Durham, NC
Bryan formerly managed the Open Organization section of Opensource.com, which features stories about the ways open values and principles are changing how we think about organizational culture and design. He's worked on Opensource.com since 2011. Find him online as semioticrobotic.
Authored Comments
We gotta get Wordgrinder into some repos.
The "bring a proposed plan to the community for discussion" approach works better than the "pose a question or problem to the community and wait to see what takes shape" approach, I think, because it jibes with cultural norms and anticipated practices from open source software communities, where people seeking to propose changes accompany said changes with sample code that demonstrates the function or utility of those changes.
In fact, in coding communities, this might be the expected approach: Don't just tell me what you want; show me. This works well because those proposals advance overtly functional/performative language that's supposed to do something, and people can then respond to the proposal by digging into its mechanics, testing it, seeing if it really does work, etc.
In communities like ours—where we produce prose, not code—or in cases where proposed changes involve that special kind of mechanics we call a "governance model," those changes pertain to something more abstract, less functional/performative, and therefore more difficult to assess in any kind of straightforward or clear-cut manner.
Still, the practice of bringing something to which a group can respond is preferable here, too.