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Re: Sounding board for Debian forums?

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Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> writes:

> Eldon Koyle <ekoyle@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Is there some kind of software that could help people break down their
>> claims into fundamental parts, then get feedback on the parts
>> individually, maybe even refining their viewpoint as the discussion
>> evolves?
>
> Prior to considering technical solutions: Have you got any examples of
> real dispersed communities that are able to avoid the problems you you
> described?
>
> Regardless of technology, I'm not aware of any forums that achieve the
> kind of formal structure you're talking about, because humans who need
> to have representative participation tend to be discouraged by greater
> formal or technical barriers.
>
> So what real-world examples would you point to as a counter to that
> tendency, and how do you think technology helps achieve that improvement
> in those real-world cases?

I'm not sure this addresses your concern directly, as I've no idea if it
has specifically been used by whatever you define as a "dispersed
community", but Minister Audrey Tang mentioned in her talk at DC18 that
they had used an interesting approach to sorting out the Uber vs. Taxi
vs. users situation in Taiwan, which you can see from something like the
13th minute onwards, here:

  https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-minister-tang/

She gets onto the technical solution used in the 17th minute, which is
pol.is, which appears to be an open-core system, with the Free version
being here:

  https://github.com/pol-is/polisServer

(Note the existence of a contributor agreement)

The thing that impressed me about this (as described in the video) is
the way that it seems to amplify the constructive aspects of the
conversation.

I can of course think of problems with using such a thing in Debian, the
main one being that unlike with government, one cannot just issue orders
to our volunteers, so it is entirely possible that everyone _not_ doing
some job in Debian are agreed on how it should be done, but not willing
to do it, while the people actually doing the job have another idea.

However, if one is trying to reach a wide consensus, and the people
involved are willing to engage with such a system in order to try to
find out what people think, and interested to do whatever looks like the
consensus, and assuming we can ensure that we don't get invaded by
trolls, but equally are able to get non-debian people with legitimate
interests in whatever question to join in, it might be worth a look.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,    GERMANY

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Thread

Sounding board for Debian forums? Eldon Koyle <ekoyle@gmail.com> - 2019-07-08 07:50 +0200
  Re: Sounding board for Debian forums? Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> - 2019-07-09 01:40 +0200
    Re: Sounding board for Debian forums? Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> - 2019-07-09 21:20 +0200
      Re: Sounding board for Debian forums? Eldon Koyle <ekoyle@gmail.com> - 2019-07-15 09:00 +0200
        Re: Sounding board for Debian forums? Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2019-07-15 12:40 +0200
      Re: Sounding board for Debian forums? Alex Muntada <alexm@debian.org> - 2019-07-15 10:00 +0200
  Re: Sounding board for Debian forums? Alex Muntada <alexm@debian.org> - 2019-07-15 10:20 +0200

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