The comments/arguments about the community health team mostly make me think something more like “it should change its name” than be disbanded. I think it’s good to have a default whisper network to report things to and surreptitiously check in with, even if they don’t really enforce/police things. If the problem is that people have a false sense of security, I think there are better ways to avoid that problem.
Just maintaining the network is probably a fair chunk of work.
That said – I think one problem is that the comm-health team has multiple roles. I’m honestly not sure I understand all the roles they consider themselves to have taken on. But it seems likely to me that at least some of those roles are “try to help individuals” and at least some of those roles are more like “protect the ecosystem as whole” and “protect the interests of CEA in particular”, and those might come into conflict with the “help individuals” one. And it’s hard to tell from the outside how those tradeoffs get made.
I know a person who maintained a whisper network in a local community, who I’d overall trust more than CEA in that role, because basically their only motivation was “I want to help my friends and have my community locally be safe.” And in some sense this is more trustworthy than “also, I want to help the world as a whole flourish”, because there’s fewer ways for them to end up conflicted or weighing multiple tradeoffs.
But, I don’t think the solution can necessarily be “well, give the Whisper Network Maintenance role to less ambitious people, so that their motives are pure”, because, well, less ambitious people don’t have as high a profile and a newcomer won’t know where to find them.
In my mind this adds up to “it makes sense for CEA to keep a public-node of a whisper network running, but it should be clearer about it’s limitations, and they should be upfront that there are some limits as to what people can/should trust/expect from it.” (and, ideally there should maybe be a couple different overlapping networks, so in situations where people don’t trust CEA, they have alternatives. i.e. Healthy Competition is good, etc)
The comments/arguments about the community health team mostly make me think something more like “it should change its name” than be disbanded. I think it’s good to have a default whisper network to report things to and surreptitiously check in with, even if they don’t really enforce/police things. If the problem is that people have a false sense of security, I think there are better ways to avoid that problem.
Just maintaining the network is probably a fair chunk of work.
That said – I think one problem is that the comm-health team has multiple roles. I’m honestly not sure I understand all the roles they consider themselves to have taken on. But it seems likely to me that at least some of those roles are “try to help individuals” and at least some of those roles are more like “protect the ecosystem as whole” and “protect the interests of CEA in particular”, and those might come into conflict with the “help individuals” one. And it’s hard to tell from the outside how those tradeoffs get made.
I know a person who maintained a whisper network in a local community, who I’d overall trust more than CEA in that role, because basically their only motivation was “I want to help my friends and have my community locally be safe.” And in some sense this is more trustworthy than “also, I want to help the world as a whole flourish”, because there’s fewer ways for them to end up conflicted or weighing multiple tradeoffs.
But, I don’t think the solution can necessarily be “well, give the Whisper Network Maintenance role to less ambitious people, so that their motives are pure”, because, well, less ambitious people don’t have as high a profile and a newcomer won’t know where to find them.
In my mind this adds up to “it makes sense for CEA to keep a public-node of a whisper network running, but it should be clearer about it’s limitations, and they should be upfront that there are some limits as to what people can/should trust/expect from it.” (and, ideally there should maybe be a couple different overlapping networks, so in situations where people don’t trust CEA, they have alternatives. i.e. Healthy Competition is good, etc)