We are designing governance features and we need your input!

Hello everyone using Karrot and other people interested in this topic!

As you some of you might know already, we have started discussing the question of governance in Karrot groups, that is, how groups are governed, how they make decisions and solve conflicts.

We want to create features that facilitate democratic decision-making in groups, that make it easy for people to participate, empowering them to organize as a collective and avoiding strict hierarchies. That also includes the question of how to deal with people who are disrespectful of group decisions, conventions and rules.

How

To design these features we are planning a so-called Community Design Process, inspired by Google’s design sprint but adapted to our context of open-source, non-profit and voluntary work. We will gather a rather small team to design these governance features throughout different sessions and meetings, and we will work in a very structured way, defining the problem, sketching ideas, deciding upon the best idea(s), prototyping and then testing. Check out the first draft if you’re curious about the process methodology in itself.

Your Participation

We would appreciate if you could participate in one of two ways. No special knowledge required for either:

Casual participation: you’re welcome to contribute with your input at any time during the process. This can be a quick opinion, a long reflection on the topic, notes, some sketches, work on the prototype or test it at the end, depending on which stage of the process we’re at. We are going to keep this thread updated as we move forward, so stay tuned!

Participation in the whole process: we’re having a kick-off to plan all of the sessions 2020-10-01T09:00:00Z on Jitsi Meet. Yes, short notice, sorry! But it’s still possible to join if you cannot make it for the first one.

I just want to stress that no special knowledge is needed to participate and that there are many tasks at hand for gathering input that are very simple and clear. Any input is very valuable! Keep on following this thread for more information in the future.

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Here’s a quick overview of the process, taken from the Sprint book. Instead of the weekdays we will just call them different stages, since we will do them for a much longer and less intensive period of time.

sprintdays

Please, do check out the thread Stage 1 - Defining the Challenge for some practical tasks and input!

Next meeting for this first part is 2020-10-08T11:00:00Z at Jitsi Meet

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How amazing is this category?! I just discovered all this information on the Design Process. Looks great

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