Establishing a Workgroup
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:
- 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.
Are there other criteria which Council should apply?
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
Wayne,
Agree that consensus model suits our needs perfectly. As you suggest, we'll need to work out the detailed process --the WP article on consensus decision-making could be helpful in this work.
My understanding of consensus model is that further discussion and rework is necessary whenever one or more people disagree. Your practicability issues will likely reflect Council members' -- who are all WE members --and likely many others' opinions such that the proposal would fail to achieve consensus if any of these were inherent problems. To avoid denials/failures/much reworking later in the process, I think we should include these practicality concerns in our charter specifications (as well as the evaluation criteria, as you suggest) -- have the Workgroup address these up front. As with good learning design, the specs grow out of the criteria for evaluation (Ben, I've been reading Wiggins and McTigue "Understanding By Design" that I learned about on your distance lang learning page :-).
Will think more about evaluation criteria.
Agree, would like to get some more opinions on these topics.
Regards, Alison
