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[TTT] Committee Voting System
#11
(09-08-2019, 01:02 PM)queef commando Wrote: Note: As a result of this system, sponsors are no longer needed for staff apps in TTT.
time for 50 more apps to be denied
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#12
(09-08-2019, 02:35 PM)Penguinslayer4 Wrote:
(09-08-2019, 02:28 PM)Foxka Wrote: "Voting used to be open to all staff, but it ended up turning into a situation where you had to be friends with the right people to get anywhere, and certain groups would just force people out they didn’t like. "

That's literally how it will be now, people are still forcing out people they don't like. What i was trying to get at is because of these committees the issue will be even more prevalent and will only further the rumors of favoritism among certain staff

These groups wont just go unchecked. Admins will still be there to ensure history doesn't repeat itself.

So essentially, just have a few more friends higher up than you used to, if you're in the lower tier. And if you're in the higher tier, just do what you always do? Sounds good.

(09-08-2019, 02:35 PM)queef commando Wrote:
(09-08-2019, 02:28 PM)Foxka Wrote: "Voting used to be open to all staff, but it ended up turning into a situation where you had to be friends with the right people to get anywhere, and certain groups would just force people out they didn’t like. "

That's literally how it will be now, people are still forcing out people they don't like. What i was trying to get at is because of these committees the issue will be even more prevalent and will only further the rumors of favoritism among certain staff

We can either try something that's never been tried before or go back to a system that's failed before. It's worth trying and we brought this idea up to all staff before making this post and no one had an issue in public or private with trying this system.

This seems like like the old system with extra steps. You just have to convince whoever's on the "committee" to do what you want. Win them over, and you're golden. Hey, you made it into a shitty republic, like Roman, and you're playing Caesar. Everyone thinks they get a say when in reality it all comes down to a few final says.

Sorry to sound pessimistic but with how infrequently things get done, for one, and how many little cliques get formed, these tiny groups are begging to be "bought" by the right people.
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#13
(09-08-2019, 10:04 PM)Seeker Wrote: This seems like like the old system with extra steps. You just have to convince whoever's on the "committee" to do what you want. Win them over, and you're golden. Hey, you made it into a shitty republic, like Roman, and you're playing Caesar. Everyone thinks they get a say when in reality it all comes down to a few final says.

Sorry to sound pessimistic but with how infrequently things get done, for one, and how many little cliques get formed, these tiny groups are begging to be "bought" by the right people.

Not that I feel any one way about this whole thing (read: I am entirely neutral about it), but lets say this is 100% certain that this is how these committees will turn out - if the promoted staff do their jobs correctly/efficiently/as expected, is it necessarily...bad that they got promoted this way? On the flip side, assuming that this IS 100% true may also entail that people that do not have the favor of these committees would be excluded from staff, but the admins would be able to effectively keep this in check, no? Moreover, assuming applications would remain public to everyone, wouldn't it be easy to catch these exclusionary situations?
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#14
My opinion on this is how it is executed. The system could work or it could fail. I'm glad something new is being done.

However, if a large problem arises like what just happened all committee members should get a vote. As to avoid as much as possible groups trying to oust others.

Thanks for trying to make a change. Hoping to see it work out.

edit: maybe add an activity committee it wouldn't be hard and it would directly aid the system as a whole.
It is not okay to literally tell people their opinions are wrong because they disagree.
#15
(09-08-2019, 10:41 PM)Proper Wrote:
(09-08-2019, 10:04 PM)Seeker Wrote: This seems like like the old system with extra steps. You just have to convince whoever's on the "committee" to do what you want. Win them over, and you're golden. Hey, you made it into a shitty republic, like Roman, and you're playing Caesar. Everyone thinks they get a say when in reality it all comes down to a few final says.

Sorry to sound pessimistic but with how infrequently things get done, for one, and how many little cliques get formed, these tiny groups are begging to be "bought" by the right people.

Not that I feel any one way about this whole thing (read: I am entirely neutral about it), but lets say this is 100% certain that this is how these committees will turn out - if the promoted staff do their jobs correctly/efficiently/as expected, is it necessarily...bad that they got promoted this way? On the flip side, assuming that this IS 100% true may also entail that people that do not have the favor of these committees would be excluded from staff, but the admins would be able to effectively keep this in check, no? Moreover, assuming applications would remain public to everyone, wouldn't it be easy to catch these exclusionary situations?

Got some examples.

Example: Person A and Person B are applying for staff. Person A isn't the best candidate, but they're good friends with one or two of the people on the committee, and some other staff. Person B is an excellent candidate, but a few of the members on the committee don't particularly like them for personal reasons.

Who is more likely to get approved?

