Its my opinion that ALFA's governance has two key strengths:
- It keeps the project changing hands when people leave. ALFA's lasted a long time. Most projects like ALFA die off when their contributors leave. The result is a system either no one knows how to run or no one can run because they don't have the source code (modules in our case).
- It keeps the management from doing anything too stupid. I think the worst we've experienced is admin blocking policies which most of the playerbase wanted.
- Its really, really slow. Look how long it took to get two PCs approved, an act which I think almost everyone now sees as a good move.
- Changes have many failure-prone steps. A lot of people have to discuss and agree on even minor alterations. Since we're all volunteers, this tends to mean things fall by the wayside.
- Its very costly in terms of manpower. The "B-game" burns people out and takes time away from the game. Of course all management has some cost, but I think we can agree ALFA's is costlier than most.
- The people who make policy don't implement policy. This means that the implementers often get stuck with really, really costly policies which might not justify their costs. See the pricing standards (untold work would have been saved if we tried to modify NWN's built-in pricing system) or the -6 floor as examples.
Forking does help people stay sane, since they know they could lose control of their project if they screw up. Google forked the Linux kernel to create android (though they are slowly merging the two back). LibreOffice forked OpenOffice, and is now the mot popular free office suit. There are many other examples, but none most people here would probably have heard of.
So it is my opinion that ALFA3's game content and hosting environment would be better served by dictators and a 100% commitment to open-source. That is open modules, open shared content (haks), and even a forkable character vault (though you could not have the vault 100% open obviously). If this ended up being a bad idea you could always fork the project and bring it back to something more democratic.
Of course the danger here is that you have multiple ALFA-forks out there, sapping at our playerbase. You'd essentially be making it easier for people to compete with ALFA. In practice I don't think this would be a problem for end users, though it definitely might cause contributors some stress. Its a ton of work to fork and create a new PW. Sure it might be done, but only for major differences which might be best served by separate projects anyway. This problem is shared by OSS projects, and the world keeps on turning.
You can also think of this proposal as "start simple". Complexity in governance could always be added if the dictatorship ends up being a poor idea. Of course you'd have to convince others of this view, but if its really that bad you should be able to.
Opinions?