I would more likely prefer Hugged's proposal more than the two proposals given.

Hugged wrote:

I have a third proposal, which sort of combines both proposals:

Regarding my own proposal, I still have concerns about it (after some discussion with others).

How much of the BNG cares to be involved with its bureaucracy? How much of the BNG just wants to nominate maps without much care about management?

My proposal would be unnecessarily complicated if it's the case that most BNs don't care about this process. It would be giving them unwanted responsibilities.

Assuming it's the case that most BNs don't care too much, I actually lean more towards proposal 1. Most of the agency stays with the NAT, and perhaps the BNs can (optionally) perform a simple pass/fail/neutral vibe-check vote amongst their peers who are interested in becoming a trial evaluator. However many evaluators the NAT wants to trial, they can take from the highest vibe-check passing candidates, then the actual evaluation/NAT selection process stays unchanged.

I'm curious if a full BNG-wide poll asking "How involved do YOU want to be in the NAT selection process?" can help us decide how much agency is good to give the BNs in selecting NATs.

id be very happy with #1 if it was more of a BN voting of the top X candidates to get to bn evaluation rather than just nominating a candidate. This would already act as an initial filter for BNs to decide while the options are still wider. this would take into consideration the general sentiment of the BNG for a candidate on a higher level.

if #2 passes through, there should be discussions on how much a BN's vote should weigh vs a NAT's on the grounds of experience and knowledge.

lenpai wrote:

if #2 passes through, there should be discussions on how much a BN's vote should weigh vs a NAT's on the grounds of experience and knowledge.

Agree, I think it's less so grounds of experience and knowledge, I wouldn't say by default that NAT's view of competency should be weighed more than BN. It's more so that NAT votes are based on working with these candidates for 1 month vs BN votes who are guesswork at best and popularity/circlejerk at worst. They are making more informed decisions with more data.

I oppose both proposals for practical purposes. The vast majority of BNs have no information on which to judge NAT motivation or ability, as it is pretty unrelated to BN work (being mostly low visibility administration and getting flamed on Reddit). Indeed the entire BN evaluator/trial NAT system exists because there's not a good way to determine whether a BN would be a good NAT by looking at their modding or longevity or nominations and so on.

I propose that BNs get to opine on prospective NAT candidates in a private, non binding manner (like through a BN site vote) and concerns brought up are taken into consideration in a manner similar to GMTs' votes. If a large amount of BNs have significant reservations about an addition, we can just not add them as having an extremely unpopular addition would be bad optics. Similar situations have already arisen and been dealt with with mania NATs - this just formalizes that process.

Nao Tomori wrote:

I oppose both proposals for practical purposes. The vast majority of BNs have no information on which to judge NAT motivation or ability, as it is pretty unrelated to BN work (being mostly low visibility administration and getting flamed on Reddit). Indeed the entire BN evaluator/trial NAT system exists because there's not a good way to determine whether a BN would be a good NAT by looking at their modding or longevity or nominations and so on.

I propose that BNs get to opine on prospective NAT candidates in a private, non binding manner (like through a BN site vote) and concerns brought up are taken into consideration in a manner similar to GMTs' votes. If a large amount of BNs have significant reservations about an addition, we can just not add them as having an extremely unpopular addition would be bad optics. Similar situations have already arisen and been dealt with with mania NATs - this just formalizes that process.

Your proposal obviously would be great, I had initially assumed the objective of this was to give more autonomy to BNs and take some from NATs to make it fairer, so I thought stuff like these was out of the question.

Your proposal only touches on the later end of the process (choosing NATs from BN evalers). How would you suggest BN evalers be picked? I still think current "pick some RNG the rest" system isn't ideal.

That was indeed the objective. I think the objective is misguided and will lead to poor outcomes for the reasons I stated. The second objective, not on the thread, was to reduce nepotism; I don't really see how letting BNs participate in a popularity contest where they have no basis for voting fixes that.

For selecting BN evaluators, the main issue imo is that there's more interest than available work at any given time (evidenced by the low ratio of selected evalers to interested BNs). I believe there's a few ways to solve this; for example, more strictly limiting evalers' activity and just picking more of them, or having it be a consistent rolling system where instead of large rounds, we always have 3-4 interested BNs floating around that stay in for a month or so and whenever we need a new NAT we present one of them to the BNs for approval.

