Political use for Loomio
João Marcello Ortega PublicSeen by 300Hi everybody.
First of all, congratulations on the 1.0 version. Really great tool you've developed here.
I've been watching the development interested in its possibilities to political use. As far as I see, Loomio will allow us to do this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era
We can increase society participation in government decisions and/or poltical parties.
What do you think about it?
@michaelsoth you said
And even though I can clearly recognize the goodwill of all contributions, I still find myself having emotionally charged reactions which influence and complicate my response.
I think we are all guilty of "emotionally charged reactions" and certainly for the reasons you go on to detail. To me that seems to be a natural or human response to the conditions you highlighted.
Or is my response influenced by feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, dismissed, even if ever so slightly.
I know one of my responses earlier in the post was based on a misunderstanding, I had been jumping backwards and forwards across posts and discussions, I was tired and to a certain extent getting carried away with the influx of activity following the 1.0 release. Fortunately @gregorycassel didn't escalate the misunderstanding but clarified his position and lead to my apology and self-analysis of why I made the mistake in the first place.
@michaelsoth - Tiredness and lack of focus lead to my response, but I also think that the inability to correctly read emotion / meaning / intent in a text based exchange is partly responsible.
I still see Loomio as a tool more geared towards discussion than consensus. It will have to be adapted or developed to be more acceptable for political purposes.
Someone, I think @michaelsoth mentioned different parts of a decision that included goals. It's something I would love to see included in the decision making process here with Loomio. It's got the potential but currently reminds me more of an Occupy GA than a tool that can help us refine that process.
@BenBurton I don't think the tool you are looking for exists (yet) if I does I certainly haven't found it.
Did you see the OpenMind screenshots with the "weighted voting" or "cumulative voting" that I posted earlier?
Can you suggest what needs to be added to Loomio or changed? What can we do in the meantime until the tool you want does exist?
I did @alandavison . Not sure how they relate in all honesty as I don't know the context of what it is.
As for suggestions, I started a discussion on Loomio's definition of a decision. I know what a decision is to ME, but it would be nice to get a group discussion on that. If we come to consensus on what that is, we can generate requirements for this (or any other) tool.
@matthewbartlett regarding your reference to: https://www.loomio.org/d/Jg6uoZmT/tips-for-loomio-coordinators
I think this is a good start for coordinators/moderators/facilitators. But when I have a bit more headspace, I think I might apply my experience of actual group facilitation over the last 35 years to develop this further. In my opinion, this is one of the main areas that will need a lot of further development and thinking once we start scaling up Loomio for bigger groups and communities. As I have proposed in other comments, my hunch is that this is one of the main stumbling blocks and linchpins as to how effective and efficient the collective process can become.
@BenBurton the way Loomio currently works is that a discussion, often containing very lengthy posts that as @michaelsoth pointed out contain
Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions
If it were possible to split the content of a post, by sentence or paragraph into something that could be "categorized" by the person posting or other group members in some way as to indicate how they feel it relates to the discussion.
- supports / adds to / positive ...
- detracts / takes away from / negative ..
- confuses / not helpful / misleading / ...
- other ...
At the moment "liking" a post, especially if it is a long one doesn't really highlight the parts of the post I feel are most important (to the discussion) or (to me personally).
There is no way to see which points lead to a proposal or decision and which argued against it or lead to other discussion topics being spawned.
The OpenMind example was one where there may be multiple ideas, or opinions or points that could be voted on as separate entities and each member could split say 10 votes, 4,3,2,1 or 3,3,2,1,1 for example using a "block" to indicate which is most important to them.
The item with the most votes would float to the top of the list.
Ideally this would be in a different topic and I have mentioned it elsewhere but include it here so others are aware why I have raised it.
@alandavison
Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions - and this is with most of us assuming that we have a shared underlying value system.
This is why I have been involved in some other group discussions about Loomio feature ideas. This discussion topic is a prime example of what shouldn’t be happening on Loomio, or how the platform needs to adapt to address the issues we are highlighting.
