One proposal at a time?

I don't think this discussion should be about multiple choice proposals, that should be another discussion

Nice work @deansatchell

Here is an example where we would have prefered the possibility to have several independant proposals at the same time.

Loomio almost totally replace our physical meetings as we live all over the world. We simply have regular quick IRC meeting that summarize and make official decisions taken.
The discussion context is regularly appended with discussions. But as we can't have several decisions in one page, we have to manage several discussion context, for the same context in fact.

So being able to have one discussion context (a meeting here) with several decisions would be good for us in this case. For this case, it would be far more useful for us to be able to open several decisions at the same time in a loomio discussion rather than opening a battery of new contexts just for some trivial discussions. But of course, it would not be the case for other group working with different workflow and constraint.

In fact, for summarizing, the needs are not the same when you sometimes open a new idea or when you organize discussions by events, and use it for day to day organization.

I abstain mainly because I don't know if it would bring some unsolvable complication to the software, but my abstain is more in favour of "admin should decide if we can have more than one decisions at a time" if it's technically doable.

Hi @raphaeljadot One can indeed have several decisions on the same page, but they are consecutive. Wouldn't "Ideas" where multiple proposals could be run past the group serve your purposes? My thinking is that it is appropriate to have only one decision at a time, because you have only one place for discussion. With ideas several proposals could be put forward and their relationships discussed as multiple possibilities, but in my mind only one should be decided on at a time, otherwise confusion and conflicting decisions might arise. If the decision has to be made fast, the time frame is reduced so the group can get on with the next one. Conflicting decisions would be okay if consecutive, but surely not at the same time? I'd welcome anybody in the group to convince me otherwise.

@deansatchell I understand your concern, I know that it may be a problem. If it's a technical constraint, sure let's not add to much workload to developers :)

but if it's rather because of the risk of misuse or confusion, then I follow my main idea, that the users should not be limited by philosophy, if they express a need, just by technical feasibility :). Maybe by default there could be only one decision at a time possible, with an option for the context creator to let more than one decision (and a warning describing the risk that may appear)

Is necessary to be able to express in a quantifiable way more than agree/not agree and implementing MultiProposals is needed. If that happens one decision at a time would keep everybody aligned on the same idea.

@strypey I saw that you are against that idea and also opt for one decision at a time. I think is important to give Loomio more flexibility to quantify support for other ideas not just the one on hand. Keeping this way:
- gives a incomplete summarization of the options and might miss the best decision: in a group with 100 participants 8 out of 10 who voted say they agree to go to pool, but if the question would have been if they want to go to sea 90 out of 100 would say yes. Starting to compare manually number of likes or votes on decisions it's inefficient and improbable to happen.
- slows down the process of finding the best solution for everybody especially in medium and larger groups. If you have more than active 30 participants in a group who will do statistics manually?!

@raphaeljadot I'm okay with having the option for more than one decision at once, provided the option of only having one decision at a time isn't taken away. This would be required for serious groups trying to achieve decisions without greivances. Happy to debate this point further if anyone disagrees.

I have changed the discussion context, I want to be clear that this discussion is not about multi-option proposals/polling feature which I'm fine with, what I want to be clear about is that the option of having one decision at a time must be retained once the ideas feature is implemented.

I was thinking about this today and I had a vision for how alternatives could be proposed without taking away the focused deliberation of a single proposal at a time.

If there is an active proposal, you state your position, but there is also an option to suggest an alternative solution. This is visible to the rest of the group underneath the current proposal (could be multiple alternatives by multiple people) and other group members could 'like' these while still participating in the open proposal.

Benefits

• still forces people to consider the open proposal and if they don't like it, thumbs down and state their position. This is important to keep clear and concise the information about why people don't think a proposal is the best solution.

• still gives all group members a chance to participate - a downfall of moving off proposals too quickly is they can be discounted before much of the group has had their say, and prematurely cut off discussion before alternative viewpoints inspire evolved thinking (Loomio at its best).

• when a proposal fails, the group has gotten a head start on where it might go next, with indications of which alternatives have support from participants (looking at the likes) without allowing those alternatives to become distractions while the first proposal is still going on.

Is this about the same as the ideas feature currently being designed @jonlemmon @richarddbartlett ? I guess the difference between this and how I imagined the ideas feature is this would specifically be at the stage of proposals, as opposed to Ideas which I thought was more at the discussion stage. Maybe ultimately it's the same idea...

@alannakrause yep, what you're describing is exactly the same as the ideas feature we've been talking about. Cool that you've emerged at the same solution independently. :)