The other issue not touched on is the general lack of experienced, motivated, and optically acceptable candidates. I think we should spend more time developing potential candidates with feedback on their eval period (if they're interested) to grow the pipeline. This would alleviate a lot of the other concerns such as high turnover, nepotism (i.e. always falling back to known quantities of returning NAT) and basically make it possible to keep bringing in newer blood.

proposal 1 won't really solve the overall feeling of needing to be in a 'clique' in order to have a chance at NAT, although it does help with being allowed to participate in the BN Evaluator program (which is good for the reasons achyoo already outlined)
proposal 2 also won't solve that problem, if anything it just makes it even worse, you'll need to be on perfect terms with basically everyone in the BNG in order to have a chance (alongside the fact that BNs aren't going to be perfectly in-the-know as to what makes a good NAT)

coming from someone that's been actively trying to get into the NAT for years at this point, it feels like both of these proposals are band-aid fixes for a system which is currently constructed around being around (and friends with) the right group of people. adding factors which contribute to that overall feeling of 'cliqueness' seems like it'd make the system way worse compared to what it is currently -- unless i'm interpreting something wrong, at least

couple of other things i noticed scrolling through the thread:

Local Hero wrote:

I can get being against any form of non-merit system but we are working under the assumption that all members of the are acting and performing in good faith. stating that a system can lead to some form of nepotism when a vote amongst the relevant team rather than internally is more transparent and a wider audience for scrutiny feels quite strange to me.

it's nigh impossible to remove biases from any type of voting; the assumption can be that everyone will act in good faith, but this pretty much never happens in practice. yes, opening the voting process to the entire BNG would allow for more transparency, but it doesn't solve the inherent issue of feeling required to befriend and 'please' a certain group of people just to have a chance at getting in.

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

can we set some threshold and say all 3 fail so no new NAT is chosen, NAT must pick different people on next round?

i think its obvious someone is a bad choice if most BN says so, lets honor BN's choice in who can become their boss

same thing said above applies to this, as well -- this quite frankly makes it impossible for people who aren't on the greatest of terms with everyone to get in regardless of their ability to do the job. that should be the last thing that happens on something which is trying to be more application-based.

Nao Tomori wrote:

I think we should spend more time developing potential candidates with feedback on their eval period (if they're interested) to grow the pipeline. This would alleviate a lot of the other concerns such as high turnover, nepotism (i.e. always falling back to known quantities of returning NAT) and basically make it possible to keep bringing in newer blood.

100% agree.

Nao Tomori wrote:

That was indeed the objective. I think the objective is misguided and will lead to poor outcomes for the reasons I stated. The second objective, not on the thread, was to reduce nepotism; I don't really see how letting BNs participate in a popularity contest where they have no basis for voting fixes that.

o7 GL in the fight for this

What makes you people believe that the current system isn't also requiring a clique or some kind of population that supports you (an even more tight-knit one even more so)? Right now without the approval of the people in even more elevated position, you can not be a NAT or get even considered for it to come into closer consideration.

Nepotism and bias will always be an issue, your trust in the NAT to make informed decisions is honorable and I can attest that people try their best to be most fair, but it would be naive to assume that it will always be objective. But in any case, a transparent voting for candidates helps a lot to legitimate the NAT or the people considered for it.

Hugged makes a fair point about people having to show some sort of interest, because people need to want it.

I also kind of disagree with Nao Tomori (and I already said that in some meeting internally) that people are unable to do informed decisions. You can make people be able to make informed decisions, if you were willing. Make the information public and people can form their opinions and decide accordingly.

I would love to place some trust into the BNs deciding at any stage and empower them to make informed decisions by providing them all they need. Either suggestion provides a layer of filtering and candidate curation by the existing NAT (which could be seen contrary to the intend of this act), so if you put your trust in the curation process by the NAT, it would kind of exist in either option.

Loctav wrote:

Make the information public and people can form their opinions and decide accordingly.

Not sure what was discussed internally, what information is this referring to? The relevant information would be things like individual evaluations (which under the new proposed BN application system, would be sent to the applicant without names attached) or the entire chatlog of the discussions happening during group phase. I'm not sure the NAT candidate, the NAT, or the applicant would be happy to see all of this public.