I have no idea how to tackle these things that "shouldn't be happening" in terms of the software systems. But I can think about the equivalent in actual group meetings: there is a famous feminist paper from the 1980s, I think, called “The tyranny of structurelessness”. The upshot of that is: in the pursuit of equality and the avoidance of any kind of thing resembling ‘bad’ authority, leaderless groups create a kind of free-for-all atmosphere, which becomes dominated by confusion and emotional distress. In order for the leadership vacuum not to degenerate into this atmosphere, I think the paper suggests ‘rotating facilitation’, i.e. different people taking facilitative responsibilities at different times, so as to avoid concentrating the facilitative position in one person and thus being monopolised. So the paper argues for a kind of deliberate and sensitive and collectively agreed delegation of facilitative functions which people take in turn (or what in online discussion we might call ‘moderation’).
One side issue relevant to this is the recognition that different people have special expertise in different kinds of such leadership: there are skilled technical facilitators, emotional facilitators, procedural facilitators, and many others (the seminal book from decades ago was called “Six category Intervention” by John Heron; he later wrote one of the best books available on group facilitation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Facilitators-Handbook-1/dp/0749427981/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1417920691&sr=8-2&keywords=john+heron+facilitation).
A comprehensive decision-making process needs many kinds of contributions in order to have a wholesome inclusive atmosphere, but in order to avoid confusion, there needs to be AWARENESS of the different levels and logical orders of those contributions. There needs to be self-reflective awareness of how and on what level I am making a contribution. And if I lack that self-reflectiveness, I might need somebody else to take such a facilitative position to help me with that, and make my intention explicit, so my contribution becomes validated and is received by the community. As I mentioned in my earlier comment: if by default we assume that ALL contributions are only on the rational factual content level of proposals (furthering the decision-making process only on the level of ideas and opinions), we invalidate the diversity of possible contributions and their validity and most of them will be ignored, fall by the wayside and then later come back surreptitiously to block and interfere.
So in the same way that there is a structure for agree, abstain, disagree, block, we might want to structure into the whole system a recognition of the different kinds and levels of contributions, on the most basic level (following my earlier comment) based on a distinction between rational, emotional and procedural contributions.
But my guess is that on top of that (i.e. the self-awareness of each contributor as to what kind of contribution they are making at any point in time), we really do need experienced moderators/facilitators who are skilled at helping people sift out and differentiate those different aspects of their comments. In the same way that groups meeting face-to-face require facilitation in order to not degenerate into the tyranny of structurelessness, I think online discussions and decision-making processes need the same thing (at least as a function that gets temporarily delegated, ideally to someone who is actually skilled at fulfilling that function).
So we need a facilitative function to keep track of the rational level, by following the flow of ideas, opinions, proposals and how they link and relate to each other. But we also need a facilitative function attending to the flow of emotional exchange, even if not explicit (what in the olden days used to be called a ‘vibes watcher’). And we need a facilitative function on the procedural level, too ( and I could write a whole paper just on that topic).
But I guess you get the general gist of what I’m trying to say for now.
What you're getting at @alandavison is fairly critical. Isolating issues that are of a manageable size so an effective discussion is even possible. I think Loomio can get there.
You mention "Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions".
That could be a very useful and telling discussion thread here on Loomio. To me, the solution lies in Loomio enabling users to isolate an issue (like we have) and turn that into its own discussion working towards consensus on the solution.
@BenBurton , @michaelsoth I think some very pertinent points have been raised that are not directly related to "Political use for Loomio" but are contributing factors for any distributed collaborative decision making process or tool.
- Group structure and Dynamics
- Facilitation and Moderation
- Decision Making
All of which are important and unfortunately inter-related. So my question is this :
How do we define boundaries and prevent the "Discussion Goal" becoming fragmented and disjointed?
@alandavison
And even though I can clearly recognize the goodwill of all contributions, I still find myself having emotionally charged reactions which influence and complicate my response.
