The proposals that you list are a bit double edged. It may be necessary,
but they have downsides. For example, there are in a few cases very good
reasons to go back to the drawing board when we're talking about
foundational documents. It is annoying that it takes so long, but with time
we also should see increased ownership and an increased support base.
Having a single phase reduces the number of messages and time spent, but it
also reduces the process to a single point of failure, making it much
higher stakes. If you don't participate, you're too late. It would be nice
if we can somehow still lower the stakes by making processes more
iterative, and accepting that the outcome does not have to be the same for
a long period of time. But there is a fundamental tension between speed and
perceived pressure.
I'm less concerned about elections, if only one of these rounds involves
the community. If having an additional round of filtering helps to make the
ballot easier to digest (reduced to six candidates for three positions
sounds great to me!) that also means less mental effort for voters. The
real question is: how much cumulative time are we spending on this process
(or rather: should we be spending on this, if we want a good outcome). If
100 people spend an extra 2 hour to trim down from 30 to 6 candidates, that
is worth it, because 10,000 people don't have to read 30 statements, bio's,
Q&A's etc. If we go from 7 to 6 candidates, maybe less so.
If doing another drafting round means 30 people spend an extra 10 hours
drafting, that may be worth it, if it means that 1000 people don't have to
be frustrated for a year because they constantly run into consequences of
the policy and have to go through protests to get it changed. If the
iteration for things that don't work is more lightweight, maybe we can just
try it for a year, and evaluate after that.
Maybe it's worth it to sometimes take a napkin and do the math: how much
collective time are we going to spend on this?
Best,
Lodewijk
On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:12 PM Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 4:35 PM Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:38 PM Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 10:27 AM Evelin Heidel <scannopolis(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
+1 to this, my perception is that we're
wasting a lot of volunteer's +
staff time + resources into complex governance processes without clear
results. In theory, the reason why you want this much transparency &
process is to make sure decision making (and in turn resources) are
allocated fairly, but in practice so much bureaucracy makes it very hard
for people to participate, leading to even more inequality.
It's a complex balance to strike but definitely the current initiatives
are not even a good aim to begin with.
cheers,
scann
100% this.
The intentions behind the complex governance processes are good in that
they intend to increase inclusivity. But it’s easy to forget the most
limited resource we have is the attention of volunteers. The groups we
include the least today have the least free time and money. Longer,
multi-step processes to form and elect committees to set up committees to
review processes to inform a decision then has exactly the opposite of the
intended effect because it reduces participation to the slim group of
people who have the time and patience for such a process. The CIA wrote a
manual about how to sabotage organizations, and it’s like they wrote a
perfect description of exactly how things operate right now: "When
possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and
consideration. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible–never
less than five."[1]
The other reason we ended up in this situation is simply a lack of
strong leadership. People feel like they don't have the permission or
safety to do things unless they've done the maximum amount of consultations
possible. This is why decisions flounder in limbo for a long time, with no
one really knowing if they are happening or not happening. We're stuck
because we're trying to reset our governance to solve the problem where
it's unclear who is able to decide what and when... but we're trying to
solve that by perpetually punting a decision to some other committee or
council of people. It's turtles all the way down.
1:
https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/read-the-cias-simple-sabotage-field-man…
I think that means we need to acknowledge some culpability for this
phenomena - in environments like this list, folks learn that no decision is
too benign to spark controversy and any actually controversial decision is
guaranteed to garner a vitriolic backlash.
Combine that with the normal tendencies of bureaucracies, magnified by
the special nature of the WMF, and the result is explosive growth in
distributed decision-making organs.
Accurate insights from SJ and others, if not necessarily new, but
unlikely to lead to change because all the incentives that led to this
place remain.
Yes completely true.
Some of the other bullet points in that guide to sabotage are things like
“argue over precise wordings of things” that are endemic to the culture of
the projects for reasons that may be unfixable.
Coming back to SJ’s original point, the tangible immediate kind of changes
the Board and Maryana could enforce are:
- Set more aggressive deadlines for forming new governance bodies and
policies. None of these processes should take multiple years to get
running.
- Reduce the number of pre-planned stages of duplicative feedback /
drafting periods.
- Where elections are necessary just do a single round of ranked choice
voting after an open call for candidates.
What else?
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