If a voting were to happen like you said, I would very much prefer proposal #1 rather than #2. Combine giving BNs the right to vote for who gets into BN evaluator cycles + what Nao suggested, a development pipeline to train candidates with potential would be ideal IMO.

Loctav wrote:

Nepotism and bias will always be an issue, your trust in the NAT to make informed decisions is honorable and I can attest that people try their best to be most fair, but it would be naive to assume that it will always be objective.

I do agree with this though, even if the current NAT do not abuse it, having safeguards in place is good to prevent any potential future abuse. It is also good for optics and gives people more reason to have trust in the NAT.

achyoo wrote:

Loctav wrote:

Make the information public and people can form their opinions and decide accordingly.

Not sure what was discussed internally, what information is this referring to? The relevant information would be things like individual evaluations (which under the new proposed BN application system, would be sent to the applicant without names attached) or the entire chatlog of the discussions happening during group phase. I'm not sure the NAT candidate, the NAT, or the applicant would be happy to see all of this public.

adding onto this, i'm not sure many would be willing to read through a month's worth of discord messages and evals, look through the discussed maps etc for each candidate. they can choose to not do so and just vote, but that cycles back to a popularity vote. the NAT would inherently know all the relevant information just by doing NAT stuff and working with the evaluators for a month. is it still biased? sure. but at the very least the BN's performance as an evaluator would actually be an important factor.

from a BN perspective proposal #2 gives you more influence on other BNs getting the position, but can work against you if you make it to the vote (you could lose the vote regardless of how well you did).

personally i'm leaning to nao's approach as well. why rely on popularity or rng when we can give more BNs a hand at trying NAT work themselves? this can be a way to gauge motivation of potential candidates, and gives people a more concrete path on what to do if they want to go for the NAT position.

this goes for whichever solution we ultimately go with. Overall I'm more of a proposal 1 person. Let BNs choose who to support from those volunteering for a bn evaluator round instead of rnging the participants.

Overall, I think how nat members feel about new additions is pretty important too, just necessitated by how much and often we work together. For BNs it's also extremely important since who is NAT will influence their fates... so it's just tricky to think of a good way to balance.

For the group work, like, for nominating stuff I can go multiple maps without ever talking to the 2nd BNs directly. We both mod and check thoroughly, maybe occasionally I'll dm them to more actively discuss 2nd opinions, but it's not required. BNs thus can be added pretty independently of each other but for NAT it's harder. Then on the other side, every eval that NAT do requires group discussion. Some less, some more, but always something. It's just incredibly involved as a group, even with the proposed application changes. That's all before even mentioning working together on other mapping issues to moderate or systems to update or other projects.

Like...
GMT get to vote internally on new additions because proper behavior, teamwork, and skillset is so important.
I think NAT deserve a similar level of agency at the end of the line.

BN evaluator rounds make it pretty clear from experience who may be most balanced to work with, even if our personal views don't align. It can be hard to give a good overview of this aspect for public voting when current evaluator rounds are a month and some change process. How do you make that consumable for uniformed voters?

However my issue with it is, it's such a long process with a lot of work for a maybe or most likely not result. I think this can make it frustrating for both participants and anyone who vouched for them to get to participate. This is already a problem as mentioned several times in this thread but... it'd be moreso the more people vouched for someone just for them to not get in.

I've said my own piece on this in the internal discussions but I'll reiterate it here to make my stance more public:

Proposal 1 is likely to be the only thing that works at all out of this, since proposal 2 would require burdening BNs with the task of combing through info they either don't have (other BNs' internal evals) or is otherwise extremely laborious to consume (chatlogs of the whole process, reading and contextualizing lots of BN apps, etc...) to vote on people with criteria more rigorous than popularity or vibes. The people who actually care to do so will be completely outweighed by the majority of BNs who, rightfully, don't really give a damn. What proposal 2 actually does is just make the BN evaluator / trial NAT period largely completely pointless, which, given it's literally the most important part of our current judgement when it comes to additions, is totally counter-intuitive.

