Rules and Processes for our use of Loomio

As one of the co-founders I have to agree with @robertfrittmann that we do seem to have cycles of 2 year discussions still active.
When we had the website forums previous to using loomio, we also had the same problem of some threads becoming difficult to navigate as comments would be replied to months after posts were made, even from pages before.

I recall the old board decided that was a contributing reason to abandoning the forums for discussion, and moving to loomio in the hope that things would improve.
It seems clear to me that the party needs a narrative rule on undead threads, or at the least if some member restarts a discussion, that it needs a fresh thread if there is a gap of six months or more since the last comment in that thread.
I will make a thread with this proposal as a narrative rule in our hospitality meta discussion group to consider more reasonable approaches to discussions.

• Please note that I anticipate having my regular broadband restored by Thursday afternoon (19/5) so I may only be able to reply in a few days.

Thanks to both of you for raising these concerns. @andrewmcpherson I have closed the proposal on the Code of Conduct thread and put it up here instead. Loomio works better when the proposal is considered in the same thread as the discussion from which it emerged. I have moved this thread into the Hospitality subgroup, to reflect that it's a meta-discussion about our use of Loomio itself.

Thanks @robertfrittmann . It really helps to get feedback from new members about how easy (or difficult) it is to understand what's going on in the party.

One thing that's happened kind of organically is that Loomio has become the only way some of us interact with the party. This was never really intended. Loomio was meant to be a formal decision-making platform, not a hall of records (for which pirateparty.org.nz and its wiki are more appropriate), nor a general discussion space (for which we had GoogleGroups), nor a social space (for which at least some branches have had in-person meetups). The challenge is trying to get agreement about which online tools we use for what, communicating those agreements to new members, navigating the hassles of multiple tools with multiple login credentials, and trying to self-host at least some of our own online tools (ideally all of them) with a tiny active membership.

I don't think the party has any chance of sorting out its technical infrastructure, let alone becoming a credible political organisation, until members commit to regular in-person meetings in local branches (even if only monthly), and an in-person annual conference. To be blunt, as it stands today, NZ Pirate Party is little more than a weird and frustrating online role-playing game.

The way I read @robertfrittmann 's comment, he doesn't at all complain about discussions being proceeded after a long time.

The problem that he draws our attention to is that those discussions have never really ended up in some presentable substrate.

E.g. we had long debates about our organisational structure and how that should be reflected in a constitution. Yet we have not been able to formulate our findings in such a formal document.

Also, we had to face many difficulties with less helpful contributions to our discussions, hence we have drafted a Code of Conduct which is currently more or less the foundation of our organisation (as a constitution is still not on the horizon). Yet this CoC is only to be 'found' on a piratePad with the only way to get to is to find the link in some loomio thread. Even if you do find it, it is not recognisable to which degree it is functional and accepted as authoritative document.

I may be wrong, but I believe that @robertfrittmann asks for an accessible place where our current state, our constitution and our policies can be found in a concise manner and possibly with a link to those discussions where they where arising from.

Sure enough, our website would be the best place to present our findings. @zl4bv (Ben, our secretary) had a much modernised and streamlined version of our website nearly ready, but it never made it into the light of the day. Maybe we could build on those efforts?

@strypey

"To be blunt, as it stands today, NZ Pirate Party is little more than a weird and frustrating online role-playing game."

LOL 👏

I would say: we are a placeholder organisation, waiting for the masses to come and take over the liberation movement that we would be if we had more than 30 legs to stomp with.
We are trying to pave a bit of the way that a few engaged people could walk upon - and proceed.

@robertfrittmann You (as well as all others) are more than welcome to play a leading role in this historic phase of the revolution. 'Who acts is (mostly) right!'

Thanks @hubatmcjuhes, I was about ready to clarify myself further, but it seems that you have said it better than I ever could.

