Facilitating Convergence
From BlueOxen
Principles
At a high-level, we have to leverage what's constructive about Wiki culture and neutralize what's not. True, the Wikimedia community has a strong culture of consensus-building, but it also has a strong culture of rewarding action. We are committed to community ownership, but we're also committed to act, and we won't let lack of consensus paralyze us. I blogged about these principles a while back:
A good strategic plan is a working draft, not a final draft. It needs to be concrete enough to implement, but open enough to continually refine. It is, in a sense, a flagged revision. People will need to realize that we will not stop listening to the community after the process is over, but we won't wait forever to act either.
We need to expect that it will be a messy and uncomfortable process, especially in the first six months. People will voice strong opinions and will go on tangents. We need to encourage this behavior while not letting it sidetrack us. We do that by encouraging noise and messiness initially, and by not trying to impose order to soon. When you let systems get messy and give them enough time, they tend to have a way of bringing order to themselves. This is true in nature, and it's true with large networks of people. Once that starts happening, we can start facilitating greater convergence.
We need to frame the process carefully. The framing needs to include who this process serves, the principles of the process, and what the final deliverables will be, and when this process will end. I don't think we're there yet, but I don't think we'll need more than a few weeks to do it, and we won't have to stall the process before this happens.
We will need to start small and evolve. I think the principles underlying the proposed working group structure is correct, although I think the structure itself is unnecessarily rigid right now. In practice, starting small means understanding that the public, open, transparent process is not the only means of engagement. We'll have to continuously move from small group interaction to large, and constantly integrate the two.
