Oliver, that's a fair point, but my idea can be expanded to non-products.
The only difference here is that everyone becomes group #2 - having to
convince others via social means. If the idea is not very visual, it has
to be painted with words, so maybe our amazing community liaisons or other
writers might be able to help with their writing prowess.
My main point is that we should have a well understood "idea path" - from
inception to getting feedback, and well known resources to rely on.
On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:53 AM, Oliver Keyes <ironholds(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 5:38 PM, Yuri Astrakhan
<yastrakhan(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Oliver, thanks!
> In other words, the litmus test for me is: what happens when the
socially
and politically weakest person in the
organisation has an idea?
If we speak of a "product" idea, we have two groups of people - those who
can implement the idea, and those who would need to convince others to do
it. They use fundamentally different, scarcely overlapping skill-sets.
An
engineer might go via the "hackathon +
demo" route, implementing
something
simple and showing it to gain traction. A
non-engineer would start with
the
social aspect first - talking to others if the
idea is worth pursuing,
how
hard is it to do, and eventually - convincing
others to allocate their
time/resources to do it. Sometimes an engineer may go the social route
instead, but it would be very hard for a non-engineer to engage in
development. Lastly, the "designer" group has an amazing skill-set to
visually present their full vision rather than the demo, thus often
having
easier time of conveying their thoughts.
In a sense, the barrier of entry for the person in the "weakest position"
would not be as high for the "doer" as for the "inspirer". So I think
the
real challenge is how do we capture and evaluate those ideas from the
second group? Also, no matter how hard we try, it would be either very
hard, or very expensive (and not just financially) to force the
implementers to do an idea they do not believe in. So in a sense, doers
need to be persuaded first and foremost.
As with any explanation, a picture == 1000 words, so we could promote
"idea
visualizers" - designers who are easily
approachable and could help to
draw
up a few sketches of the idea.
My email opened with "I think reducing things to engineering terms are
sort of indicative of the problem here". I'm not talking about code.
I'm not talking about designs. I'm not talking about software
products. And thinking about it in terms of engineering projects,
which is what we do as an organisation a lot, will not be helpful. If
it did, then after several years of insisting that we are primarily a
tech shop, we would hopefully not still be having conversations about
structure and direction!
What I am talking about is ideas generally. They might be about
software products. They might be about social products, a la the
teahouse. They might be about how to tweak our process by which we
interact with the community. They might be that our hiring process is
kinda weird and here's this one cool way we could look at improving
it. They might be that the break room snacks _suck_ (again,
hypothetical: they're fine. Sorry, Facilities).
In any case, the litmus test is just that; a litmus test. Our
structure should be designed cognizant to these problems, and then
pass the test, but not be designed *specifically* to pass the test.
And the designer idea seems pretty hyper-optimised just for the test.
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