With @strypey's comment 2 months prior to my first post in this thread, and Hubat's about 10 months before that, it seemed pretty obvious to me that the standard operating procedure around here was to continue the discussion in the same thread. In the past I have encountered criticism on other online forums for "dumpster diving" and necro-posting in similarly old threads, but that didn't seem to be an issue around here. Some places (for instance GeekZone) lock old threads automatically after a certain period of inactivity, and any new additions require a new thread to be started, with a link to the old. I'm not advocating for such a solution, and I'm happy with how things are at present in this regard.

However, there does need to be some central repository of "the current disposition of the Party", as I mentioned earlier, to be documented. I may have skimmed over something important on my way in, as I joined the Party, which outlines where we are at right now. Is the Board currently still dissolved, as I'd read elsewhere? As for the CoC, it seems to me that it is already past due for revision, isn't it?

However, there does need to be some central repository of "the current disposition of the Party", as I mentioned earlier, to be documented. I may have skimmed over something important on my way in, as I joined the Party, which outlines where we are at right now. Is the Board currently still dissolved, as I'd read elsewhere? As for the CoC, it seems to me that it is already past due for revision, isn't it?

Yes, that maybe a more clear definition of my interpretation of your comments previously.

It is correct that we have evolved to a full party management in a decentralisation away from a board structure, as a board centralises decisions and requires constant activity at the core in spite of family and work commitments.
Realistically a board is too hierarchical a structure for pirates, as we are suited to a swarm.

The last board was dedicated to the idea to operate as a service agency for the membership, to deal with regular administrative stuff rather than policy development which was (and is) seen as strictly the domain of the grassroot membership.

With the board members having been roughly 1/2 of the active membership at that time, board members - in their capacity as ordinary members - have been engaging in policy discussions as well. This has stirred up some irritation as this has been mistaken as power-tipping and contradicting the proclaimed stance of the board. There have been no claims of higher authority of board members nor interventions from the board as such in those discussions, yet the personal-union of board members being ordinary members as well appeared to be somewhat awkward.

So the board decided to dissolve itself in favour of a model of more or less volatile groups that may be created wherever at least 3 pirates come together to achieve something.

from the original last board there are two somehow 'privileged' roles left. That is that of the secretary, the keeper of the secrets (keys, certificates, passwords, membership records) and the treasurer, the keeper of the money. Ben @zl4bv is the secretary and @andrewmcpherson has our money.

All others rule the party as the sovereignty is uncompromised with the ordinary grass-root members. root rules!

"So the board decided to dissolve itself in favour of a model of more or less volatile groups that may be created wherever at least 3 pirates come together to achieve something."

Is that documented somewhere you can point me to? e.g. in the (former?) relevant place on the website

It's one problem for a board to operate in secrecy, but a board dissolving itself in secrecy would just be funny!

I get the feeling part of the cause of the issue Rob F is bringing our attention to, is that other than Secretary and Treasurer there are no recognized (though not necessarily authoritatively) roles of particular responsibility/accountability. Strypey does a great job of summarizing proposal outcomes etc. within this medium, I suspect if he stopped filling that role, it wouldn't just be new members who have trouble finding out what the hell is going on!

So the solution is to further summarize everything until it converges in a single, permanent, obvious place (e.g. homepage, wiki home, loomio group description) - and to do that in whatever way they see fit.

In that context, I see the "Narrative Refresh" proposal as enforcing a summary of that discussion. The idea has merit in principle, but I feel the specific proposal places the burden on the newcomer.

Perhaps a better way to enforce a summary is:

• 1) Have a specific role exclusively responsible for (but not necessarily exclusively carrying out) maintaining a 'narrative summary' & hold the person holding that role accountable. (In our experience with a board structure this isn't particularly effective) OR
• 2) Have the judgement of whether a proposal/decision is approved or rejected or made, or otherwise unresolved or not meaningful, be based on their inclusion in some swarm based 'narrative summary' (wiki?) - i.e. the narrative summary would be authoritative. (effectively a loomio version of meeting minutes.) Note this would need safeguards. This places the burden on supporters of the outcome (but does nothing for threads without an outcome).

