I appreciate the compliment and can understand your sentiments geneven.

But let me take my council hat off for a second to answer.

The value, to me as a member, is in formalizing the process and narrowing the focus where needed. This huge community has way more than 5 natural leaders, and in fact I'm a piker compared to many. For governance and vision, a community needs a fairly small representative body to avoid the "too many chiefs" conundrum. We've seen that on many tasks here, where either too many stepped up or too few-- and often the latter is the result of misguided diplomacy. For true progress on any issue, we need a finely-focused body to get it "just right".

Let me give you a close-to-home example.

In my last role with Nokia, I was responsible for 400 or so claims handlers around the world having the means to get their jobs done. Trying to virtually and indirectly manage that many people could have been a nightmare. So I cultivated a key user network to act as my proxies with this community. Any region typically had 2 key users. That was a good number for me: one main, one backup. And it worked.

Think of the council as the "key users" between Nokia and the community. A buffer. A conveyance. A means of sharpening any message, either way, so as to mitigate chaos.

My current manager likes to talk of "managing chaos". That's impossible. Instead you look at chaos as an opportunity to find ways of achieving order... and letting order crowd out chaos. That's what the council tries to do. If too many chiefs were involved, we'd have unmanageable chaos.

In any society, hierarchies want to form naturally. So you're correct: leaders would emerge to fill any vacuum. But I think formalizing the process gives the community the power to select the voice for them... and the other volunteer leaders would be then tapped by the council to do what they do best.

I'll grant this is not working as it should IMO. For a council to be truly relevant, we need more candidates and voters. Some of us are trying to up those numbers. The one thing that would help there is less cynicism and a little more support.

(sorry for rambling... allergies have me unfocused)