You create an open participation group which focuses on these problems. Anyone can contribute to that group and it meets on a regular cadence. I’ve done this many time and it works wonderfully
Seems like the first thing we need is organization. Even if the effort is spent on diversified efforts, having an organization of like-minded people agreeing on overall objectives and prioritizing would probably be the starting point. Is that organization SocialWG? Something else? I have no idea, but I would be open to participate.
This sounds like a much more elegant way of coordinating large groups of people towards a common goal that the current status quo of heirachical bureaucracies.
Honestly, if I ever start a company, I'd like to try something similar.
This seems good.
I do have the sense that group decisionmaking worked better before the advents of public relations and social media, among other things.
Yup, was paying attention to these communities during that time and after. Saw very similar things to you. A grass roots type of coordination, which just looks inherently different than a top down type coordinated effort.
I believe letting academic communities in autogestion (as in capacity of workers' self-management) is the way to go. For really large projects you can also include citizens (selected by sortition) and elected politics in addition to the temporarily mandated members of the community in the committee taking the decision. Of course the citizens and politics would have to be trained a bit so the decision process might be long, but these kind of projects are never in a hurry.
What the group is good at in your second category is precisely defining the shape of the problem. In my experience the solution is then still born from an individual's creative efforts, even during this group effort. I prefer the sandwich model of cooperation: get together to define the problem, separate to work on it, get together to review solutions, iterate.
I work at a company that at one point attempted to form “guilds” around some unowned, decaying cross-cutting concerns that were still very important.
The guild was great at identifying issues to work on, but most members didn’t have the time to actually contribute on any of the more hairy issues. It was basically group therapy.
I really like the platform. It enables people to conduct the decision making in a way that is followed in formal committees, and even the UN. People present options, everyone talks about them, then when it seems that the group is converging towards a solution, you present a proposal. And then everyone votes on it (and not just a yes or no!). So it's pretty cool.
I just have one concern, does only the leader present proposals? or can everyone do it? To me, letting only the leader (OP) do that makes sense. otherwise wouldn't everyone be just doing that instead of posting suggestions?
It's a multi-stakeholder model. In the end a "social networking protocols working group" would primarily consist of delegates from all social network operators that implement the standards.
That sounds like a great idea.
I have thought about something like this before, where people hold each other accountable, kind of like where people are project managers to each other.
Doing it with slack though hadn't crossed my mind, but that's a great idea.
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