What's the up side to defining a core? Are there rewards to the community for doing that?

Gold. Lots and lots of gold.

I think some frankencense, but it's a bit too smelly for most.

I just url-hacked to see how many users we have, and freakishly landed on the ID of a friend of mine from another community. I didn't know she had finally joined. Cool!

By the way, we're up to 991 registered IDs.

But I agree with the article in that there's a difference between being a registered user and a member of the community, and that the core has greater rights, because they by definition care more about the community.

I agree with you on the first clause, Allyson, maybe not so much on the second. At least, not structurally. Someone who is an active member of multiple threads and who has built that participation into a presence on the board as a whole has no greater rights here, at least as I'd define them. Nothing absolute and objective that could be pointed to.

However by the same token that person might get more flexibility and leeway from the rest of the board. That's a subjective, intermittent thing, though, and it can be lost or invalidated by their own behavior. We all participate at the sufferance of our fellow members.

I also disagree that whatever "rights" inhere to a "core member" do so because they care about the community. Someone who's been here a while and participated in a number of boards may be doing so for their own entertainment, and not because they have an abstract fondness for Buffistas.org as an entity on the net. For all you know, I don't give a damn about this place as a community, but only because it's funny and fast-moving and supplies me my RDA of porn.

but still, I'm totally right

Go you for sticking to your opinions, but I think what we have is a balancing act, as described by Shirky in the article, between keeping the community functioning and keeping the individuals happy by sticking to our premise of inclusion and equality. You're going for functionality (and you're not alone, I'm sure), where others here are still trying to be idealists.

I do think this article is a good example of the sort of reading we need to do, though, as we struggle through the growth and definition of this community. Shirky comes down harder on functionality than I would (or ita does), and doesn't see the possible polarizing effects of the caste system he advocates, but the community progression he describes is both familiar and somewhat demoralizing. (And yes, he doesn't mention death-by-obsolesence, which I've seen a couple of times by now in various fora.)

Anyway. Back to my spreadsheets.

Honestly, I'm not sure why we're talking about it now. Are we currently having a problem?

I think it's because people read that article and were discussing the concepts therein.

EDIT: whope wrong paste pasted, fixed.

DCJ, do you mean to be quoting someone that's not me there?

part of the way we stay nice to each other is by having the core membership be self-defining, and mostly unspoken.

Thank you, Ms.Moon, for defining my perception more clearly. Yes. What PMoon said.

Already fixed it, ita.

I think we reverted back to core at People's Forum, when decisions had to be made quickly. The F2F threads were created without a vote, for example. There wasn't a vote about using the Fangeek server (I think that was covered earlier in discussion about tech emergencies, but could be mistaken).

Also, a lot of tension seemed to have melted and we were none to quick about having these sorts of discussions when we came back. I found it all fascinating.

Also known as, we are happy to remain an amorphous blob. I like not-defining our formal definitions of status, just the way I like our making definitions of "offensive" relational. You know, if it works, we use it, till it stops working (or we forget that we were using it and have to start all over again, and then Nilly and feel very stupid). I'm cool with that.

But part of the way we stay nice to each other is by having the core

yes, this.

I think we don't define core by name, but by actions, and how we react and post to one another. It's unspoken, but it is the rhino in a tu tu sitting in the corner, always.

It's defined in the article as people who care the most about the community. The people that care the most, that have the most at stake, do have greater rights, and we give them freely without thinking about it. The core gets responses, greater in frequency and more passionate in tone than other users. Sometimes a troll is in the core, for that reason.