Thread:Establishing a Workgroup (4)

Hi Alison,

Yip -- I can see we're on the same page here.

Ideally the development of community policy should be based on a consensus model and there is a tacit acknowledgement that Council are the stewards of community process. Thinking practically, I suspect that in most cases/scenarios consensus can and will be achieved by the community.

While we should strive for consensus, arguably there are situations where for example, tensions between consensus and practicability may arise, for example:


 * Affordability -- e.g. proposals which would require financial resources which the community and/or OER Foundation do not have.
 * Legality -- where consensus proposals cannot be implemented for legal reasons (we're not all legal professionals)
 * Technical restrictions --- where consensus proposals relating to technology changes which for instance, create security risks or technological dependencies which are difficult to support (again we're not all IT professionals)
 * Conflicting values --- for example, WE since its inception has subscribed to its interpretation of the meaning of free content under the free cultural works definition. So for example a consensus proposal to adopt the non-commercial restriction on the site conflicts with the core values of the project.

So thinking about criteria for evaluation we could propose, for example, that Council should apply the following criteria:

Are there other criteria which Council should apply?
 * Is the proposal affordable?
 * Does the proposal meet legal requirements?
 * Are there technical barriers to regarding the implementation of the proposal (this will be alleviated in part with the concurrent developments of the Technology policy workgroup
 * Is the proposal aligned with the core values of the WikiEducator project?
 * Does the proposal represent/or likely to achieve a consensus opinion from the community? (Some indicators of what we mean by consensus combined with the mechanisms to determine consensus would be useful.

How this process will mesh with Council meetings etc -- is pragmatic, and whatever Council decides regarding frequency of meetings, the establishment or not of an Excom etc -- will be reflected and incorporated into the policy.

This is taking shape rather well -- I'll post a note on the main list encourage folk to take a look at the discussions and developments so far.

Cheers Wayne