Project Bankruptcy
In January 2018 Mike Merrill asked the shareholders of KmikeyM to release him from every project he had started and not finished. They said no, by eight points. Two weeks later they approved a reorganization instead, which required every future proposal to state what finishing it would look like.
It is the closest the project has come to ending, and the refusal is more interesting than the request.
The request
Merrill’s proposal is unusually direct about its own cause. Preparing the annual report, he found himself overwhelmed by the number of things he had begun and abandoned, and he listed them against the votes that had approved them.
“You voted on me learning the piano. I can’t play a song. You approved my acquisition of Snacker.News. I rarely post there and have become the equivalent of a deadbeat web dad. You greenlit a nutrition working group that was to define my new diet. I never followed up and I eat whatever I want.”
He then named the cycle rather than the incidents: enthusiasm, the practical reality of execution, guilt from the other half-finished things, a shame spiral, paralysis, and then a new project as a distraction from the old ones.
“This is addict behavior! So consider this vote an intervention.”
If it passed, he would keep three commitments and drop the rest, and every new project from then on would go to a vote.
The refusal
It was rejected, 46% in favor. Given how many of the abandoned projects the shareholders had personally approved, they were being asked to forgive their own decisions, and a narrow majority declined.
The comments section did the rest of the work. Merrill read it and came back on 20 January 2018 with a different proposal, crediting the shareholders who had shaped it.
Project Reorganization passed at 98%. Its terms came directly from the objections:
- Not bankruptcy but reorganization. One shareholder supplied the framing: act in the spirit of Chapter 11 rather than Chapter 7, restructuring the obligations instead of liquidating them.
- Every future proposal must carry a defined criterion for success. The diagnosis, in the proposal’s own words, was that “unspecific language and opaque intent creates an impossibility to close out the endeavor, as there is no set end point.” The example given was the vote telling him to learn the piano, a task with no stated finish.
- Sixteen active projects cut to four or fewer, with status published openly rather than reported.
Why the refusal was right
The rejected vote and the accepted one asked different questions. Bankruptcy asked whether the past could be written off. Reorganization asked why nothing could ever be completed, and answered it: the proposals had never defined what completion meant.
That defect is still visible in the record. For most of the binary votes it is genuinely impossible to say whether a decision was carried out, abandoned, or is somehow still pending, because nothing ever specified an end. It is the reason List of Votes can report what shareholders decided far more confidently than what became of it.
The habit that came out of it did hold. On the newer voting platform Merrill keeps a note on most decisions recording what actually happened, including the ones that passed and were never acted on.