I think we are all guilty of “emotionally charged reactions” and certainly for the reasons you go on to detail. To me that seems to be a natural or human response to the conditions you highlighted.
The attitude and recognition I am trying to get to is one that does, of course, accept such “natural human responses”, but goes beyond the sense that we are “guilty” of “emotionally charged reactions” - building on the recognition that the ‘personal is political’ ( and vice versa), what I’m proposing is that it is essential to any collective decision-making process that works sustainably well that we actively validate and integrate the emotional level as a necessary ingredient in the process. So rather than any of us feeling guilty about disturbing the otherwise rational decision-making process with extraneous emotionally charged reactions, I am proposing we find an attitude that doesn’t segregate out the emotional component, but makes it foundational. Whether we emphasise the deliberating (Matthew’s term) aspects, the consultative or actual voting aspects of decision-making, to me they ALL have an emotional foundation, which can be pro-actively integrated ( that is what I do when I facilitate groups face-to-face). As I mentioned earlier, when we think about the deliberating aspect of any kind of discussion that Loomio tries to provide a platform for, it’s essentially about people learning to understand each other, and what each of the discussed topics actually means to them and how they are significant. It’s the mutual recognition not just of your rational opinion or proposal, but of who you are and why it matters to you. Otherwise, we might as well have AI talking to each other.
So rather than seeing emotional contributions as an interference or distraction from the discussion, I’m trying to integrate the emotional-relational, as long as it is recognized as such. What is confusing is if people parade an emotional investment as an opinion; or if they dig their heels in without making their emotional investment explicit; or if they thrall procedurals spanners in the works because they feel misunderstood or triggered by somebody. It is that confusion of levels which wreaks additional havoc (on top of the difficulty that people have opposing feelings, beliefs and investments). So rather than pretending that we can all monitor and regulate that internally, each of us individually being responsible for filtering out any emotional response so it doesn’t disturb the discussion, I’d rather make an explicit space for it, so it can be validated and acknowledged for what it is without being hidden or dominating.
@michaelsoth you said
leaderless groups create a kind of free-for-all atmosphere
Is that what is happening here or are we still in the group "Storming stage"?
@alandavison
leaderless groups create a kind of free-for-all atmosphere
Is that what is happening here or are we still in the group “Storming stage”?
I'm not sure, you see - I'm mainly having a discussion with you - I've lost awareness of the group. I hope people find it relevant, but I think I need facilitating (quite apart from the fact that here it's 3:40 in the morning and somebody needs to send me to bed!). Good night for now ....
@michaelsoth - well at least we are in the same timezone, goodnight and thanks for your enlightening input this evening/early morning.
How do we define boundaries and prevent the “Discussion Goal” becoming fragmented and disjointed?
@alandavison Consensus on the goal has to be reached before a targeted discussion can take place. And in order to reach consensus on a goal, a community needs to reach consensus on the problem that exists and needs to be fixed.
@BenBurton the original discussion heading includes
I’ve been watching the development interested in its possibilities to political use. As far as I see, Loomio will allow us to do this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era
We can increase society participation in government decisions and/or poltical parties.
What do you think about it?
I had to go back and read it again, having done so I don't think the majority of points raised are off-topic. The posts after all reflect the groups thoughts - the things we think are important when considering scaling up to deal with non-trivial decision making and voting.
@roslyn and @joaomarcelloortega want to run for election in order to give their constituents a say in the way she/he votes (on their behalf) as their representative. Or that is how I understand it currently. Their job (and that of their team of supporters / aids / etc.) will be to communicate the legislation or proposal in language that is accessible to everybody and then rely on a secure, distributed, mobile accessible platform to promote and collect constituent opinion.
Would this be a fair summary of the first part of the posted requirement?
increase society participation in government decisions
So one goal is :
increase society participation in government decisions
And Loomio is one possible solution, Democracy.os or www.votenaweb.com.br / other voting platform would be others?
