Of course, Tank and me are de facto administrators and for important decisions, it appears that we've had the final word in the past. That, of course, only works well as long as we agree. Sooner or later, there will be a disagreement between us, and if it is left unmediated, there is a risk of breakup.
To avoid these two problems, Tank and me decided we should declare a third administrator. We'll be equal peers. Every administrator is the mediator in fights between the other two; whatever two administrators agree to decide as an administrative order will be accepted by the third administrator. The rest of the team is advised to also accept admin decisions as what shall be done even though it is bloody stupid. A single administrator does not, on his own, have any power.
Although the total power of the three admins together will be absolute, there will be very little difference for you in day to day operations. We won't micromanage. You won't have to ask us for permission to scratch your back. Can't speak for the others here, but I'm lazy and don't want to be bothered with every small detail. Only big scope decisions are reserved to the administrators, like
- What platforms the client or server should officially support
- What libraries we depend on
- Strategic partnerships with other projects (buy Armagetron and get Supertux for free!)
- Whether an official global league shall be set up
- Whether to hold back the next release to add a certain feature
- Whether to include a mandatory client identification from a hardware hash value so players on dynamic IP can be banned
We usually won't decide on "How" questions. That's the job of the developers who execute the plan. We won't assign jobs by admin order; we'll make suggestions that usually will be obvious choices, like letting Wrtl handle the unicode font rendering. If you don't do a job we suggest you do, either someone else takes it over or it won't get done at all. Our goal will be to make development fun for everyone involved and to keep the project going into the right direction. We'll spring into admin action when a discussion about one of those important topics has gone on long enough that all important facts have been stated, and of course whenever developers have a dispute one of them explicitly wants to have settled by admin order.
We also decided that Lucifer would be our most favorite man for the third admin job, and he accepted the position.
That pick doesn't mean we don't like the whole rest of you or we think you'd be lousy administrators. We just had to make a decision. We won't tell you who would be second or third favorite or why you weren't selected, so don't ask.
We take the legitimation for this all by assuming that not too may of you have serious objections. If you do have objections, state them here and now, we won't hold them against you. Tank will simply use his forum admin power to spin them around
Should there be an oath? If yes, here's mine:
I, Z-Man (Manuel Moos), hereby declare that I will use my administrative powers only for the good of the project. I will aim to keep our players and developers as happy as possible. I will do my best to keep Armagetron Advanced Free Software.
