This post is a general response to the staff vetting thread about me, but also food for thought for anyone who is hung up on the idea of climbing to the perceived top of a perceived pyramid on an internet forum.
Seeing my name on a list of people with different viewing and editing permissions is not meaningful to me.
I'm happy to mentor new moderators. I'm happy to contribute to awesome conversations about how to nourish the community. I'm happy to be more involved in any number of ways here, but none of them require status as an admin.
Quite frankly, admin access on this forum at this moment in time is really just about trust and respect. Having an admin team is pretty unnecessary right now, considering the low volume of traffic (and more importantly, spam). If and when the forum grows, we'll need a scale-able system in place to handle the traffic. Part of that is giving the right people the right buttons to push so that they can perform necessary tasks.
Admins are people you can trust with the keys to the whole building. At LWS and at many other forums, being on the admin team also means being on the executive committee. It means making top-level decisions based on experience, insight, and a certain set of skills. But in practice, having access to the buttons isn't important. What's important is knowing how to define when the buttons should be pushed -- and we can all do that together without being moderators.
You guys have my support in whatever capacity I can offer it. I will make time for this place, but not because I want to keep my admin status. That just seems ridiculous and silly to me. Just let me know how I can help and I'm here. I'm not interested in politics or power mongering. You can think of me as a non-admin consultant to the executive board -- which is all of us. :)