@alandavison A discussion could easily be started on that topic. It would probably be fruitful.
@BenBurton
I still see Loomio as a tool more geared towards discussion than consensus.
Me too. A great place for this discussion.
increase society participation in government decisions
I like that. But the group would be discussing methods and implications so why not:
Methods and Implications of increasing societal participation in government decisions.
@michaelsoth Your thought on the choice to trust is most interesting and a pleasure to read. I love philosophical thoughts and conversations.
I have not investigated the depths of the mechanisms of human trust, and you point out that there is a lot to think about there.
Let me leave you with a much deeper philosophical question. Would the decisions made by the total population reflect the nature of humanity and if so… is that nature a good thing? Do you have faith in humanity? I have chosen to trust us, while realising that if I am wrong then there is not much point anyway.
I agree, I used trust in a digital manner in my question/statement. I have never really thought of trust as a spectrum. To me it is: do I trust?, don't I trust?, or not sure if I trust. In relation to my choice to trust humanity, I did weight my feelings about the different aspects of human nature. The result was a newly formed internal feeling about what the spirit of humanity is. Previous to asking myself the 'faith in humanity' question, my held feeling was that I thought we are destined to destroy ourselves. I still think that this is possible, and it is largely because I know there are 'shadow aspects' that need to be brought to light and recognised as something we need to change.
I want to be realistic in tackling the real shadow aspects which in my experience are likely to scupper that potential manifesting.
I had to look up the word "scupper" and found references to boat deck drain holes, sinking a ship deliberately, and thwarting.
We have the potential to evolve. I have evolved in my life time. I have grown to understand that I am part of a species that must learn, fast, to understand the power our species has over the destiny of Earth. We have never had as much reason to monitor our impact and reduce it greatly before we destroy the place that has nurtured our evolution.
Deeply, Philosophically, I realise that nature / the universe / reality, does not have an opinion on what the outcome is. Within the boundaries of our ability we are free to create and destroy - and I love that this is so. Sometimes when we create, we also destroy, without realising. What a challenging world!
the shadow aspects of human behaviour
how amenable are these shadow aspects to change and transformation?
I pin a lot of hope on the possibility that when a person realises their actions will lead to the end of our success as a species, I believe that the human/person will change to avoid that happening. I hope this is true, because this is, to me, the driving reason that I have faith in us recognising and adjusting our shadows, and evolving our society.
It’s a question of being psychologically smart in recognising the very real established forces and power structures which are standing in our way and will oppose us
The systems of society are established by those who have the power to write them. In western democracies 99% of the population have a very limited ability to influence the writing of the rule books of the systems that we are compelled to operate within. I don't think that the people who do have this ability are evil, but I think it is not in their interest to make the rules equal; which is not a fair game.
Because we are forced to play by the rules it is only reasonable that we should have a say in the process. Having this ability will be a responsibility that most of us have not experienced before.
Global Direct Democracy will become a reality - The means has been identified, and the mechanisms are being built. It is a matter of when not if. I believe that giving every person a say in their governance will show our true nature and ability. Time will not show what our one true nature is because we are free to be many things. Time will show what we chose to be.
@lbjoum
Global Direct Democracy will become a reality - The means has been identified, and the mechanisms are being built. It is a matter of when not if. I believe that giving every person a say in their governance will show our true nature and ability. Time will not show what our one true nature is because we are free to be many things. Time will show what we chose to be.
Yes, yes, yes - and if we want to make that happen, let's learn from the history of those events and movements that had the same ideals (and for me that includes how they were naive, how they failed, how they were sabotaged and how they were 'scuppered' - that word again!). I am thinking of the French Revolution, the German 'Räterepublik' in 1918, the Spanish Revolution in the civil war, Nicaragua, Cuba, the kind of utopian experiments I was talking about as part of the grassroots politics in the 1980's, the Occupy movement, etc etc.
giving every person a say in their governance will show our true nature and ability
I think there is some truth in that, but even your formulation: "giving" them a say is problematic. They need to 'have' their say by 'taking' it, not being 'given' it. it is precisely the implicit issues of power and leadership, (and people like us assuming that the rest of the population will perceive, operate and behave just like us in terms of sharing and contributing), which have historically scuppered things. It's people like us being psychologically naive, and not being prepared, skilled and ready when they do get into a position of leadership, that will sabotage things.
