---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Joe Corneli <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 5:49 PM Subject: [Commoning] Fwd: guidelines for structure To: [email protected] Hi all: here is a "strawman" proposal I sent to P2PU. (I'm not sure why they call all proposals "strawmen".) It may be of more general appeal when thinking about how to set up peer-production systems. Joe ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Joe Corneli <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 11:29 AM Subject: guidelines for structure To: P2PU Community <[email protected]> The following begins to approach a full proposal on "guidelines for structure" (this is my first complete revision: it seems ready for public discussion in the P2PU's standard "strawman" framework). It draws on Pippa's posting in this thread about P2PU's priorities: http://groups.google.com/group/p2pu-community/browse_thread/thread/d1462b432... There's other material from my ongoing discussion with Charlie about "paragogy" I'd like to bring into this in the future; we'll save such expansions for later. IDENTIFYING BOTH COMPLETION GOALS AND SUCCESS/FAILURE CRITERIA SHOULD BE PART OF THE COURSE AND PROJECT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. This should include "organizational efforts, across the board". Even if that sounds obvious, it's not yet clear how best to implement. P2PU should be emphasising community involvement "to 105%" -- and clearly identified critera for success and failure are the minimum data needed to make community involvement work. As an example, P2PU's roadmap should include high-level goals, even as these are subject to discussion. Folding courses and projects together under one heading implies that P2PU should dare to "eat its own dogfood" -- and it provides core community members the opportunity to lead by example. IDENTIFYING COMPLETION CRITERIA SHOULD NOT ONLY BE A SOCIAL NORM, BUT SOMETHING CLEARLY IDENTIFIED WITHIN THE TECHNOLOGY. Prior art in this area lies in the field of "bug reporting". Conceptualizing P2PU "tasks" as tickets within a well-thought-through issue tracking system would give both learners and organizational leaders a powerful tool for defining their workflow. A good first task would be to make a map of system objects and the way they relate to one another, so we can know how the technology itself serves the organisation's high-level goals. As an example: here is work-in-progress by me, describing the elements of the Planetary System: http://trac.mathweb.org/planetary/export/HEAD/pmredux-extras/general-metadat... (More progress to be made there this week: I'd be happy to help with a similar document for P2PU once this one is done.) THE SEMANTICS AROUND "GROUPS" NEEDS REFINING. This is a key point, since groups are the new "fundamental object" for P2PU, and have to accommodate both course-like and more informal book-club-like interactions. As an example of an outstanding issue: assuming that members come and go, any agreements the group makes may only apply to a certain cohort at a certain period of time. What happens if someone wants to repurpose a group? Are they forkable, or what? Is there a plan to keep track of the potentially huge number of groups that may accumulate over time? These are just a few of the many things that should be spelled out in detail ASAP. PARTICIPANTS SHOULD ALSO CLEARLY DEFINE THEIR PERSONAL GOALS (SUCCESS/FAILURE CRITERA) AND SHARE THAT WITH THEIR PEERS. It would not be too much to ask to have goals visible on user homepages, presumably with ways to opt-OUT, so for example the goal might only be visible to members of a certain group/course, or cohort. All major "accountability" issues can be handled post hoc, through transparent record-keeping on learner profiles. This will address most of the concerns brought up by e.g. JWeb. THE IDEA THAT GOVERNANCE IS "OPEN" BECAUSE ANYONE CAN RAISE THEIR OPINION IN THE MAILING LIST HAS SHORTCOMINGS. There is a huge difference between London's Speaker's Corner, and the UK's Lords and Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers'_Corner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Commons_of_the_United_Kingdom In today's popular usage, "peers" and "commoners" are the same, but we would do well to reflect on the historical usage and learn from it. Perhaps the "community list" can be replaced by more empowering functionality within the new site, e.g. http://new.p2pu.org/en-US/courses/p2pu-the-course/ (It needs significant changes to be useful for "governance" matters.) ONCE AGAIN: CORE COMMUNITY MEMBERS SHOULD LEAD BY EXAMPLE! Anything that P2PU expects of "participants" it should expect of "core community members". Transparency, openness, and involvement should all have concrete meanings in the technology used by P2PU. The are issues that need to championed by organisational leadership if anything is going to be made of them in a "grassroots" fashion. This doesn't mean that all conversations should happen in public (that wouldn't be a "good example" for P2P communications), but it does mean that leadership needs a degree of "accountability" (in proportion to their power). At the same time, *complaints* (bug reports) should not be duplicated unduly, but managed in a coherent fashion. Accountability does not mean that leadership needs to respond and fix every issue, on demand. Rather, it means a responsibility to keep the space in good condition for work by the community as a whole. This is happening presently with a fair amount of informality, and some opaqueness that would go away if the guidelines suggested here about clearly defining "success/failure criteria" were followed throughout the project. Recommended reading: http://piratepad.net/bug-report-1 http://piratepad.net/bug-report-2 _______________________________________________ Commoning mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wissensallmende.de/mailman/listinfo/commoning -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens