Steem Alliance Working Group(can be applied to Foundation Group too).
From what I understand the Steem Alliance is going to go with staked voting and or popular voting to decide things. I see this as something that is doomed to fail if it proceeds.
When a popular vote happens you take the lowest common demonimator/average people who largely are uninformed/not experts in a particular field/have no experience in that field and "trust the wisdom of the group to prevail somehow". We already know this doesn't work well for politics in the USA, so theres really no need to explain that much further.
Staked voting is top down power voting by those who already are at the top, and the conflicts of interest are then a problem because those who have power usually want to obtain more. If we are to do staked voting we can expect more of the same that has been going on with Steem. Its putting the same people into a position of power or the people who are in the top for staked power choosing people they like to put into power. Its different but similar. Being in charge and getting to do what you want vs putting people in charge that will do what you want. Same difference really eh?
I think it would be more fair and merit based if a bunch of competent people create 5 different working groups
Each working group can only have someone in it who is competent in that relevant field. The way that this will be checked for will be people presenting evidence of their competence and done via group interview. With the purpose of a group interview to screen out people who are lying/not qualified/don't have enough exp/aren't a good fit, which if everyone in said group is a coder/programmer for example it would be fairly trivial to detect a fraudster/slacker/low exp person who is claiming to know how to program.
Then after people are screened out for those things, experience and leadership would need to be talked about. A leader and a second in command for each work group to be elected by that particular WG. If the leader is doing a bad job of leading that working group the second in command can be voted into being the leader if everyone in that WG votes them in. Keep in mind the people in the WG are already screened for real world exp/competence/skills by this point, so it should be a farily quick process to elect a new leader if that needs to happen. Anyone can call for a vote to replace the leader, if a majority votes to bring it to a vote it will be brought to a vote. A second leader would then be elected as a back up again, and the process would repeat if necessary.
To get to having a leader and a second leader in the first place everyone would talk through it, and usually a competent person/natural leader/secondary leader would come out of it based on people taking charge. In a system of meritocracy people will look to who is most competent to get the job done naturally, it should be relatively easy to elect a leader and a second leader pretty quickly.
That's my thoughts on the working groups.
