I think there's truth in what you say, Fluffernutter, but I think your conclusion is overly dark. Zack talks a lot about informal leadership in contexts like ours, based on his own experiences in labour organizing and political work. And what he says, which I believe is true for us, is that informal leadership can be really effective in decentralized movements.

I think I've seen that at Metafilter. It's true that the mods there have set a tone and demonstrated leadership 'from the top.' But I think that our equivalent of mods is informal community leaders: respected people who've earned trust, and are listened to. Many of those people are here on this list, and they have real power in our community. It's soft power (influence rather than authority) but that doesn't make it any less real, nor less effective.

I also see at Metafilter that the leadership of the mods has given encouragement to others in the community to speak up, and has resulted ultimately in empowerment of people to self-police and enact real lasting change. We can do that too, in my opinion :-)

On Feb 3, 2011 11:39 AM, "ChaoticFluffy" <chaoticfluffy@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> So I would conclude that the lesson for Wikimedia in that, is that if
>> the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces
>> it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening
>> because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the
>> people at Wikimedia: speaking super-loosely, both groups are very
>> smart, kind of stubborn and a little fighty, pride themselves on being
>> rational and not uncritically buying into received/conventional
>> wisdom, and are iconoclastic by nature.
>>
> [snip]
>
>>
>> So I find Jessamyn's story encouraging. And it seems to me that the
>> people here might be able to take on informal leadership roles in
>> helping moderate the community overall, to achieve better openness to
>> women.
>
>
> Let me point out here that Mefi has one very large advantage that Wikimedia
> doesn't: it is able to operate, in cases like this, from the top down. The
> mods decided to nip the boyzone in the bud, and they have
> the acknowledged authority to do things like delete posts, give users
> warnings or times-out, and state definitively what behavior they will and
> won't accept. We lack that luxury on WMF projects; by design we HAVE no
> top-down authority. In theory, there could exist a consensus among
> administrators that boyzone behaviors X, Y, and Z are not acceptable, but
> even assuming the cats could be herded to that point (which I think we can
> all agree is extremely unlikely), and that they could agree on where exactly
> the line lies, those enforcing such a system would be subject to
> near-abusive levels of, er...vociferous disagreement. They'd be "cowboy
> admins", they'd be "the civility police", they'd be "the PC-police", and the
> whole thing would just get shouted down. "Informal leadership roles" will
> not allow anyone to do the sorts of things Mefi mods do.
>
> In short, we work on a basis of coherence-through-chaos, which works well in
> the large but makes it nearly impossible to do anything similar to what
> Jessamyn & co are able to do on Metafilter.
>
> -User:Fluffernutter