Concurrent Proposals

I have said quite a bit on this in other threads. I still strongly support the idea of re-ordering 'positions' so that a 'block' is at the top, by the pie chart, followed by 'no', 'abstain', then 'yes'. This highlights the aspects that need further discussion to reach full consensus. Also, if you're going to have a 'block', it should turn the whole pie chart red, right?

I have definitely had experiences in Loomio where the decision proposal on the table falls progressively behind where the discussion is going. @Alanna is right that you can hack around that by closing the 'current proposal', and putting up a reworded one as a new 'current proposal'. As a UX it's kinda jerky though, like being the passenger of a learner drive who isn't confident with changing gears ;)

I agree that we don't want people to agree to one proposal, and then find its majorly changed by the time it closes. I also agree we don't want it to turn into a poll, or a confusing UI. What about having different levels of proposal? This model builds on the idea suggested by @Richard and @Jon of concurrent 'options' which can be edited but not 'voted' on.

I would call the more flexible level 'suggestions', which can then be promoted to 'decisions' once they have been crafted a bit in response to discussion. Users can indicate a position on a 'suggestion', but any group member can also edit a 'suggestion'. Editing resets any positions taken by group members to '?', but it leaves their last position comment to be read, at least until they position again. This could also allow 'proposals' to be demoted to 'suggestions' if they are made a bit hastily, rather than being "closed".

I have also had experiences where a very general discussion topic organically produces a number of more specific discussions, which really need a proposal each. You can hack around this by dealing with multiple proposals one-by-one. But this forces users to be consider them in series, when their outcomes might be interconnected.

An example in the TBANZ group is one thread in which the 'seed' comment proposes a bunch of potential agenda items, each of which really needs its own discussion/decision thread. I really think the solution to this is allowing discussions to be "forked" so a set of more specific discussions/ decisions can be nested under the general discussion - represented by being tabbed in under the parent discussion on the main page.

One more idea. The current UI has a discussion thread whose small box encourages brief comments (not essays or rants). This is good. It also has a tool for a brief, to-the-point summary of a proposed consensus. This is good too, although I'm not convinced that "Current proposal" is the right wording. Maybe "Emerging Consensus" or "Current Offer" or even "Current Decision"?

Anyway, there are times when essays and rants might really help a group to drill deep into a tricky subject. Sure we can use a blog, or Google Docs or whatever, but I think it would be good to have an integrated space for this on Loomio itself, which can be easily referenced from the main UI. This novel of a comment would be an example of something which belongs in a 'rantspace', and would have been much easier to write and edit in a bigger text box ;)

I think the "options/suggestions" idea could be handled very well by the context panel. As the discussion progresses, the current options or the working best idea could be put in the context panel, so it will have made more progress and be clearer by the time it reaches proposal time. Once the context panel is in place, I think we should try using it this way and see how it goes, before considering adding more features.

Forking/branching discussions is a very interesting and important topic, but one that will take a lot of thinking and testing to get right.

Live chat could be helpful here. People could test out ideas on other group members without cluttering up the written-down discussion.

Earlier discussed slightly here: https://www.yammer.com/loomio/#/Threads/show?threadId=191119537

Is there a tagging/metadata function for discussions? Just re: Strypey's comments, as there are many threads to read through which could conceivably have his other comments in them. And I imagine many groups would like an easy way to refer to previous discussions within discussions...

Likewise, is there a spec or definition of the context panel somewhere?

I'm totally stoked with all the great brainstorming going on in here. I think the group is starting to collectively grasp a solid process/potential-solution to this problem.

I agree with Alanna that we should wait until the context panel arrives before making any decisions on this (for those who don't know, the "context panel" is basically just going to be a discussion wiki/description that people involved in the discussion can edit). Discussion wikis are actually just a couple days away from being implemented, and I think that the emergent processes that come out of using them will inform a lot of our thinking around all of this. Using the discussion wikis will help us to observe the processes involved in online brainstorming. We will learn a lot about how to effectively collect into one location all of the unique ideas coming out of a discussion.

But yeah, I just want to say that I'm really excited about all of the suggestions brought up here. I think that implementing the particular process that we are all referring to is really going to take Loomio to the next level. If you imagine a discussion has the following phases:

1. brainstorming and generating ideas
2. narrowing down to just a few ideas
3. collectively agreeing upon a single idea

... you can see that currently Loomio only really focuses on the last part of that process. This was by design (we wanted to start small and #3 was our biggest need when we first built Loomio). But now we've got the opportunity and experience to really hone in on the earlier parts of that process. And personally, I can't wait to see what happens once we do that. I think that's where we will really start tapping into the goldmine of collective wisdom.

Really glad to see so much agreement with the idea that simple polling isn't the way to go!

I've been thinking a bit about a sort of 'temperature check' function to gauge how the group feels about multiple options under consideration - i.e. the options are laid out, and people can move a slider on each (from red to green maybe?) to give a rough indication of how they feel about each one - I'm thinking each person's temperature rating would influence the aggregate group rating for each option, and give the facilitator (or whoever) a good idea of which option the group is happiest to turn into a proposal.

In many ways the functionality is similar to polling, but the cultural context around it is totally different - giving an informal indication rather than a binding majority-rules poll. This would nicely mirror the informal temperature check often used in real-life facilitation (sparkle fingers!).

This would be a fair bit of coding work, but seems like a task that could be neatly bundled and passed to a keen volunteer.

Thoughts?

I need to see some mockups to make sense of this conversation ...after Oct1 :P

I would love to mock up some of these ideas. I think some of these ideas could add hugely to the usability and go along way to solve the issues of editing proposals, polling and facilitating the creation of good proposals. Maybe after the storm around pre-release.

@Ben
I like the idea of implementing jazz hands in Loomio! :P

Maybe your temp guage could be a replacement for the infernal 'Like' button?

Once we've got a context panel and tags it might be simple to gauge the feeling of the group just by filtering on some common tags over time and putting the result in the context panel.

I feel like for each group there's going to be a custom way they want to gauge feeling, and sometimes if the feeling consensus of a group is all "red" that discussion might be more productive in reaching a solid outcome than an all "green" discussion.

Whereas if we leave it open and gauge based on custom tags (maybe with some preset ones) it's completely up to the group to show what they're feeling at any given time or about anyone's comment in a discussion.

Eg/ I could tag the discussion at this point as being #productive in the context panel and tag Strypey's comment as #jazzhands rather than having to hit like or useful or drag a mood slider.

Back to the original topic we could tag a new idea we want to discuss as #option-polls or #option-branch then filter based on those to boil down a discussion to any given point or points.

It might be complicated to explain UX wise, but the advantage is it's leveraging features we've already been talking about and it's flexible enough to work in most group dynamics.