Example: Person A submits a Ban request for Person B and has sufficient evidence. Person A has had a difficult time with them, as Person B has been making playing difficult for Person A and others for quite some time. Person B is close friends with the members of the committee. They dismiss and rebuttal the evidence, saying it isn't enough and more needs to be gathered. Now Person A is upset and has an even bigger target on their back.

What should Person A do?

Example: Person A has been banned for some time and knows they have very little chance of becoming unbanned. Their old friend is now a committee member. They submit an unban request and nudge their friend for some good faith.

How is this fair to other people waiting to get unbanned?

I know these are very specific, and we are hoping that the staff will be unbiased, but everyone is human. It's impossible for people to not make mistakes or unbiased decisions. I understand that's what the committee is for, but we've already seen how much a group can easily be swayed or what can happen when one or two people say "I don't really want to have much say in this."
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#16
(09-08-2019, 11:56 PM)Seeker Wrote: Got some examples.

Example: Person A and Person B are applying for staff. Person A isn't the best candidate, but they're good friends with one or two of the people on the committee, and some other staff. Person B is an excellent candidate, but a few of the members on the committee don't particularly like them for personal reasons.

Who is more likely to get approved?

Example: Person A submits a Ban request for Person B and has sufficient evidence. Person A has had a difficult time with them, as Person B has been making playing difficult for Person A and others for quite some time. Person B is close friends with the members of the committee. They dismiss and rebuttal the evidence, saying it isn't enough and more needs to be gathered. Now Person A is upset and has an even bigger target on their back.

What should Person A do?

Example: Person A has been banned for some time and knows they have very little chance of becoming unbanned. Their old friend is now a committee member. They submit an unban request and nudge their friend for some good faith.

How is this fair to other people waiting to get unbanned?

I know these are very specific, and we are hoping that the staff will be unbiased, but everyone is human. It's impossible for people to not make mistakes or unbiased decisions. I understand that's what the committee is for, but we've already seen how much a group can easily be swayed or what can happen when one or two people say "I don't really want to have much say in this."

Literally that 2nd example is why we still have ban requests and such, evidence is still made public. It isn't like no one gets to see the evidence or if they make an unban request the evidence won't be provided. If staff were biased why would we bother with ban requests to begin with?

The committee's are multiple people voting on something, not just 1 person making the decision, so asking "a friend" for help wouldn't sway everyone on the committee without providing substantial evidence to support your case. And likewise, whether the staff votes for or against something they need to provide reasons as to why they are voting that way to ensure they aren't showing favoritism or have personal issues motivating their voting.
It's the same with voting publicly on a staff app, you can't just say +1 or -1 and not give a reason, you have to support your answer with facts otherwise your vote isn't valid.

With that being said, that is why the admins still oversee everything and if your reasoning starts to show favoritism or personal bias you get removed from the committee. 

I find it funny that the main issue for people is letting all staff vote xD whereas before no one raised the argument when the admins made the decision who was staff or promoted, "well why wouldn't you just kiss up to the admins?" 

This allowing a wider voting pool to allow more input and insight on issues or apps, and will help make the decision more confident and solid seeing as it isn't just 2 people voting on everything.

And quite honestly, I think this could really help the community as a whole, as well as the staff team. Staff being more involved with decisions made for the community, rather than it just being the admins who make decisions, will be better in my opinion.

And who knows, maybe it will fail, and maybe it won't. But either way, it's worth a shot. And quite honestly, after recent events, it can't really get a whole lot worse. so why not give something new a try that could end up being really beneficial? Theres a difference between now and back then when all staff could vote on things, it's a completely different staff team full of different views and personalities. 

I think it's time we started trying to make changes that could benefit the server, staff, and community. We have to at least try.
#17
Bolded the "important" parts if u want 2 skim

(09-08-2019, 11:56 PM)Seeker Wrote: Example: Person A and Person B are applying for staff. Person A isn't the best candidate, but they're good friends with one or two of the people on the committee, and some other staff. Person B is an excellent candidate, but a few of the members on the committee don't particularly like them for personal reasons.

Who is more likely to get approved?

