Thread:Questioning the use of 'Official' (7)

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I think you are right that making this policy mandatory could diminish the desire of the community to be spontaneous and self-organizing and thereby less likely to work towards the betterment of the community, which is obviously not the intent. I wonder if there are examples of this effect already.

In my mind, we need to balance the need to be spontaneous with providing a mechanism and support for members who recognize a need, but don't know where to begin to start working to address it. I think there are a lot of members like me who have no previous experience working in an open, geographically disperse, online community. I think helping people to get involved is important to the success of WikiEducator. And I can see how the idea of mandatory could get in the way.

I like your suggestion for creating a mechanism to recognize emerging guidelines and policies, with the idea of encouraging their development into community-wide WE guidelines/policy.

We could revise the mandator-iness in this policy into steps for moving guidelines or policy to apply community-wide.

Also, I think WE need to integrate a page discussing what policy and guidelines are, how different communities within the larger WE community can have "local" policy and how policy/guidelines get made with the Policy on Community Workgroups. I've noticed this WE policy page.

Thanks so much for the link to the Apache project. I have only a cursory understanding of what this project is about (I think I heard someone once use Apache as an example of a really successful open source software development effort), so I would never know to go looking for their organizational process. I see what you mean by 'lazy'. Is it fair to say that it's a consensus of those interested? If you're interested you pay attention and participate, if not, you implicitly trust that others will do their best. I also like their term do-ocracy. I wonder how do-ocracy will play out in WE.

Good ideas. I'm interested to see what others think about moving this policy to a less prescriptive process.