MeeTing07FurtherDiscussion - 17-Aug-2004, further thoughts on below issues.
Meeting 7
2004-08-16
ToniPrug and
BenjaminGeer met in person for about half an hour. We very quickly agreed on these points:
Should the project be
more cathedral-style, or more bazaar-style?
BenjaminGeer thinks we should be more bazaar-style. However, innovation has to start with someone (or some small group of people) setting out a new idea; once that idea is clearly expressed, others can understand it and contribute in the same spirit.
Richard Stallman couldn't have used a bazaar-style project to write the
GPL. We aren't yet at the point where it can be really clear to others what we're trying to do; therefore we need to stay with a somewhat cathedral-style approach for now.
We should make the project as inviting as possible for newcomers and encourage them to contribute, because there are a lot of people who know things that we don't know about this subject. At the same time, we (the project's founders) have a responsibility to maintain tough standards so that people don't change the project's basic aims. We should make it clear that the founders will have the final say about contributions. We need to make clear our minimum requirements for contributions.
The main purpose of the project is to produce
imperative documents about practices to use in organisations, in order to reach certain ethical goals. To give step-by-step instructions on HOW to do things, rather than to write descriptively about the characteristics that organisations should have. The HOW documents are the framework itself.
We also need WHY documents, but they must be kept separate. You shouldn't have to understand all the theory in order to be able to use the framework. However, for those who are interested in the theory, the WHY must be convincing. Currently the
IntroToOpenOrg is far too theoretical; it needs to be much simpler, much more imperative broken up into smaller pieces; justifications should be moved into separate documents. In practice we do the following:
1.
put short paragraph (edited patrice's one) at the front page
- this would be shortest version of WHY AND WHAT is openorg
2.
link it to new document, still less than a page long
- slightly longer version of WHY and WHAT is openorg
3.
link that to what is to become new, shorter, implementation introduction to open-org
- clear, step-by-step, instructions on HOW-to-be-an-opeorg. this document will contain
links to existing modules (ModDelegation, ModInternetOrg) and add more modules by
developing further instructive documents on practices that we see suitable
for framework's defined processes and functional rules
4.
link short points about processes and functional rule to new document, or documents
- than will finally contain full version of what is today IntroToOpenOrg
Not sure whether this will be doible like this, given current docs we have, but goals are:
- clear separation of documents into:
- instructive (HOW)
- descriptive (WHAT)
- theoretical (WHY)
- modularity of implementation techniques
Maybe we could describe it this way:
1.
HOW are instructive, step by step, docs on implementing open-org techniques
2.
WHAT is currently in
IntroToOpenOrg
3.
WHY are theoretical docs. currently, bunch of different texts, to both:
- explain reasons for, our thinking behind, 1 and 2
- develop theoretical platform
The site needs to be organised visually so that it is immediately appealing and understandable to newcomers. It would be great to have more of a tree structure, and a simpler way of including translations. Our current TWiki layout doesn't lend itself to this, and it may be too hard to do this with TWiki. We'll play with TikiWiki (
BenjaminGeer will install it on
valter.socialtools.net) and see if we like it better.