Those people who will want to use Loomio to stand for election, in my view, will not just be faced with the task of translating the legal and political issues into accessible language and opening them up for consultation. That will be the least of it is - anybody with a brain and a commitment to community can do that. And as @roslyn said: none of these issues are that complicated and we need to trust the people.
To me those ideas and sentiments are naive, I'm sorry to say.
From being involved in consensus decision-making in grassroots politics and in group facilitation and depth psychology and in teaching facilitators and organisational consultants for the last 30 years, it seems to me that a whole range of other skills will become much more important: the people who stand for election, in wanting to consult the people they will get elected to represent, in order to make that work will need to function like facilitators to their community - they will need the psychological, emotional, and other leadership skills including systemic awareness to address the underlying relationship and group dynamic issues, which are at the root of why rational decision-making goes wrong.
As soon as you get elected as a leader, people will transfer power to you, in very irrational and emotionally immature ways. The same thing happens in therapy, and is called transference. People project things onto you, which means they start to misread your good intentions. Dealing wisely and compassionately with such projection is one of the key leadership skills, that goes way beyond translating the political issues into accessible language. That is the kind of thing I'm talking about which we need to prepare ourselves for.
In my experience, when you 'give' people power and let them or encourage them to have their say, all kinds of past distress comes up, from all their previous life experience where they have been oppressed, imposed upon and disempowered. In that moment, all your best intentions and ideals as a leader/ facilitator run into some very real emotional difficulties. That is another kind of thing I'm talking about which we need to prepare ourselves for.
Does that make any sense?
Love reading through this discussion, so many interesting perspectives.
I'm a member of Senator Online (senatoronline.org.au). We're an Australian based political party founded upon the concept of direct democracy. I'm currently working on creating a support network for pro-direct democracy organizations, whether they be web developers, advocacy groups or political parties.
If anyone is a part of an organization or knows one please '@' mention me.
I'm currently just organizing the list from google docs but Loomio might make a good platfrom when the network is up and running.
@michaelsoth - the "markdown" takes a little getting used to but if you place a space after the ">" symbol the text you are quoting will be formatted as a quote.
I mention this because when re-reading this topic the posts with quotes stand out more than those without and highlight points or phrases other members feel are important to the discussion.
Etherpad looks promising ... Perhaps we could test it together?
@alandavison sounds good, I'd be up for that
@michaelsoth you wrote :
when we think about the deliberating aspect of any kind of discussion that Loomio tries to provide a platform for, it’s essentially about people learning to understand each other, and what each of the discussed topics actually means to them and how they are significant.
I have argued a similar point in discussions about the "User Profile" being extended to include contact information and activity feeds interluding posts, proposals and current positions.
Rather than direct you all to another discussion (I would if I could link to the comment directly but right now I can only link to the whole topic) I will include a mobile screen mockup here.
Thanks for tagging me in here - phewf what a lot of rich discussion!
For what it's worth, the only politics I'm really interested in is the local, personal, affective, voluntary collaboration of small groups of people in pursuit of tangible, immediate gains for the common good and against private interest. So that's the bias I bring to the design of Loomio, but I'm just one voice of many.
Having referenced the point @michaelsoth made about understanding each other I would now suggest that perhaps a bio section for each user (non compulsory) might also be useful.
In forum based discussions many users include a "signature" that is supposed to tell you a little bit about that person, a funny quote, play on words or piece of "shared wisdom".
