We're improving the governance features of Karrot with "rules" and invite your participation!

Our Design Process
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Over the last few weeks @Katie_Berns, @bruno, and @nicksellen have been talking a lot about governance within groups. There are many things we could do, and we are thinking to focus on rules for now.

Many groups have rules (although not all) but there is no way of easily managing them inside Karrot. Some groups use the description fields of the group, place, or pickup to explain the rules, but it’s not ideal.

So, we invite you to help us design how this feature could work inside Karrot :carrot:

What does adding “rules” into Karrot mean?

This is what we want help with, to get your appetite ready we already had a few ideas and thoughts though:

We got excited about the idea of a rule library so you can choose rules that have already worked well in other groups. How could this work? What are the pitfalls? Which rules could we include? How would people add/change/remove/review/discuss rules?

We thought we could support more intergroup learning, especially when groups are getting started. What support could they provide? How would we connect people? Where would they discuss things?

It also seemed important to help groups to express their visions, values, and various governance points (how do you make decisions? how do you handle conflicts?) - and perhaps the rules could be connected with these bigger points as nobody likes following rules if they don’t know why they should. How could we encourage groups to think about their structure? How would we allow it to evolve over time? At which point is a group ready to write about values?

… but don’t be limited by us, maybe you have other ideas!

Sounds great! What do I have to do?

Next Thursday (2020-11-19T12:00:00Z) we’ll gather online (karrot) and we invite you to bring your ideas, experiences, comments, and criticisms to share. You might like to make some sketches with pen and paper, use an online tool, write some notes, or just chat with people.

We’ll adapt according to who turns up and what their interests are.

You don’t have to register in advance to attend, but it might help if you write a short message (or sketch even) below to share your interests and motivations.

Sorry if this is too short notice for you to participate (we are still finding our way in this process… :baby:).

If you’re unable to participate, you’re still welcome to contribute by writing (or adding images) to this thread here :slight_smile:

Thanks!

3 Likes
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We’re starting now! At karrot

I accidentally put the wrong time in the original post, I put it one hour later that it was supposed to be. We’ll still be around in one hour from now if you join :slight_smile: Sorry!

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Hello there,
is there a protocoll about the session that took place ? what was the result ?

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Yup! It’s this post Stage 2 - Sketching Solutions, and then we had another session the next week, with these notes Governance Meeting Notes - #10 by bruno.

It’s probably not super easy to follow just on the forum, but hopefully gives you some idea of what’s going on.

Feel free to share your thoughts too!

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thx - so governance for now would be more sozial rules, e.g. agreeing on a certain behaviour like

“though shalt not barter with the food you have rescued or sell it”. (“golden” - rule?)

“though shalt not walk in dirty cloth to a store to rescue food”.

or does it at some point connect later to programmable functions “only x number of pickups per week”, that is controlled by the software ?

It does remind me a bit of the creation of the “wiki” on foodsharing.de.

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We’re still in the process of working that out :slight_smile: … but seems likely to be that it won’t be automatically applied rules, computers are good at enforcing rules very strictly, but would probably be too crude for many cases, or need a really crazy advanced “rule engine” which I’m not sure would meet anybodies needs right now.

We have discussed a distinction between values and rules (or the preferred term, agreements, to emphasize their more democratic nature), and the idea that it’s very nice to know why a given rule is there… to make it more legitimate, so it might relate to some past experience, or a key value of the group, but yeah, have to see what we come up with!

Another aspect that we get quite excited about is the possibility for democratic management of those agreements too, so people can propose new ones, or challenge existing ones, and facilitate discussions and votings about them.

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Oh, and maybe there’s a way you’d like to participate? You are welcome to just join the next session, and we can bring you up to speed on where we’re at, but we’re getting quite into the small details now, and I wonder about doing just a standalone call to tap your thoughts and experiences further? Depends which level you’re into, and time, motivation, etc…