Where is Barbelith going?
In terms of the future of Barbelith, there are various pieces of work in the planning stages, much of it accumulating around two main concepts: (1) Fluid and community-governed user roles and (2) adaptive (almost political) rule-sets about how the community should be governed that the community itself can change and influence. The first is about (a) finding ways of creating semi-permeable membranes that allow us to take in new members and have them approved by the rest of the community before joining in full (to alleviate spam and troll problems) and (b) creating democratic processes in the board that allow people to move between normal user and moderator status. The second major concept is about creating a moderation structure fluid enough to allow the community to move between anarchic, despotic, democratic or other political models as the board feels is appropriate at any given time. The scale of some of this work is enormous and complex and not easily compatible with the demands of