Perhaps when joining a discussion group it would be good to add a short "information slug" to fill in some of details about other members. A summary of :
- what the discussed topics actually means to them
- how the topic is significant or important to them.
This wouldn't appear in the discussion like a forum signature but could be quickly referenced by clicking on the members initials or photo avatar, leading to a screen similar to the one above. Perhaps this information could replace the "Comments" section with some other heading (to be decided) and an extra tab for "Posts" could be added.
@richarddbartlett you wrote :
For what it’s worth, the only politics I’m really interested in is the local, personal, affective, voluntary collaboration of small groups of people in pursuit of tangible, immediate gains for the common good and against private interest. So that’s the bias I bring to the design of Loomio, but I’m just one voice of many.
That in itself would be a good example of what I was referring to in relation to the points I raised in the post above this one.
PS - The reasons you stated are very close to the motivations I had for looking for something like Loomio in the first place. I'm not sure I am against private interest I would have to learn more about what you mean by that.
The 'private interest' bit is just me being a dirty radical, more of a hunch than a manifesto: I think we're fancy monkeys born in to an abundant commonwealth as interconnected equals with infinite potential, and we get ourselves into a lot of trouble when we pretend that one monkey can own a bit of it to the exclusion of all the other monkeys.
We should get a beverage sometime and talk about this at length, but right now I've got work to do for the commons :)
@dnephin - this discussion is growing faster than any other with some very important concepts being raised. I propose we create a discussion group to discuss "Towards a Collaborative Toolkit" including but not limited to Etherpad, rather than dilute this topic.
I have some ideas for addressing some of the things we have previously highlighted and some concerns about the limitations of the mobile platform.
@rorytb I had a quick look at your Loomio groups for SOL having read the earlier post by @lbjoum highlighting the difficulty you are having trying to delete unused sub-groups on Loomio. I scanned some of the group content but haven't had the time to look very closely yet.
I have also taken a look at the SOL web site and will look at it in greater detail this week.
I have a slight concern about Stage 2 of your technology plan :
Wiki for the public to collaboratively develop and vote on Bills for submission to Parliament
I would replace the word "wiki" with something more open like "online tool" or "online workspace" there will be more to follow on this subject.
@michaelsoth - you said ..
Those people who will want to use Loomio to stand for election, in my view, will not just be faced with the task of translating the legal and political issues into accessible language and opening them up for consultation. That will be the least of it is - anybody with a brain and a commitment to community can do that.
I think that is the initial point being made at the beginning of this discussion. A starting point, you might say, for reducing the barriers to participation for the majority of the people they represent.
We are all pretty much in agreement that "large group collaboration and decision making" is a very complex issue when looking at it in it's entirety.
Breaking it down into manageable, deliverable pieces whilst developing strategies to encourage engagement and participation is the best way I can see to tackle the problem.
As has already been highlighted not everybody will adopt the "new tools of democracy" but we still need to drop that pebble in the pond to observe the ripples...
You said in an earlier post
If you read reflections on the Occupy movement after its decline (having experimented with basis democracy decision-making), the gist of it is that people were completely getting fed up with ‘process, process, process’ which was going nowhere.
I guess that is what we are trying to address now...
There are already several comments about the depth and richness of this discussion, as it gets longer it becomes more daunting to new participants who have to set aside a fair amount of time to read and digest before being able to add to the debate.
During the course of discussion I would like to see members highlight topics that are of particular importance. I made an attempt earlier but that is only my perspective, floated to introduce the question posted earlier.
How do we define boundaries and prevent the “Discussion Goal” becoming fragmented and disjointed?
@alandavison
How do we define boundaries and prevent the “Discussion Goal” becoming fragmented and disjointed?
As it's late again, I'm sorry I haven't got time for one of my long-winded answers ...
The short and simple answer from my side is (as per earlier comments I made here and there): moderation and facilitation.
