unsummarized (so far)
Subjects from memory:
Here’s some more from this thread that I wrote to Lion this morning. He wasn’t online, so I’ll just paste it here:
Hey Lion, sorry that I disappeared yesterday. I wanted to also talk to you about your suggestion that a clique is not always bad, and that hierarchy is not always a bad or undesireable thing.
Where you wrote, yesterday, for instance, that the community has different ideas about what “abuse” is. That you and Alex would have no problem evicting certain people, but others, like Mattis, perhaps oppose evicting. Or where you wrote, I think in Friedemar’s personal page, that you might say to a new person “slow down” on creating new pages, while Mattis, or others might say “give them some breathing room”.
And, what I am trying to say is that these are different worldviews, different ways of solving problems. And this is where I think we can apply LiteracyOfHumanNature.
Because, what we are looking at, when we ask the question “What type of change is CommunityWiki ready for?” is: “how do we successfully mesh these apparently contradictory worldviews?”
Graves identified six conditions which must be present for change to occur. Those six conditions are (these were later repeated in the Spiral Dynamics book):
These can be described this way (from http://www.vmacgill.net/paper.htm):
I am saying is that it is possible for people with different worldviews to work together. The potential is there.
We have met condition 1. We have also collectively met conditions 2, 3, and 4. For condtion 5, we have identified barriers, or thresholds as I prefer to call them. The biggest barrier, I think, is the difference in world views, or ways of solving problems.
I personally think that Alex’s response on CommunityWikiGovernment, and BayleShanks’s response at CommunityWikiConstitution, combined are pointing in the right direction. The idea that there is like a two-phased system. We try to operate in normal routine under informal, open, soft processes, much like the way that we’ve been doing. But, we also create a constitution that puts decision making power in the hands of members, if the soft processes break down. I think it is important that we think about when we will invoke the powers of voting members, and when we will not. Because, this is a subtle thing that very likely could make or break the meshing of worldviews and different types of problem solving. So, we have not overcome the barriers/thresholds to change yet, until we figure this out.
In my mind, the need to invoke a formal power/decision making process has shown itself. But, we can make a social agreement that basically says that this process will not be invoked unless certain conditions are met. If some of us “club” members want to avoid the invocation of the process, it is up to us to then solve the problem But, the formal power/decision making process is still there as a community safety net, to keep the community from breaking down.
So, it is up to us to Consolidate and Support this change, and meet condition six.
Thanks for writing up those 6 conditions, I hadn’t seen them before and they’re interesting.
I agree with the two-phased system idea.
I agree that different people probably have subtly different ideas about when the formal process that we are considering should be invoked, and that this is a potential source of future trouble.
I’m hoping that conservative voting thresholds like those of Proposal 2 will help with this issue a lot. Since, under proposal 2, it would take 80% agreement to make a new rule, actually two conditions would have to be met before the passage of a rule:
I imagine that sometimes people will like the point of view corresponding with a particular rule proposal, yet still vote against it because they don’t think the issue merits a formal solution in the first place.
In addition, since it would take only 50% agreement to repeal a rule, we won’t get “stuck” with more formal rules than most of us want.
So, in a situation when there is not broad agreement that the formal process is appropriate for a particular issue, the formal process will not be brought into play (and if it were, it wouldn’t do much because any proposals for rule changes would easily be voted down). So, those who do not want to use the formal process very much won’t be forced to use it; except when 80% of everyone else agrees that formal process should be used.
Define external redirect: LiteractyOfHumanNature VotingIsTransformative