A thing that came to mind for me when using this conflict tool is, that FINALLY people are engaging in discussions and sharing their opinion. As the active meetings don’t happen in Östersund at the moment, it was really hard to get people talking and answer on questions.
So what I would love to have, is that we could use this tool not to solve a conflict with a person, but as a tool to decide on foodsharing matters in general. Just now within the conflict resolutions going on, we are having general discussions on the rules.
So for FSosd, a general voting and discussion board could be a way to get people participating some more. So my idea is, that we could have this tool, but a little adapted and start topic discussions where everybody could discuss, decide and vote. I also like it a lot, that the time runs out, which gives a time frame to find a decision.
Hey, nice that the feature helped you to solve some problems!
Re @Teddy@bruno: I think it would be great to have the “issue” feature in a general way, not just for conflict resolution. Actually it’s already half-implemented since the beginning, it just would need some more weeks of work. I would definitely support people working on that!
Re @karolina@nicksellen: we could make email notifications about conflict resolution opt-out instead of opt-in, they don’t seem to happen that often. What do you think about it?
I agree, it is a good idea to involve all active members. This way people also get involved in the group dynamics and see what is going on.
In Östersund I guess that some people don’t really understand the trust karrots and don’t know about the conflict feature. Thus they might be irritated if others talk about ongoing conflicts. But this is only a guess.
I can’t remember if I replied this in another context, but anyhow… I don’t think it would be a problem, but that’s also me guessing. I think it’s worth trying it out.
A have a question for you all who participated in a conflict resolution in your respective groups:
Did you have problems reading, writing and sending very long replies on the chat?
In our group we experienced a few problems recently when we had a conflict with a lot of debate and long replies. I want to know if you had a similar experience.
just out of curiosity - how many conflict resolutions have there been , and was there any feedback on how did the process feel for the participants ?
Have there been considerations about other options for “punishment” except for excluding the person from the group ? e.g. not being able to participate in pickups/activities of places or not beeing able to write on walls ?
(from our grafana the “Issues” dashboard, uses GitHub auth)
We have discussed it more informally, with people that participate in the calls, but no more structured assessment of it I think. It would be interesting to have a good written report gathering all the human feedback so far, but also that’s a lot of work.
As for the future, your thinking is exactly inline with ours. I think it’ll actually be really important to have softer sanctions like you described, and fits in well with Elinor Ostroms work which guides us a lot.
It was discussed as part of our governance design process, but we went in the direction to focus on the rules/agreements part now. I’m hoping we write up a roadmap of which other governance features are on the horizon too…
Hi everyone, we’ve had a couple of instances where the conflict function has been used here by now (Gothenburg, Solikyl, which is group 10 in the stats Nick posted), and here’s some feedback from me based on our experience so far:
More parameters is a good idea. Some useful ones that have already been mentioned in this thread are offline mediation and temporarily prohibiting someone from doing pickups. A few more could be cancellation of the conflict due to lack of clarity/valid arguments, suspension of the conflict starter in case of misusing the function, and one custom parameter to adjust for the conflict in question. As for the last parameter in place right now it seems to be causing confusion, so maybe it could be removed?
As an organization grows bigger it seems to get more and more intimidating for the one who’s the target of a conflict to say anything at all to his/her defense during the resolution. Even with only editors involved it seems people find it a bit drastic to even use this function in a very big group. I think a good idea could be to have an option to make the conflict go out to a defined group of people during a first week, and as a consequence of not resolving it, let it pass to a second week when it goes out to everyone in the whole organizaton. If a conflict is going to be taken to this second stage with many people involved it could work as an incentive to resolve it before that, during the first week. In this case I think earlier conflicts should be set to not visible to everyone, as they’ve happened before the change.
bonjour, l’outil de conflit est très bien , cependant lorqu’un membre est vraiment très problématique , y a t’il un moyen de l’empêcher de participer aux ramasses ?
y a t’il également une option de blocage des plannings
Thanks for all the input, this is definitely something we want to work on!
My feeling is that once we’ve built the first version of our new agreement / rules management feature then softer sanctions for conflict resolution will get our attention
But we can also keep the discussion going here until we have capacity to more actively work on. So in that spirit some more detailed replies:
Could you clarify what you mean by the last parameter and the confusion it causes?
The two themes of improvements to make seem to be:
less severe “punishment” or “sanctions” as an outcome
some way to start with a small conflict process (even one-to-one) and then incrementally escalate it if it’s not getting anywhere, eventually up to a whole group discussion
I wonder which is more useful to focus on initially?
Yes, I’m wondering too what other groups think about these. Personally I was favorable to focus first on softer sanctions. But from the experience we’ve had in my group so far when using the conflict resolution feature I’m more in favor now of starting with the second option of escalation, starting with a small circle for discussion leading to a whole group discussion if things do not get settled.
People in my group are now so afraid of being exposed in such an open process (we’re not a small group anymore) so that they will really avoid using the feature as it is now.
I would vote for the first point - the softer sanctions. But I’m also courious what comes up of the second one. This might be more complicated and take longer to implement, though… which would be an argument to start with the first one.
Sorry for being unclear! During a conflict resolution the first voting option is to remove the person in question, and the last one is to let him/her stay (or if it’s vice versa). They are very similar, only mirror-reversed to each other, and usually a person gets equally or nearly as many downvotes on the first option as he/she gets upvotes on the last option.
An option with more downvotes than upvotes gets a minus sign before the result. For some reason this confuses people, and they keep asking what it means. I don’t know why this causes any confusion as I think it’s quite clear myself. But as more voting options might be added it could also be good to keep it down to the most necessary ones, so maybe one of these two could be left out?
This has been discussed earlier in this thread, but I can’t find where as it’s getting quite long.
Hope I was being more clear this time.
I think not quite mirror-reversed to each other, as a person could vote like this, for example:
strong resistance to remove person from the group
strongly in favor of extending discussion
neutral about person remaining in the group
The key is that the option in the middle (further discussion) makes it possible to express your priorities when voting, but unfortunately people like to take very binary positions (the person should definitely leave the group, or the person should definitely stay and nothing should happen), in which case it doesn’t make so much sense to have this more nuanced score voting. I believe that has been the case with the conflicts in our group. I’m curious to know about other group’s experiences in this regard.
Yeah, I think we could solve that by having text only. But somewhere in the final result there should be the final score and maybe a little explanation.
Indeed! I remember when we were originally building it we had some similar discussions, it was quite fascinating, as to me it was obvious that we need both possibilities to be scored (to keep them in group, and a seperate one for removing them), and to others it seemed odd to have both.
To me it seems totally possible to vote in the same direction for both of them… I might not like either the idea to remove them or for them to stay because I am more interested in further options. The theory we borrowed the concept from is systemic consensus which says to always have the options to extend the process, and to keep the status quo (in our case leaving them in the group).
However, because we don’t have the possibility right now to add more options for people to vote on, it seems a bit odd. That’s why I’d love to add more options! In the systemic consensus process there is a time period for collecting options, before the voting period starts.
In a much improved version perhaps we can make it possible to add options into the process, either “automated” options (ones that require the software to do something, like removing them from the group), or “human” ones (that would just be some text, and might represent something that happens offline, or where the software doesn’t need to do anything).
There are some techniques to improve that, like giving a number of “voting points” that you can allocate across all the options. I don’t know if that would work when we have so few options available though.
I think it’s definitely a great idea to make the interface clearer and have an explanation, people are not used to these more complex voting processes.
I think it’s worth trying it out.