A moderator, in this kind of context, would in my view fulfil some of the functions that you are taking care of implicitly and in some ways are volunteering for: on the rational ideas and opinion level, somebody who has read the whole lengthy discussion can be delegated to summarise the main points, the pros and cons, and suggests subdividing the discussion, creating further lines of enquiry to be separated out - that kind of thing. the whole discussion is still there for anybody to go over and check whether the moderator has done their job in an inclusive and representative way. But most people would not want to wade through the whole thing - it is visible how and when the moderator is acting in the best interests of furthering the discussion and keeping it creative and productive.
What I was suggesting earlier is that in parallel to the flow of rational interaction, there is a flow of emotional interaction, which could be included explicitly, validly, which might require also facilitation of a different kind.
Some of these facilitative tasks and functions you have taken on in this discussion.I would happily leave it at the moderators discretion to make proposals how to support and further the discussion, and to decide what is confusing fragmentation and what is still creative brainstorming and diversity - but all we are talking about on that level is really a clustering or subdividing of topics, which are still all accessible to everybody.
Earlier on, you proposed the following subdivision:
Group structure and Dynamics
Facilitation and Moderation
Decision Making
Separating out those three topics from the current discussion makes some sense to me, although we would have to define more clearly the third point.
We could then get much more deeply into each of those points.
In this particular discussion, I would prefer to define one-sub-topic more precisely:
What can we learn from the tradition of actual face-to-face group facilitation, and what of that and be usefully applied to Loomio ( or more specifically: to Loomio in a political context)?
I could then contribute and summarise key learning points, references and books from my particular area of expertise without boring everybody to death in this wider discussion. And you could all have a go at cherry-picking and extracting from that what you want to use for Loomio, or for other software platforms that are maybe more suited to scaled-up political decision-making processes (taking into account what Richard said above re his focus for Loomio: "local, personal, affective, voluntary collaboration of small groups of people in pursuit of tangible, immediate gains for the common good and against private interest").
Gotta go horizontal - goodnight ...
@michaelsoth - thanks as always for your insight and goodnight...
@alan
We are all pretty much in agreement that “large group collaboration and decision making” is a very complex issue when looking at it in it’s entirety.
Breaking it down into manageable, deliverable pieces whilst developing strategies to encourage engagement and participation is the best way I can see to tackle the problem.
For a point of reference, Wikipedia excels at this.
@BenBurton - funny you should mention that, as I type I am on the Wikipedia Loomio page :-)
^ @alandavison
@BenBurton - they are running their fundraising banner and I am planning on donating the £3 they are asking for.
The short and simple answer from my side is moderation and facilitation.
I am a bit sceptical that this can really scale.
While wikipedia is an excellent example of this working at scale, the nature of wiki pages are quite different. At any give time some percentage of the pages on wikipedia will be wrong. In the case of wikipedia this is fine because (hopefully) no one is making critical decisions based solely on a wikipedia article, and eventually those pages will be corrected.
There are other types of discussions that can't change as quickly (simply because they may take years to carry out), and are more constrained to a fixed timeframe.
Not to mention that wikipedia has had it's own share of scandals with moderators being paid for content. This type of bribery would likely be more common in a system tasked with important decisions.
Even a moderator acting with good intentions has bias, which can bias the overall discussion. I think we should be aiming to avoid these types of centralized human intervention.
My feeling is that the software tool should handle these concerns. I think that can be accomplished by moving away from a single chronologically ordered list of responses, to a tree structure.
Discussions can branch freely without requiring extra effort on the participants. As a participant you can subscribe/unsubscribe from the branches you're interested in. A new participant joining the discussion only needs to follow the branches they're interested in, which would be a small fraction of the entire discussion. This makes auditing a lot easier as well (for the same reason, it's easier to find the related posts).
@dnephin - I like nested structures but without a good search function they can hide a lot of important information don't you think. Also it would be important to be able to link between trees to avoid duplicating and diluting comments.
I see real problems for a mobile centric interface.
