Loomio
Sun 2 Sep 2012 11:54PM

Concurrent Proposals

RDB Richard D. Bartlett Public Seen by 110
RDB

Richard D. Bartlett Sun 2 Sep 2012 11:54PM

More feedback in the inbox, this one from Florian:

"I don't know what your immediate plans are, feature-wise, but
personally, what I am really missing is a type of proposal, where the user has the choice between multiple options, and not just essentially yes and no. (think: 'what color should our background be: red, green, yellow, blue')."

I know this has come up a few times lately. I have some opinions of my own on the danger of implementing this feature, but I'd be interested to hear what the crowd thinks before I go on a "polling is bad" rant :)

JV

Joshua Vial Mon 3 Sep 2012 12:06AM

an essential next step in my opinion

RDB

Richard D. Bartlett Mon 3 Sep 2012 3:31AM

Basically I'm concerned that implementing this feature poorly will do serious damage to both the UX and the underlying philosophy of Loomio: i.e., as far as I'm concerned it is a tool for building shared understanding by collecting diverse perspectives into a cohesive outcome. Concurrent proposals (i.e. polls) can undermine that philosophy by degenerating into a combative 'majority-rules' approach.

Then you also have the problem of the UX: how do you prevent discussion from getting bifurcated? how you prevent the first proposal from getting more attention than all the others?

This seems like the perfect time to do a research check of what other platforms are doing with this e.g. discuss2decide (hint, it sucks). Perhaps @Varun will be able to weigh in.

I do agree that this feature is likely to be implemented in the future, I'm just cautious as it raises a bunch of red flags for me.

Talking to Jon about this, one suggested solution we were playing with is that there is only ever one Proposal that is in voting stage, but you can have any number of other pre-proposals on the table at the same time (I'm going to call them Options for the purposes of this discussion). An Option would be a brief description of a suggested course of action, a small block of text in the right hand panel, not open to voting per se and not time-limited. It would have some kind of "+1" feature for users to say "this is my preferred Option, it should be the Proposal we are deliberating".

Perhaps if someone wants to put a No or Block on a Proposal, they would be prompted to suggest an alternative course of action, which would become another Option.

Mmm this is a hard one eh. Keen to hear lots of input and paper-prototype some ideas before we go anywhere near the code on this feature.

AI

Alanna Irving Mon 3 Sep 2012 4:18AM

I agree with Rich - we need to do this right if we do it at all. Otherwise, Loomio will degenerate into a polling app. We have to figure out a way to do this in a way that encourages consensus not competition, and that's going to take some real work. Personally, I feel like doing proposals consecutively is better for now. Right now, you can simple make a comment with different options laid out, and see what the group says, then raise a proposal for the one that seems best. What's wrong with that?

PS

Paul Smith Mon 3 Sep 2012 5:32AM

I really think branching is the best way to achieve the outcome and still keep within the central philosophy.

Then a proposal can be branched off into sub proposals so in the example of "what colour should our background be"? You can first branch into "Do we need to change background colour" and branch the proposal into the 4 seperate option branches.

That way you're getting consensus on the premise "we need a colour" before moving onto deciding which colour which might be as simple as picking the one that most people agree on (maybe with no strong objections?).

It seems a bit over the top for this example but there was an actual discussion where this solution came up and it seems like a really solid approach.

JV

Joshua Vial Mon 3 Sep 2012 6:10AM

agree with the points about doing this right and I definitely don't think we should just jump in and make polls. Instead I would suggest we model the process we use in physical facilitation + the preferential voting algorithm used in politics.

Put forward the question and request ideas in a discovery phase
Give everyone x votes that they can give to the ideas they like the most
Make a short list
Discuss
Preferential voting (ie everyone makes an ordered list of the options and we use those lists to choose the outcome)

I think the algorithm for preferential voting is something like
Add up the 1st preferences of all votes
- choose the option with the least votes
- look for the next preference for all the people who voted for that option and redistribute those votes amongst the surviving candidates
rinse and repeat until a single option has the % of votes required to pass (50,75 etc.)

If we sat down for a couple of hours I think it would be pretty easy to come up with a process that worked the way we wanted it to - would be happy to facilitate a session if people want.

B

Billy Mon 3 Sep 2012 7:52AM

This is a messy question.

I agree that polls are an inelegant form for proposals to take.

One of the things in my notes so far was "is there a way to modify proposals and put them forward in the context of the debate?" In terms of collaboration that seems relevant to the process, but tricky to implement.

Or maybe there just needs to be an additional option: Yes, No, Abstain, Block, and Modify, where Modify indicates unhappiness with the current formulation of the proposal. If enough people indicate Modify then the proposal needs to go back for more discussion.

I like the branching idea, but in practice it requires massive clarity of language and conception in users, and could make the process quite painstaking.

Some kinds of decisions and proposals are of different kinds. Some are simple, some are hard and complex. Simple ones can generate simple proposals. Hard ones will be trickier to generate and word proposals for. (Using Loomio to debate hard questions will be an interesting proving ground for the software.)

For hard proposals I think the key will be introducing a stage after discussion to identify proposals - sort of like what Joshua put forward, which sounds like it would involve an additional or different process from the usual discussion > proposal process, which would be unnecessary in simple proposals.

Ideally it would be integrated into the software. e.g. adding a flag that defines it as a hard proposal and adds a step of getting consensus over the proposal and its wording. This could take the form of a poll over what is the proposal to be put forward.

(Here too we just generally run into the limitations of online discussion and keeping it neat and tidy. Already in this comment I am replying to several people and ideas and raising new ones.)

AI

Alanna Irving Tue 4 Sep 2012 12:21AM

If a user thinks a proposal is not as good as it could be, and wants to agree to modified version instead, we already have the functionality for that - say no or block the current proposal, and when it closes, open a new one with modifications.

We already have the features to guide a group through navigating multiple ideas. It just comes down to good facilitation. We don't need to make a bunch of complex features, we need to help the tool organically teach groups how to effectively self-facilitate.

B

Billy Tue 4 Sep 2012 6:54AM

I agree the tool needs to organically teach groups how to self-facilitate, but how does the software facilitate that, vs having trained facilitators and competent communicators using the tool to communicate? I don't currently see anything inherent in the software that implements the description "Clear proposals emerge from the discussion".

VM

vivien maidaborn Tue 4 Sep 2012 7:03AM

Great conversation, I would like to have a play session on this, actually approach some comex issues with multiple options and track the 'hard' process then see how we can convert it to soft . We might come out thinking it is a facilitation issue, or we might see a way to add features, either way we will learn valuable stuff. I would be up for organizing the session if others wanted it.

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