I'm largely completely against having any BN interaction with the final voting process - nominating people to try out is fine, but giving them agency over something I'm certain a large amount of them wouldn't want to bother themselves over, and then giving those that do care the same weight as those that don't is just a horrible mistake, in my opinion.

Scotty wrote:

achyoo wrote:

Loctav wrote:

Make the information public and people can form their opinions and decide accordingly.

Not sure what was discussed internally, what information is this referring to? The relevant information would be things like individual evaluations (which under the new proposed BN application system, would be sent to the applicant without names attached) or the entire chatlog of the discussions happening during group phase. I'm not sure the NAT candidate, the NAT, or the applicant would be happy to see all of this public.

adding onto this, i'm not sure many would be willing to read through a month's worth of discord messages and evals, look through the discussed maps etc for each candidate. they can choose to not do so and just vote, but that cycles back to a popularity vote. the NAT would inherently know all the relevant information just by doing NAT stuff and working with the evaluators for a month. is it still biased? sure. but at the very least the BN's performance as an evaluator would actually be an important factor.

I get where you are coming from, although it would be kind of top-down to decide what others "may want". My remark was not about them absolutely being forced to dig through hours of logs and stuff, but giving them the *possibility* to be as informed as remotely possible. Whether this is done by providing logs or by making their entire actions just transparent ever since they were part of the process (so people can just follow what these people are doing) is up for debate, but providing information vs. having the voters eventually utilize this information are two different things. It's hard to argue that "people cant make informed decisions" and then say "but if we provide them with information to make the decisions informed, they will not do it".

All votes are eventually popularity, but you people always make it sound like everyone will just vote out of all the wrong reasons. It is okay if people are popular, it is however important what they are popular for. I'd argue that NAT doing a good job are also fairly popular among those groups that they are supposed to assess (here: the BNs).

I just want to get away from the framing that voting is a popularity contest (and even if it is that this is always a bad thing). I can understand the reservations, but honestly: it's kind of democratization. If you make the voters (here the BNs again) aware what they vote for, what the result will impact and especially how it will impact them personally, I am very sure that people will try their very best to vote what is in their best interest - and this is not necessarily just voting for their best internet buddy.

.. and it is not like regardless of the option you choose that there aren't safeguards in place that it doesn't end up in sheer chaos.

I don’t think giving BN more powers about NAT additions works.
NAT is a team mainly focus on management, eval, discussing, community task and etc, the NAT should choose the fellow members by theirselves rather than voting by BNs. Also I am pretty sure some BNs just nominate maps of their own accord other than that nothing, they don’t want to take the responsibility of these extra tasks (like voting of NAT, veto or discussing).

More of that, how does a BN know who fits the read team and who can be worked with well? It’s team not political election. BN would just vote whoever they like or the most popularity ones if that.
Since the NAT is a role that has a lot of reponsiblities and permissions, making it decided by BN(some members age are even below 18) is dangerous.

I’d prefer Proposal 1 or keep the current process rather than proposal 2.

Fycho wrote:

I don’t think giving BN more powers about NAT additions works.
NAT is a team mainly focus on management, eval, discussing, community task and etc, the NAT should choose the fellow members by theirselves rather than voting by BNs.

More of that, how does a BN know who fits the read team and who can be worked with well? It’s team not political election. BN would just vote whoever they like or the most popularity ones if that.

I’d prefer Proposal 1 or keep the current process rather than proposal 2.

Sorry that I have to reply to this again, but what exactly are you insinuating? Your argument basically boils down to "this can't work because we have never done it that way", which is a fairly weak argument. Also why exactly is a team composition that hierarchically seem to stand above another user group not eligible to be up for an election? (it is literally eligible for an election in many many other things in real life, too). Also why exactly do you believe that they will just vote "who is popular"? Also why is that bad? What makes these people popular? Are you implying that the BNs vote in bad faith? And why are you skipping the part where in both methods, there is a curation in process that *even if* there would be just popularity voting, the candidates for NATship already went through a curation that weeds out the "dangerous kind"

The layer of protection against "who fits the team" comes in both methods by the curation of the currently NATs in place (at different points of the procedure), which also involves all checkboxes usually required to join the team.