PS - Just started testing etherpad tonight
Wikipedia fixes itself though. And the key analogy isn't if Wikipedia is perfect or not. The key is that the site narrows down a discussion to individual, digestible pieces to prevent completely off topic and out of range pages.
@daniel-nephin
@BenBurton - I don't think that @ mention is going to work try @denephin (which by the way doesn't auto-fill in 1.0. I will go over and test that using Beta next time.
@BenBurton - yes the auto-fill still works in Beta.
@dnephin & @BenBurton - here is a link to the collaborative tools testing sign up form
Even a moderator acting with good intentions has bias, which can bias the overall discussion. I think we should be aiming to avoid these types of centralized human intervention.
I agree very much @dnephin . It's such a difficult problem, and also a crucially important problem IMO.
I like the idea of a facilitator who has a certain amount of responsibility, based on community trust, but as little personal authority as possible.
Just 'pinning a post' is a way of shaping a group's interactions. I don't mean that it's wrong. I do mean that it's a concentration of personal power.
I would personally prefer groups in which facilitators/coordinators/admins have the authority to make time-sensitive decisions as needed, but always subject to community review.
(Which is awkward when it comes to deleted content!)
@gregorycassel I am going to try and test out some of the theories and suggestions presented here with respect to "facilitating" this discussion based on the suggestions made so far by @michaelsoth who has so much real-world experience in this field that the points he is raising can't be ignored.
I will try and select some of the "important" points raised so far in order to create a summary. Something we can focus on whilst keeping the general debate going in it's current format which feels a bit like brainstorming.
Initially these will be listed simply in chronological order as I work down the discussion trying to highlight specific things that have caused concern, highlighted issues or indicate topics that deserve better understanding through focused discussion.
I don't want to create or force that focus simply try to give us something we can move towards a proposal, whatever that might be (currently I have no idea)
Back to the topic of creating a group where we can continue to explore this topic. I think it would be best to have a parent group for general discussions and subgroups for more specific conversations. Like a sub-group to discuss the various existing platforms and their pro's and cons.
Because our SOL - Online Direct Democracy Australia has been dormant I have asked that group of people if they would mind us moving in there.
I will see what they say, and if no one objects I will change its name, but we still need to decide what to call it.
increase society participation in government decisions
Methods and Implications of increasing societal participation in government decisions.
Global working group.
More????
@lbjoum
It seems like this discussion is currently our "Global working group" or at least a good starting point. Global in more than one sense :
- Geographically : Australia, South America, Ireland (as far as candidates)
- Topically : Members with vastly different skills and experience
- Perspective : Looking at the whole picture
@alandavison, creating a summary is a very admirable intention. I guess that relates ideas behind having the ability to edit the Title and Context of an ongoing discussion. I don't know the Loomio cooperative's views on these things yet, though.
As someone who has often written minutes, public statements and summaries, I view it as a powerfully creative and influential process. I think it's generally good practice to get more at least a couple of people involved in gathering points and reviewing whatever is written, even if it's written by a sole author.
I don't necessarily support the shaping of an extended brainstorming session into some definite form, even if that occurs collaboratively. In the case of this particular discussion, I kind of viewed it as open-ended dialogue from the beginning, without any particular drive to create a proposal. However, I don't mean that worthwhile proposals couldn't come out of this talk. Like you, I currently have no idea what they might be.
@gregorycassel
I am not planning on writing anything in isolation. This is merely a starting point. The document will form the basis for testing various collaborative writing platforms so we can do a number of things at once.
I am trying to link (and document) as many of the ideas posted in this discussion as I feasibly can. Currently Loomio doesn't have the feature set to allow me to do this so my approach is to try open source tools and see how well they fit.
@michaelsoth you said
This is why I have been involved in some other group discussions about Loomio feature ideas. This discussion topic is a prime example of what shouldn't be happening on Loomio, or how the platform needs to adapt to address the issues we are highlighting.
I think that is what I was trying to get at in an earlier post
At present we need to either adapt the way we post or test something different in order to address the issues you highlighted.