Better discussion summaries

@craiglambie I find scanning over the position statements on a proposal often gives me a good sense of the most important bits of the discussion; as does looking at the most liked comments (examples attached).

Do you have ideas of how this could be done better?

Thanks for the feedback :)
We're working on it. Not all conversations are so long. One possible solution we're interested in is maksuggesting it easier for users to suggest summaries which others can then recommend

Yep that's exactly what statements of position are for, and why you only have a limited space to describe your position - so others can come by later and read just that part and easily get a summary of the issue and main themes of opinions.

it is not obvious to me in a quick glance what is what. Maybe if a summary was a different colour I could tell what was happening?

@craiglambie maybe try mocking it up visually so I can understand what you have in mind? How do you imagine summaries working effectively?

And then someone like me comes along and says: is "discussion" even an appropriate paradigm, with its links to "percussion" and "concussion"? How about conversation, dialogue?

http://www.hendersongroup.com/articles/tips-for-effective-dialogue-dialogue-vs-discussion.asp

Perhaps this is more a cultural issue than a technological one.

[Stop reading now if rants aren't fun for you]

If conversations are efficiently summarised and organised, then what am I? A "useless tree"? One of the deluded masses who aren't as original and brilliant as they think they are? An outlier? A wingnut? (Open question :) )

If an issue is worthy of one's consideration, is it not worthy of more than a quick glance?
Coming down from the meta-level, we probably imagine (very) differently how we will use loomio with other people, in collaborating groups, on real-world tasks.

How unworthy of attention are our colleagues' individual contributions?

The more we rely on summaries, the more we see what we already think we know. So what?

I have this from Tolkien (via stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com) on my desktop:

"Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of ‘appropriation’: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.”

.......
My favourite two words about Loomio are: "Say something..."

Your turn.

@johngraham that's a well-noticed facet to this conversation... check out this in-depth discussion about "discussion vs dialogue" for a lot more about that.

I think it's definitely a context-dependent give-and-take sort of a problem. Some conversations call for summaries. Some require much more deliberate and in-depth engagement. We must trust our users and our groups to navigate the whole spectrum in all its diversity, since I hope people will use Loomio in ways we can't begin to imagine.

We have talked many times about being able to post a comment as a suggestion for a summary, and have some way for the rest of the group to +1 it up if it's a good one, leaving it open as a dynamic, participant driven feature.

Meanwhile, I think a lot can be accomplished with the context panel. In a Loomio group, everyone is empowered to take acts of facilitation, such as updating the context to reflect where the discussion has got to.

@AllanaKrause how about that?
The positions only come up if someone asks for a decision, which doesn't always happen a lot.
I also don't know how to make a "summary" type of comment, is it just one that has lots of likes? Or could you say vote for a comment as a particular type of comment. Eg. I don't just "like" this comment, I think this comment is a good summary, a good point against, a good point for the discussion. Contains facts, is absolute fiction/ opinion (so I know to avoid wasting my time reading these..)

Like is simple, and works for a lot of people, but maybe I am alone, maybe there are more "programmers" that like more specific answers/ results.
You could opt in to having more complex voting on something.

This is getting at some interesting design questions we've had on the back burner for a long time about how to sort and prioritize information in a Loomio discussion. It has to make sense chronologically, but other information hierarchies based on topic, importance, etc can also be quite valuable. It's also relevant who posts, not just what they post.

In the example above, I was specifically trying to take an act of facilitation (posting for what I thought would be the good of the group, vs posting from my own personal perspective). Those kinds of comments refer to a whole lexicon of facilitation tools (cultural technology). The question is how to translate those tools into our digital context.

Would be interested in @jonlemmon 's take.

Interesting links to those resources @johngraham - i'll have to dig into them more deeply. Yes those are examples of cultural technology.

The thing is, each group will have its own culture, and the language and tools that go along with it. For example, groups used to De Bono's ideas could mark comments as [black hat] and that would make sense and be useful signalling to the other participants. But we don't want to bake stuff like that into the software explicitly because not every group will use those terms (consider that Loomio is in a dozen languages, and all the diversity even within English-speaking groups for example).

We need the tool to be simple and agnostic to hard-coded philosophies as much as possible, so it can be flexible enough to accommodate a diversity of cultures, jargon, and protocols. So we need to design as minimalistic as possible while still making the tool as useful as possible. This is hard to do.

