I want to thank you @jasonsprouse for starting this discussion. I’m sure it will bring up some important dialogue about how we, as a community, engage in governance. Additionally, it’s clear that a fair amount of thought went into this draft, and there is a larger context at play (largely governance automation), which is definitely a worthwhile topic to explore.
I will begin by stating my stance on the matter, and then I will elaborate on that stance.
Stance
a. I believe that Discourse is an appropriate solution for the Hub’s current governance needs.
b. I believe we need better tooling for (or more parties involved in) feedback consolidation.
c. I am opposed to ratifying official tooling for doc collaboration at this stage in the Hub’s governance development.
Rationale
a. I believe that Discourse is an appropriate solution for the Hub’s current governance needs.
(some) Hub Governance Challenges:
- It is difficult for newcomers to get involved in Hub governance
- We want to foster a diverse and inclusive governance culture
- Governance conversation is scattered across multiple platforms
- Centralized infrastructure is prone to capture
- Governance participants may have limited bandwidth to engage
Without the scaffolding to help new participants engage in governance, we end up with valuable ideas that never make it past the “wishful thinking” stage (e.g., A tweet, forum post, or mention in a call) because the next steps to propose them are too opaque. Discussion on complex topics is throttled or limited to a few in-the-know people because the context required to understand a proposal is so high that newcomers who want to make proposals are judged or penalized for not following unspoken norms. - @lexa, Recommendations for ongoing Stewardship of Hub Governance,
Discourse is open-source, configurable, and can be hosted on a server managed by the community. This reduces the likelihood of capture. The Discourse UX has been designed to make having online conversations as frictionless as possible, which bolsters accessibility and inclusivity. Like github, it has an inbuilt reputation system, but is more expressive because it enables custom-badges & hours read, which can help participants’ ascertain reputation quickly, reducing the strain on attention. Additionally, Discourse has a well-designed notification system that can reduce the strain on governance participants’ attention. The current forum is well-maintained, well-moderated, and well-categorized.
Regarding governance participation, it would be useful to know have more data about forum usage. To me it seems it has greatly increased since Hypha has started their work here, and I’ve noticed the quality of governance discussion has greatly improved. Like @JD-Lorax said above, I don’t think that raising the barrier to entry by using a less intuitive platform would be beneficial to building a more diverse, responsive, and inclusive governance culture.
b. I believe we need better tooling for (or more parties involved in) feedback consolidation.
It is clear from on-going discussions that we do need better tooling to consolidate feedback, however, this will likely always be a manual task to some degree. @Youssef has done an excellent job in the ATOM 2.0 thread summarizing changes, and @lexa has pointed out the importance of undergrowth work.
I have proposed a solution for this that could take into account the Cosmos groups module here. In the mean time, github is a great tool for giving document feedback due to the ability to publicly track changes, but other tools exist as well. Proposal feedback comes from every possible platform, including twitter, discord, telegram, and here on discourse. It can be difficult to reconcile. While I personally believe that human thinking will always be crucial here, I am open to seeing how we might augment this with automation, but even so, the Discourse API is already robust, so Github does not have any inherent benefit in that regard.
c. I am opposed to ratifying official tooling for doc collaboration at this stage in the Hub’s governance development.
We still have a lot of experimentation to do with different tooling before we are ready to ratify any feedback consolidation as part of the governance process. Within the context of ATOM 2.0, we have also seen a community crowdwrite from the Governance chat on TG proposing changes. It makes more sense to me to start encouraging some feedback consolidation tool as part of the proposal process than it does to ratify any such tool. Also, it’s in the proposer’s interest to use a tool that enables others to make changes, because it reduces the friction between summarizing feedback, and implementing it into the already-written document. That’s all to say, we should encourage the use of some tool to more easily consolidate feedback, but before ratifying anything, we should see what tools emerge.
Thanks @jasonsprouse for drafting your proposal and looking forward to your responses.