Thread:Process (4)

I believe the process needs considerable consideration. I know we have had initiatives started that seemed to have people engaged, interested and a shared agreement to importance. Yet the participation never materialized. In one important initiative it ended up being only two of us driving the initiative forward Quality Assurance and Review. In the end I wonder why this initiative never gained community participation. I believe participation is very important to "ratifying" new works. I believe our process needs to have an early step to gage community involvement. I don't see an initiative driven by one or two people as a community initiative. I don't have an answer for this, I just believe it is important to have a good cross section of the community involved early in the process, so not too much effort is applied before it gets to the "oversight committee". The other side to this would be to let one or two drive an initiative forward, have a quick process for "ratifying" the workgroup outcome with the knowledge that it then moves into a commenting / annotating state where it is open to periodic amendment... Sometimes works need to be almost complete before the community becomes involved. We are considering this commenting / annotation approach within our online legal publishing and it seems to be an approach that is gaining traction. Here are two good examples of commenting / annotating and existing publication;
 * 1) horizon 2009
 * 2) O'Reilly - Programming Scala