User talk:Martin

Inventing that Helps Tiny Businesses

In general I am a student of “process”. I try to observe and understand what really makes things tick. This has relevance to transparency, democracy, and empowerment issues. Sometimes the most important things for the populace to know, are things that some relatively “few” people within the populace don’t want others to know. When students of process are observing and trying to understand your process, they risk being viewed as a pain in the neck – it’s not an activity where one should expect to get lots of “high fives”.

Some subjects that catch my interest are listed below:

BetterAutomation

Martin, word to the wise, give a link when sending a message asking someone to look at something, like this: IncomePilotProject. It's now on my watchlist.

consensus

We haven't actually started the WhoWeAre process yet. I think it was a mistake that someone invited every active member there. It's like inviting people to a pool party when the pool's not been dug yet. Conensus is work, that's for sure. All decision-making methods are work. The great thing about a wiki is we can sweep up after ourselves once we've made progress, and all that's left is the result, without the process weighing us down. I haven't actually been following the WhoWeAre page itself yet, because we haven't started the consensus poll. I've been working on Projects:WhoWeAre. I know you've been reading that too. It's been frustrating for me to see all the round and round in circles without any clear proposals. I've been working with folks to see if we could get clear. How do you like the 3 stage idea I posted? TedErnst

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"OPPS we made a mistake. There are people at the WhoWeAre page that assume the consensus poll process is already underway (Ted, I myself had this impression). In contrast there are some folks still trying to figure out how to make this consensus poll process more efficient at Projects:WhoWeAre. After we work out some of the bugs then we plan to start the WhoWeAre consensus poll process. Please forgive us for us for this misunderstanding, we learning as we go."

Ted, I think something like the above needs posting at the WhoWeAre page, or people that continue to contribute to this page, under the assumption that the polling process is already underway, are going to get mad if they discover their work was premature. In fact one posting I read already has one person mad for this reason, claming that those that now want to go back and start all over again, are actually hi-jacking the process – which itself is problematic.

In terms of process what this reveals is never ever never invite people to a consensus poll process until it is actually started – or people are going to get mad, and then you have to go back and figure out how to make them happy again.

In contrast if you want to invite people to participate in making the consensus polling process better and more efficient, do not even mention a potential polling topic such as “WhoWeAre” within such invitations, because then people tend to associate the topic with the underlying polling process, when in fact they are actually two completely different beasts. The underlying process can be brainstormed outside of any particular topic. Once people are within this brainstorming polling process area, then one can bring up issues like, “how might this process we have now devised work for this or that type of topic?” – in this context people are less likely to get confused about what is actually happening and the participation role they want to take on.

I think if this issue is not addressed soon on the WhoWeAre page more people might arrive, and more people might end up getting mad. I see no purposeful ill intend, rather just misunderstanding, which I think most people will forgive, since all of this “stuff” is so new and we are learning as we go. My point is somebody needs to make a posting on WhoWeAre and in effect beg for some forgiveness – or don’t you think a mole hole might turn into a mountain?

Ted, I will review 3 stage idea again and reply.