However, I have found time and time again that when people thing they need a new feature in the software, they often don't. For example, why not try out marking comments as [summary in your groups and see what happens? Perhaps that tag could be quite useful without needing a new feature. And once we start experimenting we'll hone in on the right design not by guessing, but by testing in practice. Once we do that, then it's time to design changes to the software.

[summary]

We've discovered that some people want to be able to quickly know the most important aspects of discussion, but it's also important not to lose the considered, in-depth approach at the same time, because building on what others have said is key to the process of dialogue.

Right now, people use the context panel and statements of position to get the gist of where the group is at and what the discussion is about. But perhaps this isn't enough.

This relates to ongoing discussions about how to sort information in Loomio, and ideas like re-sorting comments based on things other than chronology, highlighting comments as having certain characteristics like "facilitation" or "summary" or "fact to keep in mind" - this is a design challenge for the future.

It's possible to utilize cultural technology without requiring changes to the digital technology, such as tagging with text or building and understanding of protocol within your group.

I had a go! turns out the summary was nearly as long as the discussion... lol

Apologies for deleting the resources @alanna mentioned I referred to:

The Group Pattern Language Project groupworksdeck.org/

And...Where Are Your Keys whereareyourkeys.org

It could be helpful not just to mark things out on your own post, but to retrospectively mark it out on someone else's.

Maybe here's an "agnostic" way:

I can envisage having, right beside the 'Like' button, a generic "Flag as..." button.... You could type in what you want to flag the post as, OR, maybe each group could develop (or grab from a library) a finite set of flags....

And then, you'd end up with, under your comment,

"Liked by Jim"
"Flagged as 'a brilliant piece of inductive reasoning' by Jen"
"Flagged as 'soap-box rant' by Jiminy"
"Flagged as 'Nailed It' by Crikey"

Might be interesting to allow the "creator" of a discussion to limit the characters (140, 250, etc...) of comments- like how Twitter does. This could help achieve easier to scan threads + more to the point comments!

I would like to figure out a way to incentivise people to summarise content, both of individual comments, and discussions as a whole.

Fair summaries are super valuable.

Wouldn't it be cool if after a discussion got to certain length, you'd get a friendly prompt like "this looks like an in-depth discussion! would you like to have a go at summarizing where it's got to so far?" and there's a box you can type in....

hmmm, this is an interesting discussion now.
I really like the @johngraham idea of flagging discussions as x. That works well, if you could then easily find the flagged discussion.
Also on the need for in-depth vs summary.
I sometimes need a summary to want to see the in-depth! I love the idea of voting up a "summary" post.
Maybe "flag as summary"

Basically with online discussion a lot of comments are "not original" and could be skipped/ grouped with others to avoid having to re-read the same thing.

Maybe instead of the +1'ing you see as posts, we just have "agree" or "disagree" options "+-" to vote for different options.

@alanna totally agree it is all very difficult to design well, but is a challenge that will make the internet Great! And inclusive.

Flags could be colour coded, and multiple people could wave the same flag once someone has introduced it.

I figure if you found something marked
"Flagged as 'brilliant summary' by Craig and dozens of others", it would probably be worth reading.

We have talked in the past about another potential solution: the TLDR field (Too long; didn't read). The idea is that when a comment gets to a certain length, the user is prompted to fill in a summary.

I think accurate summaries are one of the most important ingredients of consensus building.

I brought this up in another thread, but for discussion with a proposal, why not have someway of tagging posts to their position? So rather than reading everything, you click/hover on the 'yes' or 'no' section of the pie chart and it shows you the posts pro that position.

Then use the 'like' system to bring the 'best' summaries of each position to the top of the feeds for each discussion. Summary posts could be encourage on the tag feed as part of the cyber-culture.

There is another conceivable option - turn this whole problem inside out.

PO:
Instead of a default any-length comment and optional summary, you could instead force a tweet-length permanent ‘abstract’, and an optional box for expanding on your point.

In effect, this means giving each comment its own context box.
This would solve a problem I have - when I try to be concise, people who know me ‘get’ what I’m saying straight away (unless I’m being too much of a clever clogs) - but for others, without enough context, a concise comment becomes cryptic.

In fact, this is almost the definition of “cryptic” in one of the senses of the word - making a gesture or appearance commment without enough shared sense of context to make the meaning plain.

