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Open and Closed - The Death of Community

Dream of what could be
I have a dream. An open community, that is both free and fair, where the community is in control, where everybody is free from oppression and their voice can be heard.

Do you think it is possible? I do but it will take honesty, integrity, determination and belief to archive it.

Disappointment hurts
It’s sad when things don’t turn out quite how you expected them to. I’m talking about Open Designs. The community promised so much when it was first launched under a fanfare of “a community site, run by the community for the community”. It seems that it wasn’t to be and the site has firmly remained under the control of a few people who seem reluctant to open the site up to the community.

Money is evil I tell you
Is it the money? The site must make a reasonable sum of money from adverts and donations. I’m sure there is more than enough to pay for hosting and a few prizes for competitions. I do wonder if money really is the “root of all evil”. It often seems that money causes more problems than it solves. I would rather see no money and a thriving community rather than a rich autocracy.

…and finally
Time will tell. I hope it is not the end of the dream and that the community can overcome it problems.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 11:38 am and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Open and Closed - The Death of Community”

  1. perthmetro Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 4:38 pm

    OpenDesigns isn’t going to the dogs quite yet.

    There’s no doubt there was, has and is a distinct lack of response by the admins to varying degrees. Sean, one of the admins has been brave enough to front up to the cries for action and is doing things, good things.

    The community is now in discussion about having elections to vote in new admins, hopefully this will happen in the near future. I welcome you to join in.

    There is no doubt the ‘community’ is concerned about the power base that exists without enough accountability in place - hopefully the elections will help address that and even more so a new/revised ‘constitution’ is long overdue.

    I hope that the money isn’t the reason, i doubt it is. I couldn’t see these admins taking any of the money - but, there needs to be a drastic improvement in accounting for the money to prevent this ever being able to be an issue and blog topic for that matter.

    Regards,

    Pete aka perthmetro

  2. Ainslie Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 8:44 pm

    Hi Pete,

    Sean is a good guy but he seems to be the only one who is regularly posting in the forum.

    I was hopeful that there might have been some progress but it seems to have died off again :-(

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