Suggest an alternative

I think this is an interesting idea that warrants some more discussion and development @yago.

My immediate thoughts are that this might fall into the trap that @alannakrause mentioned below - taking attention away from an initial proposal, meaning that it may be harder to come to a clearly defined collectively understood outcome.

Rather than a linear flow of proposals in a vertical stream, I think @joshuavial's idea of parallel alternative suggestions might avoid this pitfall if it was implemented in the right way.

Another idea we've talked about in the past is some way of suggesting updates or amendments to current proposals - the tricky thing about this is that needing to get collective agreement about each update could get messy.

On balance, I think parallel suggestions might be the cleanest to implement, but whichever path we go down it's gonna take some very careful planning and user testing

I think concerns raised by @alannakrause are very important. Having different people making different proposals to the group at the same time feels a bit like having different people speaking at the same time. It all becomes suddenly very noisy and it's hard to focus on any of the alternatives.

So I think the two new tools presented before make sense and have different use

1. Proto-proposals − What @richarddbartlett said. Someone makes a "proto-proposal" that is basically saying "hey here is a bunch of options we have, which one do you think we should vote on?". So I guess that would mean that the option with the "hottest" temperature check would become a proposal. I think these two steps are important because someone may be willing to discuss a specific option not because they agree on it, but because they think it's the option that is the most relevant to discuss (they could possibly vote "no" on it).

2. Forks / Alternative proposal − Person A started a proposal and person B want to propose an alternative to it. I think in this case it is important not to allow people to start alternatives before the initial proposal has attracted sufficient attention (cf @alannakrause's concerns). So it would make sense to allow forks/alternatives only after the proposal closes. But maybe person A could be notified that person B want to create an alternative to their proposal, and may choose to close their proposal if they think the alternative is better. When the initial proposal is closed, either because it expired or person A closed it manually, we see the fork/alternative that person B wrote.

How about a fork is allowed only after a certain % has participated? That way it's assured people have considered the current proposal before moving on to the next one.

Interesting concept @alannakrause! One challenge might be that different groups and types of decisions often have very different proportions of engagement, which could make this tricky.

@nicolaswormser, I like the concise articulation of the two main ideas that have been considered up til now! Would be great to A-B test them to see which people found more effective (and ideally to C test an option with both - if we somehow find a way to generate more minutes in the day)

That's a good articulation @nicolaswormser but I'm thinking both cases you're describing could be handled by the same feature.