Mediation - Discussion Only Threads
Danyl Strype PublicSeen by 36Robert's comment about this Loomio feature group only being a consultative group got me thinking. For issues which a group knows are going to be contentious, or which become contentious, maybe there could be an option to create discussion threads (or even whole SubGroups) in which proposals cannot be made. Rather than being about decision-making, such threads would be about mediation, exploring the problem-space, discussing group process etc
@vivienmaidabornloo Ae, that's what I had in mind. I like the mobile wireframes @matthewbartlett put together for 'Ideas' as one way of doing this:
https://www.loomio.org/discussions/6413
I wonder if this is something that can be left to the policy / process of the group in question, and doesn't need to be coded?
If a group is working together well, then I'd imagine that a delegated sub-group should be able to manage its own affairs without accidentally over-stepping its authority. Just because a "Create New Proposal" button is there, it doesn't have to be used, or if it is used accidentally, then other members will point out the mistake. And if it is there, then maybe at some point the discussion will turn into one where proposals might become appropriate, or maybe a sub-group makes its own proposals and then e.g. takes the ones it favours to a higher group.
I think this relates to the discussion elsewhere about whether a proposal has resulted in a decision being made. At the moment it feels pretty fluid, and up to the group to decide what its policy is, based on the proposals that have ended. If there were a state change to "We have made a policy change now!" then it would be obvious if a group were over-stepping their authority to make decisions that affected others without their input.
I think allowing customisable per discussion permissions would create a lot of possibilities here and I wonder if distinguishing between people groups and discussion groups would be useful.
A people group could be pretty similar to how it is now but a bit looser (more like teams in github) - you have admins who maintain the group and also maintain a list of related groups which would allow for more complexity than just parent-child relationships.
A discussion group can be created by anyone and they can add many people groups to it with permissions for viewing, commenting, voting, creating discussion and creating proposal.
This would give users a lot of flexibility for structuring discussions and groups in a variety of ways.
Something that has been on my mind a lot is how to create more design in the discussion part of loomio to grow and understand the shared meaning and agreement in a group I have seen the decision making tool used really well to test ideas, to iterate them rather than make a decision. I wonder how we could make it really clear which is what when?.