Discussions about the Community Future and Roadmap

So let’s address your points, @MelodyLiu :slight_smile:

Yes, we are brainstorming a Division of work here, and you gave the valuable feedback to shorten the list. Let’s continue in that topic.

Other than that, I want to keep the number of pinned topics as low as possible (max. 2 per category, and 2 global ones). The table with the Division of work will be in the pinned Community announcement along with the list of all projects we are working on. Each community role gets a separate topic in Help Wanted category, explaining exactly what it entails and how to join.

All of that will also be explained on the community website, for the wider public to see, when they land there.

This is all continuous improvement. Currently we haven’t decided on many of the details of how it should work. Key members aren’t determined, because people should volunteer to take the lead. This also requires more clarity on community philosophy. I’ll elaborate a bit more, but this needs further attention:

Some of the philosophy is in the Community announcement message. Participation should be fun and rewarding. We are all volunteers and spend the time we want. We can take any community role we want, and grow into more responsible ones based on activity. We work on principles of mindfulness, i.e. we accept current reality. As a facilitator I will support any initiative, if it makes sense in the greater whole. But there is no guarantee on speed and progress afterwards. That depends on member activity and initiative. If there is none, then the project remains ‘on hold’. My second facilitator role is to help embed the project ever more firmly into the community structure, creating connections. The Awareness Program is a good example of that. It has broad applicability.

I agree, but this is solved by the workflow process of campaigns (they have 4 states). Anyone may have great ideas for a campaign, and submit them without commitment to also produce or lead them. That is why the campaign has ‘Ideation’ status. The idea is describved and veryone can help refine it. If we decide pick up a campaign, its status goes to ‘Preparing’ and we find a team for it, decide the work method, etc. After that the campaign is ‘Launched’ and now the team is working on it, and it is up to them how they handle additional feedback.

Currently all but the dogfooding campaigns are in ‘Ideation’ phase, waiting for someone to take an interest. The campaign documents serve to describe the intent and purpose. They are informational only, and will be updated only sporadically (not living documents). Once the campaign is launched the team decides how they track progress, what and where.

I agree on the ‘streamlining’ part. I call this continuous improvement as-we-go. What we are setting up may seem complicated, but in reality it is not that sophisticated (e.g. campaigns only have a 4-step linear workflow process). It just need proper explaining in the proper places.

The reason why it takes some extra thinking upfront, is that both the forum as well as github, are not ideally suited to the work we want to do (and we don’t want to add, or know of, additional tools at this time). Experience learns that having just simple forum topics makes the thread TL;DR really quick, and people skip reading, go off-topic all the time, etc. Too many ‘work topics’ will make the forum less interesting for visitors who want to read about Humane Tech insights. And on Github there is a barrier to overcome for non-technical members.

But we’ll get all your points addressed properly, eventually, I gather :smile:
Keep the feedback coming, it is super useful!

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