Thank you very much for your feedback. I prefer 'harsh and
true' reviews rather than 'consensual and fake' ones.
I completely agree with you about the fact it supposes an
active community to work. And this is the main issue, I guess.
I fear the non-spreading of Lojban, because people may not be
active enough to maintain it above a "sustainability"
threshold (eventually worsening into fading and decay). I just
hope I'm wrong.
(Side note: Generally speaking, people I know are not much
interested about Lojban because... it's not spread enough.)
About Warnock's dilemma, we may *also* infer that the
message is rather complex (I mean it requires to be active and
interested in multiple topics)... ;) And this goes with what
you say about "complication". Is this really needed? Well, I
bet the answer is "yes, until we find something simpler".
Maybe some things are to be improved, to be more "user
friendly"? I personally think that we may need to add other
"tools" in the toolbox. Surely a more general tool (to be
defined), to make more people go there & make it more
popular. But I don't know which. Any idea about a
Lojban-related feature that doesn't exist yet somewhere else?
On the topic of "complication", my philosophy would be more in line
with the old quote "Everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler". Perhaps it is not much different from what you say
in practice, there is just more emphasis on the starting point:
start with the bare minimum and add more later if there is evidence
that it is not enough.
I see simplicity in two ways. One aspect is in limiting the number
of different roles and processes codified by the system. One set of
roles already exists by default in every project: participants are
divided into those with write access to the resources of the
project, and those without. Most times, one can reuse this as the
basic layer to recognize roles and add only some minimal structures
on top of it, if needed. This could be a simple starting point. (It
is true that Lojban is a bit peculiar, in that nobody knows for sure
which are the resources of the project and who has access to them,
but let's put that aside for the moment :) ).
The other aspect of simplicity is to see if we can spare the effort
of defining everything from scratch, and try to reuse what already
exists in the wild. Here is a link that I think makes a great
starting point for pointers and ideas:
http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/governancemodels
Similar, also useful: https://opensource.guide/leadership-and-governance
The links above suggest some basic frameworks for the governance of
a shared project. The simplest option is just to have a "benevolent
dictator" (it is not so bad as it sounds and works quite well in
practice, as explained here).
Then there are more nuanced options, including sometimes a "Project
Management Committee" and ways to build and formalize consensus by
means of policies such as "lazy consensus", commit-then-review,
review-then-commit, etc.
https://openoffice.apache.org/docs/governance/lazyConsensus.html
http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/meritocraticgovernancemodel
https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/blob/master/BasePolicies/CONTRIBUTING.md
Voting can play a role, usually as a last resort. When you say that
voting should be a straightforward administrative validation
procedure in 95% of the case, then I agree as in my mind that would
not be voting in a strict sense but more a second round of review,
so your workflow might not be so different from these ideas in the
end. Speaking of voting, an interest concept is the one of
+1/+0/-0/-1 voting as explained in the links below, which I see as a
having potential within your workflow.
https://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html
http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/meritocraticgovernancevoting
https://openoffice.apache.org/docs/governance/consensusBuilding.html
Sorry for the digression... the main takeaway is that there are
existing approaches (used by projects with millions of users) that
rely on a very limited number of roles and processes, and seem to
scale well. Note that these approaches can be put into practice by
leveraging simple collaboration tools (mailing lists and some
policies on top of shared development platforms). If we can find
something similar for Lojban, for me it would save a lot of effort
and be a big win! Coming back to possible improvements and new
features for the lojban-submissions site, while confirming the
quality of the site and its potential to be repackaged for many
specific purposes, my point would be that with the right approach to
governance, we would not need a special site in addition to a
standard shared development platform (the one for putting the
code/documents, issue tracking, etc., which would be needed anyway).
In fact I think the similarities between the workflow you proposed
and the ones mentioned above might be more than the differences, if
looking at the big picture.
About voting: Yes, I also hope that voting should be "a
straightforward administrative validation procedure for 95% of
the cases". This is why the "final" voting is restricted to a
reduced sub-community of "validators". I also intentionally
tried to mimic the "board"-like voting, without the drawback
of a mostly-statically selected sub-community (which may rely
on inactive members, even if people are nice and willing). But
I agree that this may look more like competition than
collaboration in some circumstances. Any idea to improve that
is welcome :) Maybe adding helpers ensuring that decisions are
well documented is a good idea?
(BTW, the link you gave makes me think that we will surely
have a peaceful and non-disturbing community (= few risks).
Anyway, hostile people should be reported and can be banned!)
About the system itself, I don't think there is a real
competition with other existing ones, since it is (from my
point of view) complementary to the others. Do you really
think there are some duplicates? Which features precisely?
