I only ask the following questions because I'm not too sure what the subject or question posed here is but I respect the discourse if it is as follows. So, is it:

whether or not the LC is going through an identity crisis?

And:

Are you suggesting that the rating system controversy has caused this?

If so:

I'm currently under the belief that too many people have taken offense to the rating system and that it must be decided upon at the next general meeting whether or not it should be kept by the group. But, this goes for every other feature/design element the community has issue with and brings up at meetings.

To respond more generally to the suggestion that the LC might be going through an identity crisis. I'm not sure the LC has much of a defined identity other than from the communication that people make through the website and the development team's efforts to mold or shape how user content is organized and what features are available for users.

I will suggest at the next meeting that we thoroughly define a working group model for the LondonCommons. I'll explain briefly what I mean by this. For too long the community has been waiting for the development team to alter the site, largely, to the dev team's own liking. We have, through our expertise, tried to make the site as user-oriented as possible such as to diffuse conflict and allow for the community to make this the best community site they can. Groups, the ability for users to delete comments on their own thread, and other such features are particular ones we have been implementing in the hopes that people take more ownership over how the site is run and can maintain it themselves, as a community. We're still working hard to change the site even more to better suite user feedback.

This is partly because we are only a development team and have been given the task to simply improve the site so as to empower the users, but also so that they can help to maintain and moderate it as we only have a couple of volunteer moderators to just that. Everybody here is, every user can be considered, a volunteer - in a way.

But, the trouble is now that we must have a general meeting soon and define how it is that the community can decide what features/design elements they want and don't want. They haven't had the chance to provide input in such a way that could potentially alter how the site behaves, essentially making a lot of users feel like they no longer have an input. And this is aloft all the previous conflicts that had emerged on the site, partly causing, the development group to take the steps to upgrade and alter the site to better suite the community's needs in the first place.

So I will simply extend the offer to the community of users on this site to come out to the next meeting to help decide what features/design elements they want to keep, alter, or remove from the site. I believe Rachel is currently the one assigned with planning the next meeting. If you have any schedule conflicts just post such on the event posting once it shows up in the calender and I'm sure Rachel will take that into consideration.

I'm looking forward to helping the community of this website attain whatever accountability over the development team they feel should be in place, and to further improve the site itself. I will be bringing up two proposals on how the community and the development team can work together more effectively, myself.

Thomas