And especially because the position comes with a lot of responsibilities and permissions, the safeguard curation is as much required (done by the NAT) as the legitimation by the people that the people with these responsibilities are supposed to have them to begin with.

I'm curious to continue hearing additional opinions from BNs on this, especially since this topic has been discussed around in circles a lot internally prior to the threads being posted. I think we've represented our existing points pretty well so far.

The insights from everyone posting so far have been good to read, maybe some more are on the voting itself to be seen later.

That said if anyone is reading this and has another idea, I reccomend putting it out there. I or other people can help cross post thoughts as well if needed.

After reading the long paragraphs (it was killer pls help), and the overall opinions of others, it seems that Proposal #1 is the better choice out of the two.

While yes, it may be better than the current system we have, we have to also realize that the influence of many can and will detriment the voting. While there are people who can get the remote information for themselves and also promote their values and beliefs, we also have to think about the numerous amount of people we may be giving this info to. Either-all, there will be a very big split between the community, and it promotes more nepotism in the BNG (not from the NAT). It's just shifting the nepotistic actions from one to the other. You're giving the option of giving people who are younger then 18 the chance to represent not only the BNG but the entire community, and trust me a lot of the underaged BN's sometimes can be quite immature if you ask me.

I fully can stand by Nao Tomori's values and beliefs about this, and their solution seems a lot more agreeable than most I've seen in this forum (no offence). And seriously, the amount of lackluster support on their proposal is brutal. The BN-Evaluators should be doing some work that the NAT does. Supporting Scotty on this, the amount of motivation someone needs to be NAT is immense, depending on the load of work they get. And to gouge someone who is both motivated and also quite strong-headed about it as well, would make an NAT a lot more agreeable that they would be NAT.

I just don't see a full ending to this if we choose to go back and forth on this. But I'm completely against giving the power to the BN's about choosing their NAT's respectively. And if that were the case and it actually happened to work in our favour, then sure I'd agree to keep it that way, but the system is severely flawed that way.

This is why Proposal 2 can never work.
Proposal 1 is the best idea for this to gain less nepotism until we find a better solution. And please keep in mind a voting system is never going to be fair, but it is what it is. But, you COULD combine Nao's proposal for that as well. At least in my opinion.

based on the poll results above, it seems like the majority is leaning towards proposal 1, albeit not very satisfied by it.

however, people seemed to voice support towards Nao's proposal that has BNs give opinions on NAT candidates in a private and non binding manner, with any concerns pointed out being taken into consideration by us.

Nao Tomori wrote:

I propose that BNs get to opine on prospective NAT candidates in a private, non binding manner (like through a BN site vote) and concerns brought up are taken into consideration in a manner similar to GMTs' votes. If a large amount of BNs have significant reservations about an addition, we can just not add them as having an extremely unpopular addition would be bad optics. Similar situations have already arisen and been dealt with with mania NATs - this just formalizes that process.

so, I'm proposing we try to incorporate the best of both worlds by:

- when we want to start a BN evaluators round, we'll have something in BNsite that allows BNs to sign up for it, and also have them grant X amount of "vouches" to other BNs who signed up. NAT will handpick a few users + add from the most vouched users of that round.

- after a BN evaluator round ends, we create a new type of "voting" card for each candidate, this card will have no actual voting options but will have a text field, BNs will write their opinions/concerns on these candidates, and when we conclude the "vote", the card becomes private to the NAT only so confidentiality of BN opinions is kept. then, the NAT discuss among themselves and act accordingly.

^ this was agreed upon internally so we will implement it unless there is heavy pushback.

Hivie wrote:

- when we want to start a BN evaluators round, we'll have something in BNsite that allows BNs to sign up for it, and also have them grant X amount of "vouches" to other BNs who signed up. NAT will handpick a few users + add from the most vouched users of that round.

- after a BN evaluator round ends, we create a new type of "voting" card for each candidate, this card will have no actual voting options but will have a text field, BNs will write their opinions/concerns on these candidates, and when we conclude the "vote", the card becomes private to the NAT only so confidentiality of BN opinions is kept. then, the NAT discuss among themselves and act accordingly.

We will go with this for now, and test it in the near future.

We highly encourage any input regarding the NAT addition process, so please don't hesitate to open a new thread to discuss any ideas that you might have!