I meant that the process of reviewing a proposal in the
lojban-submission site can be seen as being in the same territory of
Github "Pull requests" or similar, which are powerful generic
solutions that can be leveraged to do any kind of review and
approval of changes, including review of design decision. The big
advantage of these systems is that they are an integral part of the
platform where the code/resources are maintained, so you do not have
a system where you discuss the changes and a separate one where you
do the implementation, reducing friction.
Again kudos for the website and thanks for the interesting
discussion, even if there are not many chances of it becoming
something more than a theoretical exercise, with the current status
of Lojban, unfortunately :/
Gregorio
Finally, thank you for compliments about the site and the
underlying system. Yes, I did that on my spare time. But don't
be fooled: I reused a lot of components, and wrote very few
"low-level" things by myself. Technically speaking, I used
Drupal, many modules, and a little bit of PHP & Bash. Time
I spent was mostly configuring the whole (server, site,
modules...), integrate database schema into the pre-defined
tools (somewhat difficult sometimes!), prepare "good" queries,
fill pages, etc. The only pages I really coded in PHP was
admin ones, where I query for invalid or duplicate kudos, and
the one that lists inactive accounts and emails them (not
automated yet). So if kudos for me on that product, then maybe
more on "adapting to the needs" than on programming/web! ;)
But thanks anyway.
If you think this should be extended to some other
communities, please tell & "advertise". That may be
possible to generalize the system.
la .sykynder.
Le samedi 24 mars 2018 02:37:01 UTC+1, Gregorio Guidi a écrit :
coi ro do
OPEN ALPHA: A first (public) version of the
submission tool is online. Anyone wanting to be a
tester can register at lojban-submission.sukender.net
. I will welcome any feedback to help improving it:
content, features, issues, etc...
Notes:
- For now, registering requires administrator
approval; this restriction should be removed
later. Please be patient after registration! I'll
answer as soon as possible.
- Site has multi-language support (3 languages for
now...) and will try to satisfy your browser's
language list. You may change the language
whenever you want (there's a language switcher on
pages). Please prefer registering your account
details in English (switch language for that, if
required) so that everyone can understand. Else,
you should think about translating your account
details in English after
registration.
Thanks for your help!
coi
Since the initial announcement, I didn't see any comments on
the mailing list on the proposal. Looking for possible
explanations according to Warnock's dilemma, I can
only infer that there is not much interest on the topic,
unfortunately.
I am at fault myself because I registered but did not
experiment very much with the system until now, by I think a
few comments are in order...
First, I am really impressed at what you have created based
on the original discussion and ideas. I can imagine the
amount of work you did to get the site to the current
level... If you have done it all by yourself in your spare
time, I really envy your programming/web skills. Kudos!
About the role that the site can have for the Lojban
community, it is difficult to make a fair assessment because
a tool to organize a community is something that presupposes
an active, lively community that needs to be organized.
Sadly, I observe that there is no such community at the
moment, and there is not much that a tool can do to correct
the situation.
In the hypothetical case that an active community will
spring to life, I would say that such a tool would work well
and provide a lot of value if the community had a
strong commitment to the organizational rules that are
encoded in the tool. On the other hand, I am pessimistic
that such commitment could be achieved in practice, and I
have also some reservations on whether it would be actually
desirable.
To explain better, let's say the site provides these
fundamental services (simplifying):
1. A submission/review/commenting system.
2. Management of roles and competences for the users of the
system.
3. A workflow and approval system based on voting.
My biggest concern is on point 3: in my experience I have
never encountered a volunteer-based community that put such
a strong emphasis on voting as a way to direct the project
(I am comparing mainly to the innumerable small and large
communities about open-source software and similar projects,
which have the most similarities with Lojban). In fact, I
consider it a sign of poor health if a community routinely
resorts to voting. A healthy community should
rarely need to vote. In my view voting stimulates
competitive (as opposed to collaborative) behavior and
usually obscures the need of having a well-defined vision, a
limited scope and a coherent design around which
consensus-based solutions can be found when issues arise.
I see point 2 above (roles and competences) also as being
somewhat dependent on point 3. It is in a sense a way to
mitigate the possible shortcomings and manipulation
opportunities of the voting system, while keeping the voting
system itself in place. Is all this complication really
needed?
About point 1 (submission/review/comment), the system you
built is very good. Taken by itself, though, it suffers from
the competition of solutions that have been around a long
time and that have explored this problem domain (think
Github code reviews).
Sorry if my assessment sounds a bit harsh, I might be biased
from my past experiences. In any case, I hope Lojban can
find a way to be better organized, whatever the organization
will be...
And in the end, you managed to give concrete form to the
vision you had and build something useful basically from
scratch, something that I would never have been able to do.
So all respect is for you!
TL;DR: The site is extremely well-done and could support a
community that values voting and user roles as the basis of
its organization, but I don't believe that Lojban should be
such a community.
Gregorio
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