Re: [Tikiwiki-devel] question about TikiWikiSocialContract

[mose <mo...@ti...>]

le Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 03:58:44PM -0400 par Jason Diceman :
> Hi Ben.
> 
> I too am interested in how the TikiWiki community works.
> 
> There definitely seems to be some interest among a few developers for using
> a Social Contract, but this is the first I have heard about it. 
> 
> In general communications are quite distributed among the two mailing list,
> the forums, wiki pages, several TikiWiki.org websites and of course, IRC for
> core developer discussion and CVS commit notifications.
> 
> I would agree that Tiki Community makes decisions by rough consensus, but
> unfortunately the forum for recognizing this consensus is not clear.  Is it
> IRC or tikiwiki-devel mailing list or CVS or ...?  

- the decision-making in tikiwiki is not hierarchical, and things are
decided after they are done, usually, by 'not contesting nor rolling back'. 

We already did, at least damian and me, some rollback moderation in the 
past, but usually mistakes or things that break environment are
negociated by a human exchange of information or knowledge (except one
or two cases of non-collaborative contributors, which is quite low 
proportionnaly with the number of cvs writers, see
http://tikiwiki.org/TikiCommunity ).

IRC is the main tool we use to reach consensual prior feeling about
what has to be done and how. Devel list is not so active, and the
tikiwiki forums are definiately not visited enough to pretend to be
relevant in a group decision process.

CVS is the second decision-making tool from my point of view. If 
someone don't agree with something, he has to commit something better. 
That required effort makes that we usually reach good productive
consensus on picky points due to the natural laziness that every 
good coder develop as a skill for finding more clever solutions 
with less efforts.

I feel I play a big role in how things are done in the tikiwiki
community, as well as damian, due to our constant presence on irc.
Other admins are not so involved in the 'steering' as far as it could
be considered as a steering (I prefer the term 'proportional
subjective peer-based collaborative weight' but it's almost poetic).

Incidentaly we also are the highest rated in the subjective and
loosely defined reputation-metric provided by http://cvs.tikiwiki.org
and some other indicators like professional profile and resumes,
presence on irc, in the forums, on http://tikiwiki.org website, and in
tikifests (for my case, as actually I'm a recurent tikifester and
initiator). We also provide resources, mainly server space for some
tikiwiki community websites (but we are not alone, see
http://tikiwiki.org/TikiServersNetwork ).

I would like to hear the input from other active developers on that
point, as occasions have been rare to talk about it frontally.

I feel that the individual choices and needs of one coder is what 
matters at the end, in any case, as involved time is not compensated 
by any mean other than gratefulness (and not from everybody).


> While I love what people have produced for TikiWiki and I hope to continue
> contributing in different ways, I do think we could benefit from a clarified
> decision-making process.  Specifically, I think it would be useful to
> recognize what fixes, upgrades and new features users need and want and let
> this guide some collective effort.  
> 
> Some of us have started working on this at http://cc.tikiwiki.org/

- yup. I'm working right now, and quite actively, to mutate the polls
feature in 1.10 to become a real direct-democracy tool, that we may
decide to use or not for tikiwiki, but at least that will be used by
some tikiwiki-powered communities.

Check http://nornia.org for some more information about my
development ground, it describe a schema of a delegated voting system
that could avoid populism and enhance our reputation-based team
atitude.

We just closed a meeting on that topic (and some others) and you can
find some contextual information on http://trollparty.org/Joelster2004 
(not sorted yet, maybe difficult to feel the real things, but at least 
there are inputs and a mighty list of participants).

I plan to report asap on cc.tw.o a more constructed synthesis.


> Personally, I think we should establish a routine of conducting surveys of
> developers and implementers to recognize our common concerns and approved
> suggestions.
> 
> I'm currently analyzing and writing a report about the results of the most
> Recent "Got Tiki" survey
> http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-survey_stats_survey.php?surveyId=5
> This is already starting to give me some insight that I hope to share in the
> upcoming weeks.

- yup, surveys are under-used and I hope we'll use more of them in
the next cycles. Anyone motivated by that task, and being in tikiwiki
community, can create a new survey. So, please take initiative.
	

> 
> Not sure how helpful this ramble was, but there you go.

- you are on the right track, I think, jason :)


cheers,
mose

> 
>  - JD -  -
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: tik...@li... [mailto:tikiwiki-devel-
> > ad...@li...] On Behalf Of Benjamin Geer
> > Sent: September 18, 2004 6:27 PM
> > To: tik...@li...
> > Subject: [Tikiwiki-devel] question about TikiWikiSocialContract
> > 
> > I'm one of the developers of the Open Organizations Project[1]; we
> > recently
> > noticed that TikiWiki project is using the Introduction to Open
> > Organizations
> > as its social contract:
> > 
> > http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=TikiWikiSocialContract
> > 
> > We were delighted to see this, particularly because that page describes
> > the
> > document as "general concepts that all are true in our case".  We were
> > curious to know how you came to choose this document as your social
> > contract.
> > Was it a group decision?
> > 
> > We have been trying to collect descriptions of organisations that use
> > processes like the ones described in that document.  Could anyone point me
> > to
> > any more specific information about the structure of the TikiWiki project,
> > how decisions are made, what sort of coordination work is normally done,
> > etc.?
> > 
> > Ben
> > 
> > [1] http://www.open-organizations.org
> > 
> > 
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> 
> 
> 
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