I would like to start a discussion around creating a new section on this forum to host and foster the Polkadot Fellowship.
If you are not familiar with the fellowship, please check out the following links:
The goal of this new section will to be a space where people in the fellowship can communicate about a range of public to sensitive topics about the network and the fellowship itself.
My current thoughts are below.
Scaffolding
I suggest the following scaffold be created:
- Fellowship (top level section, public for anyone to post, inside or outside the fellowship)
- Fellows (visible to those with rank 3 or higher)
As you can see, there is a public space at the top level for people to communicate and learn about the fellowship. This is a space where candidates or members can ask questions about ranks, where discussion about direction, members, and even promotions can occur. You should expect that most conversations happen in this public space.
However, you will also note that I suggested private space, and would like to justify that, since it is against what I think is the normal expectations of the forum. As Polkadot continues to become more decentralized, sensitive topics will need to reach the right audiences across many different organizations. Imagine if there is an exploit discovered somewhere in the Polkadot codebase, and we need a team of engineers to coordinate and quickly remedy the issue. The thought is that high ranking members of the fellowship are the right people to be told of these issues, and to be notified ahead of time to the public. For example the core developers who will patch issues and parachain teams who may be affected.
This private section can exist as a space which allows communication among peers with a similar reputation in the Polkadot ecosystem, without worry about the general public seeing those conversations at sensitive times. It would be an expectation that posts in these private sections, make their way into the public top level section when appropriate. As such, no conversation should be private forever, and conversations can continue in public where it makes sense.
Membership
I suggest that some semi-automation of membership be set up for this. Users are already able to associate their GitHub login with the forum, and we can use this along with the official list of members and their ranks.
Members, Fellows, Architects, and Masters can become groups on this forum, where users can be placed into the appropriate group, giving them access to the private section on the forum listed above, as well as public recognition of their status. A script can be run once a week, manually, to add or update any existing members. This can be publicly audited by anyone comparing the group members to the public fellowship list.
- How do people feel about using the forum to help facilitate the fellowship?
- How do people feel about this private section?
- Any other ideas you can think of to make communication in the fellowship better overall?