In this example, I feel like we have to put it into a realistic scenario. If this person applies and gets commented on by the community (as it is right now, I would assume that these committee changes wouldn't affect the community's ability to give their opinion on applications, so any and all opinions/bits of information would be commented onto these applications in one form or another), I want to say that all information that may factor into their promotion would be provided by the community. This assumption/belief comes from the fact that Dinkleberg's is made up of many opinionated people that like to argue with each other (although tbh most of those people have been community banned, and regardless of whether or not you believe they were banned for SUFFICIENT reason, we have lost a lot of thoroughly-opinionated people because of it, and that is objectively a detriment to the community) and that if any one individual wanted to, they would post their opinions regardless of whether that may fall into the majority's agreement or not. The option of sending an admin these opinions is, naturally, available. My main point here is that anyone may argue for or against an individual's promotion and may make their sound argument for or against this person. Any person reading this application's thread will read that post, see the follow-up posts from others reacting to this post, and the resulting conclusion from the committee and see if all of these posts/opinions/events flow correctly without influence of bias.
What I am getting at here is that the result of applications does not always SOLELY fall upon the shoulders of the committee based on what I am gaining from this post. There are main contributors to this committee, yes - and they may be (or, in essence, are - as all people are) biased in their decisions; but there are admins who are keeping them in check, and while you may believe that these admins are equally biased in nature, it does make it more difficult for these committee members to make decisions SOLELY off clique-based biases. To be specific to both you and myself, I will talk about Gabe - he is a TTT admin, and is the only ACTIVE TTT admin. I think you and I would both agree he is a reasonable, minimally-biased individual (If you disagree with me on this, then there is not much we can discuss beyond this point). In a specific example like what you have provided to me today, you would be able to DM Gabe on Discord to not only bring this concern of bias to his attention, but to discuss it.
So to answer your question honestly: I genuinely believe that both of these individuals would be accepted. I do not know any of the people on ANY committee personally, so I can only assume that they are unbiased from a random community member's perspective. I understand that you have a different perspective on specific individuals on these committees, so I cannot comment on that unfortunately.
If you want me to comment on a situation from the opposite side of the spectrum, assuming that these individuals making these decisions as as biased as they possibly can be, I will have to say that Person B will not be promoted whilst Person A will be. From here, we can only go one of two ways: we see that the deciding individuals on the committees are making very obviously biased decisions, which (hopefully) will be brought directly to an admin and handled correctly from there. The alternative is that the deciding individuals are not CLEARLY making a biased decision. This is the worst case scenario, but honestly from what I have seen of Dinkleberg's in my short time here, it is a very uncommon occurrence. Even so, in this situation, going to Gabe specifically will honestly probably resolve the situation effectively.

the tl;dr of my drunk and extremely long response here is that either 1. the bias will be obvious if it even exists, and 2. if the bias is not obvious, you can make your argument to a reliable, trustworthy admin and go from there. The only issue coming from this is if you do not trust any of the admins, in which case you will have to go directly to Dink, but at that point I think you'd be one of the few individuals who do not trust the higher administration in the first place so...I'm not sure if my response would be good enough to address that.


(09-08-2019, 11:56 PM)Seeker Wrote: Example: Person A submits a Ban request for Person B and has sufficient evidence. Person A has had a difficult time with them, as Person B has been making playing difficult for Person A and others for quite some time. Person B is close friends with the members of the committee. They dismiss and rebuttal the evidence, saying it isn't enough and more needs to be gathered. Now Person A is upset and has an even bigger target on their back.

What should Person A do?

To avoid writing yet another novel, the only response I can give this is to go to an admin. Again, like the initial post stated, admins will be keeping these committees in check.
In addition to this, I will continue to assume that all ban requests/appeals will be kept public to the community. In this case, the rest of the community will be able to view the evidence provided and people such as yourself will be able to check to see if the committee is, in fact, responding without bias. I feel like the solution to both this scenario and the one above is simply, the community will be able to view the resulting thread/evidence and admins are available to handle any mishandled situations; in this case, if you do not feel like an admin will be able to do their job without bias, you can take it to Dink, and that's about it.


(09-08-2019, 11:56 PM)Seeker Wrote: Example: Person A has been banned for some time and knows they have very little chance of becoming unbanned. Their old friend is now a committee member. They submit an unban request and nudge their friend for some good faith.

How is this fair to other people waiting to get unbanned?

This is a very unique situation, but unfortunately, it does actually occur frequently in Gmod communities. However, the way you've phrased it is slightly vague. I will work off of the assumption that the initial ban reason is both 100% valid and quite severe, so this person is permanently banned and, while they have the option to appeal, will be unlikely to be accepted for quite some time (I don't know of any specific offenses within this community that would produce this type of ban so I can't be specific with any example of offenses, sorry). Because there is not a conclusion to this example, I will also make the assumption of worst case: this person's appeal gets handled quickly and before any other pending appeal's, and this appeal either resulted in a reduction or a total & immediate unban. This answer will also be similar to the rest of my answers: the appeal is completely public to the rest of the community and, therefore, can be reported to an admin for appropriate handling. While I understand some/most cases of bias are usually very subliminal to the naked eye, an argument can be made for each individual case to a competent, minimally biased admin and a discussion can ensue in private. I know this to be true because I've gone through it countless times with Gabe specifically (he is very patient with me).


