Hi Todd,
On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 8:06 PM Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
These are very disappointing. It does not seem like a bit of the feedback on earlier versions was taken into consideration at all. Can we expect anything we say to matter this time around, or will we once again be talking to the wall?
having participated in writing some of these recommendations, I can tell you from personal experience they have been massively shaped by feedback. That included feedback on the talk pages, feedback at events and conferences, feedback from strategy salons organized for that specific purpose, feedback from all kinds of personal conversations... often conflicting feedback, since, unsurprisingly, different people within the movement often have opposing views. Also, at least in the parts of the process I have seen, all feedback was considered carefully (whether we had the bandwidth to respond or not, with the latter unfortunately happening a lot more than we'd have liked), but then of course not all of it could not be incorporated - some was in conflict with other feedback, some was not in alignment with the strategic direction, some was infeasible or factually incorrect... but much of the feedback did end up changing the recommendations.
So if your expectation is that your feedback will be taken in consideration, you can be confident that that will happen. If the expectation is that it will be heeded in every case, then you might come away frustrated; like all large-scale governance projects, our movement's strategy for the next decade will require a lot of compromise from a lot of people. For every part of the recommendations that you like, I'm sure there will be a hundred people who dislike it. So I would urge you (and everyone) to look at the recommendations through that lens: whether they will be a positive change for the movement overall, not whether every single detail is to your liking. If we cherry-pick everything that some group of people is opposed to, soon nothing would be left.
---- (I'm one of the writers; this is my personal opinion only. I will certainly not be in the position to make any decisions based on community feedback about accepting or rejecting the recommendations. But having seen how much effort was spent on making sure all feedback is collected and reviewed, I'm pretty sure this last phase is not going to be any different.)