Disclosure: I haven't read the Code of Conduct yet and also may be out of date in my info and understanding of PPNZ

Just to confirm for new members (eg @robertfrittmann ) and those who have recently returned (welcome back @adambullen and @tommyfergusson !):
* the Board was dissolved
* it was replaced with a set of 'working groups', as explained in the thread on 'Decision-Making Beyond the Representative Board', and the proposal 'Create or Modify Subgroups to Create Core Working Groups'
* the new structure does include a 'Records' subgroup, where discussions unlikely to be continued can be archived, which has been created
* the Code of Coduct did achieve consensus, and the full text of the current version can be found in the context box of the 'Code of Condust' thread, but @robertfrittmann is correct that it is well overdue for review

I started to implement the new working group structure, and got as far as setting up the new subgroups required, and moving some discussions into the appropriate groups. Completing this work was challenging because, at the time, there seemed to be no way in Loomio to:
* bulk move large numbers of discussions from one subgroup to another, or close a subgroup and auto-move all its threads elsewhere (even to the main group)
* allow all members of the main group to automatically join a subgroup without admin approval, or to make its contents automatically visible to all members of the main group whether or not they join that subgroup

I brought the subgroup pruning/ bulk move issue up in a new thread in the Loomio Community at the time, but it appears there has been no work on a solution. I recently started a new thread there on spokescouncils, proposing a new set of features which, if implemented, could solve the second issue.

Perhaps, we could try to have a Loomio clean-up hackathon? We could all assemble in Mumble at a pre-agreed time, and work together to tidy up our Loomio group? This could include:
* moving all discussions to the subgroup for the relevant working group
* deleting obsolete subgroups
* ensuring all proposals have an accurate outcome statements
* ensuring all threads have a dated, up-to-date summary of the points covered in the discussion, and decisions made

This could also be an opportunity for informal discussion about what other tools have been used by the party, which ones we want to use going forward, and for what, what's happening with pirateparty.org.nz etc

Thanks

I see "The board should be dissolved to truely give the power to the membership. Members that demand change should take ownership of making the change happen. The party should become the entity that it believes it should be", and "All PPNZ members present at the next board meeting (2015-05-06) have full voting rights during that meeting" 2015-04-22.

Did something take place on 2015-05-06 (or since) and is there a record of it? Perhaps in the PiratePad (access restricted)

In this post, @strypey advises us to avoid "the proliferation of subgroups with overly narrow purposes". Might I suggest a workable compromise, to supplement the current "Core Working Groups" subgroups. My suggestion (and I'd make it a proposal if there wasn't currently one already in this thread) is to have subgroups based on the spokes of the Pirate Wheel. I don't know to what extent the Pirate Wheel is seen as canonical for the Pirate Party of NZ, but someone here referred me to it on the first day I joined, so I guess it is pretty important around here. It would make sense, if so, for it to be adopted and used more within the Party, and Loomio subgroups would be a logical place to start.

I was thinking along similar lines, as a result of another thread.
Instead of Main Group -> Policy Incubator
we would have (Main Group ->) Policy Incubator -> Policy Area Subgroups
(with the latter having equal/parallel status with any off-loomio discussions of 3+ pirates)

And the Policy Area Subgroups following the Pirate Wheel spokes is brilliant.

Agreed, the Pirate Wheel spokes, as defined by Rick Falkvinge as "an overview of pirate policies", would better serve as subgroups of the Policy Incubator subgroup.

Loomio does not enable subgroups of subgroups. However, threads can effectively function as subgroups of subgroups. Nobody has to participate in any given thread, except perhaps if there is a proposal. But I believe we established that before any proposal made in subgroups is treated as a binding outcome of the party, it must be put to the main group (the one that isn't a subgroup), and have enough members take positions to meet quorum. In keeping with the long-established decision-making rules of the party, a proposal in the main group would need unanimous consensus, or supermajority, to become binding.