What an organizer does
An organizer is a founder or steward of a community: the person, or the handful of people, who get it started and keep its decision-making healthy. In the software there is no organizer role and no admin button. What organizers have is a founder’s signature on the Charter, standing as established members, and the trust of the room.
That is deliberate. Railroad Network is built on the assumption that the most dangerous failure of a community is capture: a small group turning the rules to their own ends. Every governance mechanism is designed so that doing that is slow, visible, and reversible.
Your work, roughly in order
- Found the community. Choose founders, write the Charter’s principles and rights, and run the signing ceremony. Start a community.
- Get the first members established. Vouch for people you know and trade with them, so the community grows out of bootstrap grace and governs itself.
- Run decisions in the open. Proposals, co-signing, voting, statutes. How decisions get made.
- Let disputes work. Understand the jury, escalation, and appeal so you can explain them and stay out of the way. Disputes.
- Know the emergency lever cold, because it is the sharpest capture lever in the system. Emergencies.
- Practise the outage. Once a season, run the community with the network off. Running an outage drill.
Organizer and operator
Often the same person in a small pilot, but they are different jobs. The operator keeps the station computer running, backed up, and paired. The organizer keeps the community deciding well. This section is the second job. For the first, see For operators.
Do not use this with real value. Run your pilot with play stakes. See Security and audits.