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Scaling Community Decision-making

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Find out what is happening with the Twin Cities Drupal User Group at https://tcdrupal.org/

Timeslot: 
Friday, 1:45pm - 2:15pm
Room: 
238
Track: 
Community Wellness
Experience Level: 
Intermediate
Session Length: 
30 minutes

Scaling Community Decision-making

Any Free/Libre Open Source Software project will have elements of do-ocracy (rule of those who do the work) but this approach does not work for all decisions a software community must make.

Largely of necessity in heavily volunteer-driven projects, all people who must carry out a decision have to consent to the course of action. Everyone should get a say in the direction and conditions of their work (and no one gets to say they are just following orders).

A good decision-making process requires everyone involved be heard from, and encourages making decisions based on data and scheduling a time to revisit decisions.

We'll talk about ways we can do even better, but the nature of needing the consent of people to do the work, to carry out a decision, gives us a good minimum baseline in our processes for much of what we do.

When a decision strongly affects more than those who carry it out, however, we need better ways of making these decisions. We can scale conversations and decisions in a fair and truly democratic way.

Learning Objectives & Outcomes: 

* Come with at least a passing familiarity with various ways decisions are or have been made in Drupal.
* Leave knowing about sociocracy and sortition and how these esoteric concepts could make our community scale