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It's been four years since the town opened its doors. Since then we've never
shut them, not even for a day. Though people come and go we've grown
consistently and are bigger than ever. Our community remains unique and
compelling, and I'm excited for the coming years.

I don't know if others have felt this way, but since our last birthday I feel
like I've been mentally holding my breath. The writing was on increasingly on
the wall: the several year model of me, a lone human, handling almost every
single admin request and issue on the town was unsustainable.

I shipped features that helped (the help desk, runaway process killer sudo
group, irc mods) and got enthusiastic support for volunteers, but it wasn't
enough. I still feel like I'm the final say in everything that comes up and that
pressure has been really getting to me, to the point of total town burnout.

How does this relate to the town's birthday? I want to lay out a vision for a
new model of administration that will carry the town into the next N years and
commit to working on it[0] (in addition to the still in progress tildemush ;) ) as
a birthday present to the town.

Instead of a single admin and a set of inconsistently-empowered volunteers, the
town will be managed by an administrative anticabal[1] proxied by IRC, email,
and web bots. Admins will answer to social and technical issues as they are
able, and share the burden among them.

In addition, a new monitoring system will proactively page volunteers about
system resource issues before they become a ruinous experience for town users.

This means you'll be seeing less of me, your frantic and ever-worrying admin. I
hope to take a step back from the day to day bustle of IRC and cease being the
point of contact for town issues. I'll still be part of the anticabal and an
active part of town administration, but it won't necessarily be me you're
talking to directly.

We're at a point where it's time to step up and self-govern. The town is an
*intentional* community[2], and part of bringing intention to a community is the
willingness to cooperate and collaborate on governance. I hope these changes
allow us to retain our identity and values while still welcoming new users in
the years to come.


Happy birthday, town.

~vilmibm

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[0] work towards these goals will be tracked here:
    https://github.com/orgs/tildetown/projects/1 .

[1] a lot of technical groups use "cabal" to refer to some elect group of
    individuals with an expanded mandate to make changes in secrecy. Our admin group
    is thus an anticabal; an empowered group, but one that acts from a place of
    transparency and cooperation with the wider group.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_community

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            dedicated to abraxas. you are deeply missed, friend.