My answer would depend on the kind of editorial board in question.
The distributing of management functions amongst the community would be a pretty involved conversation though.
So as long as that option comes with a proviso like “We will have this conversation if the option is chosen” I guess I would be ok with holding my breath.
Who’s on the byline? Are there pseudonymous or anonymous options for submitting writing?
Good point. I guess I had assumed the editorial board would be self-selected, in the same way that the “mod board” was. But I guess there are other ways to do it, too.
@popobawa: that’s a matter for another discussion, I think. That falls under “style guide” which I would suggest should be drafted by the editorial board, however that gets formed.
Because they get a kickback from doing so?
One of the issues I had when I modded a long running site was that there were people who were creating interest in their own work by their many generous contributions to our discussion. Many of them had their own small businesses - mostly hobby businesses - and there was a problem with them not getting to full on promote within the community where they had built up a reputation through participation. Just to site one example, we had in our community a chiropractor who gave a lot of great anatomy information on yoga, and she had a LOT of people interested in her from our discussion board. She is now selling cars.
To me, I’d rather have a platform to promote community member’s stuff than Amazon’s stuff.
For example, on BoingBoing we had @nemomen who’s Hedgehog art is a little business concern, but he also entertained us all with his great Hedgehog art. I’d love for him to be able to just go at promoting his business as long as it was in a way we felt was not totally obnoxious.
Why not have the occasional sponsored blog post where he gives a little something hedgehog extra to us and drive some traffic to his site?
I actually created this model for my own business and have a Shopify store.
Anyhow, just throwing that into the mix.
For my own business, I own the platform; not sure how it’d work here.
That’s an interesting idea, though I think an argument could be made that a better model might be to reward members by giving them free “promoted posts” rather than charging them for it. Plus, in a community of 100-150, value of that is small. Assuming the community grows, that becomes more valuable though.
Just to make sure we don’t get off topic though, this discussion is about the content not the revenue side of things (I realize there’s some crossover). For revenue, see Get Your Vapes and Headphones Here thread.
Okay, here’s the poll - who should be able to post to the front page? See above for fuller descriptions.
A note on the last two options, I am thinking it’s either the “dynamic” version, which may see people who come later or who suddenly get an interest could be added later, resulting in a larger group, or the “static” version which involve the selection of the editors now, only from those here already, with others added later only under extraordinary circumstances. This would probably result in a smaller, but perhaps more dedicated, editorial crew.
0 voters
Okay, this isn’t an overwhelming number of votes given that we have 100+ members here, but the trend seems to be that everyone should be able to post to the front page but with some kind of editorial review, which I suppose could come before or after (as discussed above). The second most popular answer is that there would be some kind of election or appointment to an editorial group. So how about we fuse those two ideas in to this;
Everyone will have the option to post to the “front page,” provided the post passes editorial review. Editorial review will be conducted by a group of editors, taken from the membership, who apply or are elected to form such a group.
Thoughts?
I think that sounds pretty reasonable. Basic safeguards against someone going off the rails and posting something crazy. But not so heavy handed that people feel excluded.
This. With no safeguards, it’d become too vulnerable to trolls, but we don’t want to exclude good ideas for the crimes of being a new author, or even just bad with spelling and punctuation, but we do want to keep bad grammar and punctuation – and poor research, trolling and flamebait-- off our public facing areas unless we want to be the next reddit.
I concur.
Is it worth having the (optional?) extra step of letting someone post a ‘I’m thinking of writing about XYZ’ to
Such a thing could be public, transparency is good, but I can’t help but think that editorial decisions might be best issued privately, at least initially, to save face/minimise embarrassment on the 'no’s. (no-one _likes_being told “Sorry, no thanks”, even nicely), with the understanding that the person can then share the whole review (no editorialising for effect) themselves, or can then authorise the editorial staff to post the feedback verbatim to a topic if they want to.
[NB, I tweaked this text after the first like, to make it clearer.]
This is a very interesting idea, and would solve a big problem; people posting about the same topic or posting the exact same story/link at the same time. I don’t know how other places do it, but it seems like it could be handled with a topic that would be just for front page drafts/ideas.
I don’t know what fur transparency is, and I’m afraid to google because rule 34.
But as for decisions being made in public vs private, I think public is probably best - it keeps everyone on their best behavior. Most of the time. Could be something that’s a special topic that doesn’t appear in the main board though, or is otherwise somewhat hidden. Ultimately though I think that’s something that the editorial group can figure out.
Sorry - I killed that typo in the edit. Still laughed at the joke, mind. 
Oh, sure - I’m just thinking through the issues ahead, because that how my neurology works. If I’m steaming too far ahead, that’s cool.
Possibility of editors checking-out spelling and grammar? Balancing act between significantly changing content / writing style / board article style / time spent by editor per article.
I’d suggest the lightest touch possible, but even the best of us make typos/mouseos/brainos 
Here you go.
…in a snowstorm, while blinking.
One last question/idea for the editorial committee - promoting impressive topics/content from the other categories?
The existence of the TL3 and TL4 levels looks to me like a provision for sorting out the editorial group question.
TL3 would act as a self regulating lounge that uses their influence to ensure the health of the commentariat in that pool of trusted readers.
Any TL3 members that would like to act as editors could submit themselves to a randomised (or elected), temporary (or tenured) position as a TL4 editor.
TL4 editors should then be able to select from submissions to publish, or publish their own work, whilst also editorially controlling the content they release. This might include editing submitted work themselves, or suggesting edits to the original writer.
Submissions could even be graded by the submitting writer indicating whether they are ok with the board of editors editing their work or if they prefer to edit themselves and resubmit (which would probably incur some kind of time penalty (perhaps going to the back of the queue for publishing approval)).
Obviously some people will have a communally recognised flair and will be long-term trusted by the community as editors representative of the Zeitgeist, which is why I mention permanent (or at least, non-automatically-rescinding) promotions.
Any thoughts on the unnoticed wrinkles to my personal utopian ideals?
On Wordpress you can see pending articles and drafts—you just have to look to see what’s in the queue before you start writing. I believe there’s also a scheduling plugin which specifically addresses this issue. I’m not assuming that we’re going to use Wordpress, but if we do, it has all the necessary mechanics, and I’ve seen them in use.
I have no idea why the BB crew have such a problem with this, but it’s possible that they’re just not taking the time to read their own blog.