Difference between revisions of "BeABuilder"

Basic Philosophy

BeABuilder is about wanting to build and acting on that desire, with the focus on having your heart in the right place. In many ways, it's a leap of AssumeGoodFaith. It begins with the belief that everyone has come to AboutUs to participate in something constructive and informative. You have come to build something. You've not coming to AboutUs to tear down. Even in re-factoring wiki pages with your ideas and thoughts, what becomes of the page is something owned by the whole. You're not building your own page, you're helping to build off everyone else's. At any point, this thing we're building right now is foundation for someone else to build on top of.

BeABuilder is also about not just coming and hanging and out and chatting/shooting the breeze. It's about TRYING to creating something that has lasting value.

Types of Things We Are Building

• Connections between people
  • Good characteristics between the connections
    • Trust
    • Assume Good Faith
    • Spirit of collaboration
    • Warmth
    • Hospitality
    • Fun
    • Helps you grow as a person
  • The synergy between people causes the creation of things you wouldn't create alone
    • Riffing off of each other's ideas and energy
    • By collaborating we catch each other when we fall quicker and waste less effort trying to pick ourselves up individually.
      • The earlier you get input the more valuable the input is, because it compounds

• Ways of collaborating and working together
  • Bringing in more and more people, creating a critical mass of people working in this way
  • Refactoring the Wiki Way together
    • Finding whole new ways of working together
    • Doing experiments and learning from those failures and successes

• A collectively valuable resource
  • Pages
  • Topological structures -- organization of information and how things relate

Other Values

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

BeABuilder is often about not sweating the small stuff. Believing in ChangeIsCheap is an acceptance that you can change the small stuff later. Focus instead on the big picture, knowing that other can and will fine tune or build on top of your ideas.

To achieve this, just click "edit" and "save" a lot. This creates a visual history of your thoughts and changes that others can use to build on top of or just understand the direction you were going in. Clicking "edit" and "save" a lot also allows you to quickly jump into a document and get your hands dirty. Don't worry too much about a plan up front, just start working on it. The idea can be likened to building with Legos, you start somewhere and let the creation take shape, adding and subtracting, constantly re-factoring what you are building.

This links to the ReleaseEarlyReleaseOften philosophy common in the Open Source community:

1. People seed a page with an idea that's often vague and poorly worded. It is rough and that's okay, that's expected. It's a beginning.
2. Other people come along and re-factor it. There is a freedom from fear that others are going to judge their effort as unworthy, in fact the expectation is that other will judge their efforts and highly valuable.

Create and Demand a Safe Environment for Experiments

Beyond assuming good faith in other's efforts, a value that's important to BeABuilder is that you can expect people to assume good faith about your efforts so you don't have to worry that you've got everything perfect. Their is a tacit implication in BeingABuilder that what has been built before you was designed for you to improve it and that the previous builders feel like it's great if other people come along and improve the things you've built.

Other Types of Building

BeABuilder isn't just about great wiki page creations. BeABuilder is also about building a strong community. Building a foundation level, and creating networks. Building more than just domain page, portal page, or personal page. Just as there are different types of people in the world, there are different types of builders. Some people may not be good writers themselves, but are great at encouraging others in building the pages. Part of being a builder is collaboration (communication). Anything on the wiki that is collaborative in nature is part of building the community. Whether it is a group of people collaborating on creating a great wiki page, a portal, someone organizing a consensus poll, fighting spam attacks and other vandalism patrolling changes to AboutUs.

What being a builder is not

• Not just building for yourself and for your own purposes. That doesn't mean that your objectives can't be met while building for the community.
• Be a builder is not gardening (although gardening needs to happen).
• Be a builder is never finished.
• Be a builder is not perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good enough and right now.