(09-08-2019, 11:56 PM)Seeker Wrote: I know these are very specific, and we are hoping that the staff will be unbiased, but everyone is human. It's impossible for people to not make mistakes or unbiased decisions. I understand that's what the committee is for, but we've already seen how much a group can easily be swayed or what can happen when one or two people say "I don't really want to have much say in this."

You are correct in saying everyone is human, and in saying so, everybody is biased. I am biased, you are biased, the admins are biased, and every single person in each committee is biased. A big factor in being apart of these communities is not only accepting this fact, but working to address it in the most appropriate way possible. In my experience, the best way to handle that is to put as many people onto a team/committee as possible. In doing this, it ensures that there are several different people working on the same situation towards the same goal - all of which have a different way of thinking. Yes, all of them. You (or whoever is reading this, I cannot speak for how you think specifically, Seeker) may believe that certain people on these committees are apart of the same "clique" and, in short, think the same way towards the same agenda: to get their friends as many benefits as possible. The reality of the situation is that they all think very differently, only due to their much different upbringings and social conditioning growing up (tl;dr there is a big psychological/sociological theory here that I really can't put into less words ): ). However, to say that they have the same goal in mind is not entirely incorrect. In a subconscious fashion, the human mind naturally drifts towards only recognizing the positives towards those it favors and only recognizing the worst in those it is against. This goes back to my point about everybody being biased in some sense, and in this way, you'd be correct to say that those apart of the same "cliques" would be working towards the same goal: to benefit the same PERSON in that clique/friend circle. At the end of the day, though, each person does think differently and evaluates all available evidence and opinions uniquely. I believe that the reason these people were chosen is because the admins believe these people are capable of putting aside these biases in order to make a decision that best benefits the community.
Now, when you say "but we've already seen how much a group can easily be swayed or what can happen when one or two people say 'I don't really want to have much say in this.'" - you bring up a very necessary point in this entire discussion. A group is very vulnerable to a majority opinion/agreement, or even a simple argument that is worded correctly. That is not to insult the intelligence of the people on these committees or to say that they can't think for themselves, but a large factor in social psychology is the fact that these things go frequently unnoticed in the heat of social situations. I.e., when it's happening, you won't notice it. This goes for everybody, not just committees - if your friend group thinks a certain way, chances are you will agree with it. That's just human.

To address this last point: I don't have a good answer for it. The most important part of decisions happen during the discussions, and we simply do not know what happens during those discussions because they are kept private from the bulk of the community. The only thing that we, as a community, can do is to trust in the process that has been laid before us by the admins. This brings back the topic of simply trusting in the admins, as my previous answers have brought up. We've been told that the admins will be keeping these committees in check, and there's little more for us to do than wait and watch for any misguided judgements from these committees that may have resulted in bias. In short: we can't tell until it happens.



As for my personal thoughts, it's summed up pretty well by this phrase: we've never tried it before. I understand that there is an extensive history to Dinkleberg's that I just don't know about or understand well enough, and so I can't really comment on it. But as someone who was once in an admin position (specifically, the equivalent of admin here in another community) I feel like I can offer good advice to those who seek it and that's why I post my stupid novels here. I understand the """"plight"""" of an admin and I also understand the position of a random community member. There are multiple sides to each of these arguments and both sides have a unique privilege to them: admins enjoy knowing almost every side to every situation and having all the information (a good example of this is the lack of public evidence to the community bans from only ~2 weeks ago. The admins know about ALL evidence that contributed to the bans while we just don't). The community, alternatively, has a unique view of each situation that the admins simply do not. They know all pieces of evidence, reports, etc. while the community only knows what the admins show, and while the admins MIGHT know all things, that influences what they show to us. To put it simply, they will never understand the unique, restricted view that the community does because they see things in private that we don't.


big tl;dr: trust in the admins' decisions. Specifically, go to Gabe, because he is the least biased person I know of personally and he is always open to a discussion of some sorts (as long as you don't approach him aggressively, obviously; he is human too). If you don't trust the admins for whatever reason, then the only answer from there is Dink. Beyond that, there's nothing more to do besides just wait for an actual, applicable situation in which bias is hindering the benefit of the community.
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#18
I look forward to seeing this new system of yours in action. 
#19
Well, thanks Proper, Penguin. That addresses some of my concerns fairly well. Hopefully this works out for the community and if it doesn't, well, something else will have to be done. Not impossible.

Time to test the new found committee process via a staff app.
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#20
This shows some promise with involving more of the staff in the decisions being made. I look forward to see how it turns out.
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