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CC-003

Welcome new council! I have performed the tasks requested in CC-001 and CC002.

Concerning the Council's request: The Council requests Bureaucrat Matt Innis to add to sysop rights the rights of the Editorial Personnel Administrators, consisting of two rights: View requester’s and IP addresses while processing requested accounts (requestips), and View the queue with requested accounts (confirmaccount).

Sysops already have 'View the queue with requested accounts (confirmaccount)' permission, so nothing needs to be performed. The second half of the request requires a change to the group user rights. It appears that I do not have the necessary access to change user rights to within a group. I may be missing something, so if someone knows that I do have this ability, please let me know and I will oblige. As an alternative, I can just add the EPA rights to all the Sysops.

Let me know. D. Matt Innis 13:40, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

List of decisions

seems to be incomplete. I remember two from the last election: appointing election committee and endorsing referendum. Maybe others are missing too. Peter Jackson 09:48, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Also Anthony's election to the Council chair. Peter Jackson 09:41, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

And the recent (re)appointments to the technical team announced by Anthony, which the Charter assigns to the Council. Peter Jackson (talk) 10:19, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

New Council discussion page

I have created this page to replace the old forum board. Is it acceptable? It could actually go under the new 'Forum:' namespace, but I thought that placing it under CZ:Council separately would discourage non-Council-members from editing it. It will still be linked from the main forum page when that is set up, which will also include a link to this Talk page (which may be the best place for project members to comment on Council activities). Comments/directions welcome. John Stephenson 18:06, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Why don't you retitle it /Members only discussions or some such? Peter Jackson 10:01, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Depends what the Council want. John Stephenson 11:57, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Formal petition on new governance

Non-Council members: please make any public comments on the forum here.

To the Council,

Please consider this statement a formal petition under Article 37 of the current Charter, which allows any project member to request that the Council hold a referendum at the next election.

For some time, there has been on-off debate both about the future of the Citizendium project and its governance structure. For a variety of reasons, elected officers and their appointees have not been able to drive through significant changes or advancements. Often this is through no fault of any individual but simply the rest of time constraints, technical issues, funding, etc. Meanwhile, regular contributors to our articles often feel unwilling or unable to take on administrative tasks themselves. Clearly, a new approach is needed, though we should be careful to maintain two fundamentals: real, verified names, and a special role for experts.

Others on the project have publicly or privately called for a more informal governance structure which would place the future of Citizendium in the hands of those who edit it. I would like to add my support to that call and propose a final referendum to start this process.

Referendum on new governance

This referendum proposes to dissolve the Citizendium's current governance structure, reduce all current rules, policies and articles to the status of guidance, and establish a new community-driven system based on discussion and consensus among active members of the project, supported by a single ten-point policy document. As this referendum abolishes the Charter as a fundamental policy document, under current rules it will require a two-thirds majority of votes to pass. Voters could indicate 'yes', 'no' or abstain on a single question (see below). If passed, it shall come into force one week after ratification.

Question

Should the Citizendium's current governance structure be dissolved in favour of the below policies, in which previous rules and the Charter are treated as guidance only?

Citizendium Policies

The following ten points shall be the only binding policies on the Citizendium, and placed at CZ:Policies:

The Citizendium shall be run according to the policies set out in this document.

1. Usage and eligibility

1) The Citizendium shall be open to all who endorse this document.

2) The Citizendium is a knowledge resource which shall be owned and managed on a non-profit basis.

3) Citizendium articles shall be free to access on-line via a wiki and available under a licence that permits reuse with attribution.

4) Citizendium contributors shall participate publicly under their real, verified names and maintain public biographical details about themselves; minors - who must be at least 16 years old - shall provide only brief details, and otherwise personal information shall be kept private and destroyed when no longer needed.

5) The Citizendium shall prohibit behaviours that restrict the activities of the project or its members, or damage its reputation, including but not limited to unauthorised advertising ('spam'), vandalism, harassment, copyright violations, libel, slander, use of the site for purposes other than providing a free knowledge resource, criminal activity, or use of material that is considered either inappropriate for minors or illegal.

2. Content

6) Citizendium articles shall be as neutral, comprehensive, accurate and comprehensible as possible while respecting the balance of scientific evidence.

7) While all article contributors shall be otherwise equal, there shall be special recognition for subject experts (who shall be individuals with any of: accredited research-level qualifications; three or more peer-reviewed publications; or equivalent practical experience as defined by existing expert contributors), who shall have the final say in any dispute over content, and shall have the right to close a version of a reasonably high quality article to further editing.

3. Governance

8) The Citizendium community or its representatives shall decide its own governance structure and who shall be responsible for administrative, financial, legal, content, behavioural and technical matters.

9) No Citizendium member shall be denied a fair, unbiased appeal process against a decision made against them on administrative, legal, or technical matters.

10) These policies supersede all previous articles, rules and decisions, which may be used as guidance where publicly-accessible, and this document shall be modified, abolished, added to or otherwise changed only via mandatory public discussion and when authorised by a two-thirds majority of participating Citizendium members; other rules and decisions may be made through voting, consensus or precedent, in as transparent a manner as possible.

Thanks for your consideration on this matter. John Stephenson (talk) 13:10, 9 October 2016 (UTC)