[by the way, “PO” is Edward de Bono’s word for indicating that something is a provocation, a lateral thinking move rather than necessarily a proposal.]

I like that idea @johngraham - if you type more than a certain amount, it will pop up asking for a TLDR when you hit "post comment". Probably will force people to clarify their thinking as well. And there's nothing stopping people from typing in "I can't summarize - please just read the whole comment" if they need to.

summaries came up a lot during our trip, the importance of finding a good summary, and especially as the numbers of people increase in a group. I like the idea of being able to flag a post as a great summary and be able to search for different flags

Discourse provides a "summarize this thread" feature, which will show you only the top-rated comments in chronological order. It's really good. Check it out here:

http://meta.discourse.org/t/shouldnt-you-be-able-to-tag-with-multiple-categories/256

If you scroll down a little bit you can click "Summarize this topic". It hides most of the comments, but then you can still click to expand them.

@jonlemmon I really like this and it would work with our 'useful' button really well

Cool thread with lots of great ideas and inspiration here :)

For me the problem is that the longs threads makes it almost impossible for newcomers to enter a discussion.

What about this:
Have at "propose summary of discussion" button. When pressed the user can write a brief og longer summary of the thread from beginning to end. When posted the summary turns up at the end of the thread.

(ok nothing new so far but stay with me:)

When another user then likes (or presses "summary is accurate") his/hers previous comments disappears from sight (with the option og "see all comments to show them again)

So if all who is involved in the discussion agrees on the summary. All the previous comments are hidden and only the summary is back, making it so much easier to enter the discussion.

Cool idea @madsringblom !

Thanks @alanna :)
Do you know if there is a thread somewhere discussing ups and downs of "comment types" and also "discussion threading"?
Tried searching without any luck.

Actually, I think I do have a thought on this:

1) If someone else had this thought, I apologize-- I have only read about a quarter of the comments.

2) My thought: Maybe it would be best to build into Loomio's etiquette that the originator of a discussion thread should keep a running summary going, and can delegate people who participate in the discussion to help?

@madsringblom it's something we've discussed a lot! One improvement (one level of threading) is in the roadmap to be implemented shortly: https://trello.com/c/SAMuMFoc

We've definitely talked about ideas of tagging comments as "summary" or "useful" and different ways of filtering and ordering information to make discussions easier to engage with. This card about tagging everything, including comments, is kind of about that: https://trello.com/c/vqVDjxZ7

@jacobgadikian how appropriate that you haven't read all the comments for lack of a good summary feature!! It's true that once discussions get long they get quite unwieldy.

A good discussion summary was one of our original hopes for the Context Box (the text at the top of each discussion). It's editable like a Wiki by anyone in the discussion, so we'd hoped people would update it regularly with where the conversation had got to. This happens occasionally, but most of the time it's not used that way, so I think we could find a better design.

Thanks Alanna!
My thought about 'type of comments' is a little different from tagging. I think I'll make a new feature discussion about this.

@alanna Have u thought about using http://etherpad.org/ as discussion editor?
When ever the text is edited participants will be notified with useful color for every participant. This will keep the discussion summarized with the useful info, which also will help formulating any proposal out of it

@waelalsaad that's cool! Many people have noticed the potential connection between Loomio and collaborative document writing. But I kind of think that's out of scope for Loomio core functionality - you can just link out to Etherpad or Google Docs or whatever you want to use. I'd rather we stay focused on simple decision-making. In the future, I see Loomio being open to plug-ins and modules for things like this, so people can introduce other specialised functionality without complicating the main featureset.

@alanna @waelalsaad Ultimately though, online decision making does involve some level of collaborative writing. Not that I think Loomio should try to absorb Etherpad, but Loomio will need to help people agree on written language in order to help people make accurate decisions. I'm working through ideas and options in my head, but refining written language is an avenue Loomio perhaps shouldn't ignore.

Thanks @benburton for sharing your thoughts on this topic and reviving the the discussion.

Personally and generally I belong to the group who tries to develop tools commons , which will help leveraging and channeling the positive forces around the globs. Either loomio it self should grow to integrate other communication purposed tools or it become part of more advanced tool environment (meshwork).

What also fits in this context is the need for brainstorming bigger pictures of loomio for example which structure is needed for forming biothop of global governance. As you see both discussions are related when thinking about mass cooperation and communication.

Other thought that in the future to consider how different languages can flow in collective formulations on global level of activism ...