BeABuilder
At AboutUs, we believe a bunch of people working on building something together is itself a profound result. We hope to create a space where such building happens. As such, BeABuilder is a philosophy of striving to build something of lasting value to the AboutUs community and the world at large. This is much more than just building wiki pages that are aesthetically pleasing or highly informative and useful (although all these are valuable qualities), but building ways in which people and ideas work together to create something bigger than the pieces. This is about synergy and providing space for others to work in. While this means having a targeted goal, the building is as much about the process of building something valuable than the finished product (especially since the product may never be finished).
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 it, because it compounds
- Good characteristics between the connections
- 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
Click Edit and Save A Lot
Don't sweat the small stuff. Change is cheap. You can change those later. The big picture. Other people can fine tune or biuld on top.
ChangeIsCheap It's not unlike leogs where you can refactor ad cange.. You can reguild. You don't have plan up front. Just start working on it.
It's like in making a group decisions this is true as well, that the first idea you have is a lousy one, and the next idea is a lousy one and you just want to have as many lousy ideas as you can so you can get to the good idea that comes after the lousy one.
Creating a wiki page is the same way. You want to make a lot of lousy edits so that the difference between when you started and when you end is one great edit. It never happens in one fare swoop, that there are a lot more missteps than there are strong, sure steps.
So there's a related value here... it's about just working on it, like a release early, release often kind of thing. So maybe we need to talk about phases of a wiki page:
1) People seeds with an idea that's often vague and poorly worded. Rough and that's okay, that's expected. 2) Then other people come along and refactor it. What I want people to have here is a freedom from fear that others are going to judge their effort as unworthy.
Create and Demand a Safe Environment for Experiments
That touches on AssumeGoodFaith, the inverse of that is that you can expect people to assume good faith about your effort so you don't have to worry that you've got everything perfect.
AssumeGoodFaith Assume that what has been built before you that those people want you to improve it and feel like it's great if other people come along and improve the things you've built. Its like a tapestry that you are always improving.
Other Types of Building
Other types of building. Part of being a builder is building a strong community. Building a foundation level, creating networks. Build more than just page, portal, or user page. Building community. Different types of builders suit different types of people. 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. Patrolling changes etc.
Building community is totally about being a builder, but patrolling changes it kind of depends on how you approach it. If you just basically watching for vandalism and reverting it and letting constructive edits pass through, that is gardening. if on the other hand you are watching for opportunities to help people grow in the wiki way and in their fluency with the technology then you are building the community. So it's not just watching for, it's watching for and capitalizing on opportunities too.
Gardening as a separate thing. Do we want to encourage building over gardening, knowing that gardening is happening. Gardening has to happen to keep from sliding into the dump (morass).
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.