Axl,
I think that some people will take sides as you say, and that some people will see the bigger picture.
What I know is that personally I’m someone who tries very hard not to see sides where there doesn’t need to be sides, and to consistently take the longer-term bigger picture view. I firmly believe this whole industry is not a zero-sum game, and that working cooperatively together helps get us all to a better place over the longer term.
I think most of the time when people don’t take the bigger picture view it is because they don’t understand it – not because they are opposed to it. So one of my goals is to work to create infrastructure where the benefits of the longer term view are more visible. But equally important is to create infrastructure where the benefits of what is good over the long term helps over the short term, and what is bad over the long term hurts over the short term.
So you will find that I will focus on efforts to increase visibility of good and bad actions, to create codes of conduct, and to provide a platform where good and bad conduct is visible as a source of reward or punishment. Forums can do this to a limited extent, but their structure does not support doing it very well, so this is an area where I anticipate making a big difference over time with the right projects.
In my opinion, the GPWA made a lot of mistakes in the past that I do not intend to repeat. However, I believe they made at least one good decision. And that was the decision to have a process for determing that private member portal webmasters followed some basic ethical guidelines – things like not stealing the content of others and not being spammers. That’s a foundation I believe in and can use as the basis for building something that will be a credit to the industry.
Michael