Abstention - Part 2 : Make wording in votes more congruent

Having agreed, if it's possible, though, I think it would be ideal to have a checkbox that would let me toggle the inclusion of abstentions. The view of what only motivated participants think is important enough that I'd hate to lose the ability to see it, also.

I'll have to look closer at this later, but I will say for now that from my perspective, having viewed something and not registered a position yet is not at all equivalent to abstention. Actually, someone may feel quite strongly in agreement or disagreement, but may be taking time to consider the matter more closely. I think that potentially listing such people as having "abstained" can create misleading graphs.

In that case perhaps the functionality might be useful, just requires a more appropriate terminology than "abstained".

@fabioballi I like the idea of a 'fork', and hope we can implement it more elegantly in the software at some point, but in this case I wonder whether these two discussions are closely enough related that they could have happened in the one thread? I feel like my attention is confusingly split across these two threads now.

I think the discussion in the previous thread has been awesome thus far, thanks so much everyone. I do think this proposal is conflating quite a few ideas.

I agree with @gregorycassel's statement that viewing a thread but not participating is not equivalent to abstention. And I feel like the proposed options don't really provide participants with the opportunity to say they're happy to go with the group (as the current 'abstain' option does). I also agree with @purplelibraryguy and @theodoretaptiklis about whitespace in the pie graph making it harder to judge how much support or opposition a proposal has (which is what the pie graph is supposed to give an immediate indication of). However, I do think representing members who have viewed the thread but not participated could be valuable, I just don't think it should be represented on the pie.

I also want to echo @strypey's sentiment that the current four options are based on a consensus process which has a long tradition of use, and I don't think changing the 'block' option to 'stop' will add any real value. However, we have been talking about functionality to allow groups to customise the options...perhaps that's a conversation that could do with some new energy at this point..?

@hannahsalmon thanks so much for adding your powerful perspective on these fundamental issues.

Hmm. I've felt steadily for over a year now that 'Stop' makes more sense than 'Block' for most Loomio groups, although I've rarely mentioned it since the first time it came up. Maybe there's a 'middle path' of sorts, per your reference to customized options...

I think this is always going to be a bit of a wicked problem: how to encourage consensus-oriented, inclusive decision process, while allowing groups to customize their tools. Perhaps it really would be ideal if
1. the defaults remain Agree/Abstain/Disagree/Block, per the powerful history of formal consensus
2. groups could customize the buttons somewhat
3. the customization were intentionally limited, to prevent the reduction of Loomio to "yes/no" voting, and also to create some friction/resistance to the removal of a position such as block/stop/STRONG disagree .

(Perhaps really the only button that should be customizable is the "Block" button?)

I definitely do think that Loomio should encourage the types of decision process which it considers to be socially healthy. If anyone really has a problem with that, they can fork it. (I'm not holding my breath on that ;) )

For customizations like this, perhaps the WordPress model would work: The feature to customize is implemented in the code, so self-hosted communities can enable it without departing too far from the mainline code branch, but it's disabled in the main hosted service.

That's one fundamental possibility @kenlefebvre , and thanks for pointing it out! I tend to support a fairly high level of customization within the hosted product, but there are so many social and technical variables here. Hannah, Matthew and other Loomio team members have deeper perspective and investiture than I do. :)

The idea shared in the other thread that if you comment after the proposal is started but haven't voted yet, then your participation gets tracked in the white slice.
I also wish to add to this the liking of comments anywhere on a discussion thread after the proposal has begun.

While I don't think this is really a candidate for Loomio core, I would very much like to be able to allow for this sort of thing to be possible as a plugin, either on a per-group basis on loomio.org, or as an option on your own hosted instance.

This sort of feature, which falls, in my mind, into the 'not for everyone, but valid use case' category, is something we can't commit a ton of resources to, but would like to support others in being able to make it happen for their organisation.

This is all great discussion, by the way.