a "Minnow" group. Shallow end is meant for conversation that your HR director at work would approve of. Standards are basically bland corporate discussions and welcoming new people. Deep End is more like how friends talk to one another. You can swear, mention sex so long as you're not graphic, talk about basically whatever. There's still not Steemit posting, but now when you're having a deep conversation with a friend new people don't walk in anymore into awkward conversation.