Thread:Questioning the use of 'Official' (6)

After the event:

This is a useful exercise which may result in some excellent guidelines. I would hesitate to make it a mandatory process even for Community workgroups. More agile, organic, spontaneous community processes (e.g. via a collection of self-organising projects on WE) may result in policies/ approaches adopted more widely later (perhaps as de facto standard practices before they become "approved policy").

Would it make sense rather (or in addition) to institute a WE Community process to highlight and "approve" emerging guidelines and policies? The resulting pages may be tagged (with attribution and a gold "WE Approved Policy/Guideline star") rewarding the innovators (of the associated projects) and those who took the extra trouble to elevate it to WE Community level.

All the thinking so far on this page would become part of the valuation/"approval" process, rather than a prescriptive process.

I could imagine something like this happening with the Language Policy - many projects involving multiple languages, as we go along we learn and adapt each others' good ideas, the best of which rise to the top and become standard practices.

Regarding consensus, check out the following approach to decision making in the Apache project: Decision Making (click and scroll down). That has worked well for a very prominent software development initiative with multiple projects. For WE, a libre knowledge community of communities with multiple projects, what actually happens is likely to be (and should be IMHO) at least as "lazy".