Why should we exist?

[luap42]

@PeterMortensen

That was also my first impression. For examples, look at how Olin was shut down one or two months back. You may (I have not followed it closely since) have lost a very valuable contributor by just one response (I will abstain from using any particular adjective to describe it).

Without interfering to the other points, I just wanted to point out, that Olin is still here and actively contributing.

For reasons of privacy I won’t comment on Olin. Feel free to send me messages, where you think I had a wrong reaction and I’ll try to correct it. I apologize if I came around as rude and I’ll try to be even more friendly next time/avoid getting into discussions.

@PeterMortensen

Sometimes the benefit of doubt and asking clarifying questions instead of making assumptions can go a long way.

Ironically, I don’t know exactly what you mean with this and where this relates to.

@PeterMortensen

Maybe it is unavoidable in almost any group, but there is always the risk of a small clique (effectively) keeping newcomers out ( "The decision has already been made. There is nothing you can say to change it. "). Or at work ( “We are withholding this vital information that you need to do your job, because you are new here (or for some other reason X).” (not actually uttered, but real)).

I can only speak for myself, but I think nobody here wants to prevent newcomers from participating in discussions. However, we cannot re-discuss and overturn any decision once somebody new comes and disagrees with it. If we did that, we’d effectively never start. If we did that, then we’d really have to turn new people away. We need to keep decisions, once we made them.

Some decisions have been made after seriously weeks of discussion. We must stick to those discussions or we’ll never be able to start.

Such discussions are:

• We will build a community-governed platform.
• Our primary focus is Q&A.
• Our tech stack C# ASP.NET Core
• How we do reputation/privileges
• …

Every bit of time we spend with these discussions is actively preventing us from starting to build our software.

Therefore there are decisions, where nobody will be able to change it. This is mostly true for questions of opinion/interest/personal preference, such as tech stack. I am not complaining, but we had really really heated and long discussions about it (as in: almost a week without a real break; I woke up with some 300 new messages daily)

@PeterMortensen

First impressions are very important. Decisions have to be made, but the risk is to become insular. On Stack Exchange meta sites the main mechanism was (is) mob downvoting.

Many suggestions will be FSPs (frequently submitted proposals) or FRPs (frequently rejected proposals). There should be a proper standard response to those (and not the equivalent of RTFM): "Four months back, after 2 weeks of debate, 55% voted for proposal 719 ([title and direct link to proposal]) and 21% for the contradicting proposal 701 ([title and direct link to proposal]). However, it is up for scheduled reconsideration in 17 months. You are welcome to already take part in the debate at [link].

Besides those discussions that simply can’t reconsidered (tech stack and the others from above), we try to link to the original discussion and – if the arguments are simply repetitive – close it or – otherwise – let it stay as long as it is productive.

In my opinion, we are actually allowing too much discussion. I am not saying that it is bad, but it feels like we are bikeshedding on some matters instead of finally starting.

@PeterMortensen

One model is to let the decision power follow the actual work. If you are willing to put real work into it and not just opinion, then you have real influence.

Another is to have a (real) roadmap - “Look, what you propose is similar to what we plan to do 8 months from now. However, it is never too early to develop the idea and perhaps even make a proof of concept prototype to get more insight into how and if it could work.” .

A third model is to have elections on proposals (or even competing or contradicting proposals), but only after they have been discussed back and forth for an extended time. Proposal 837: First develop tutorial-like features (instead of helpdesk-like features)

The current standard procedure is to follow this process around “how are MVP features decided”, which aims for agreement over voting, but uses voting if no agreement can be made:

Voting on MVP features?

I disagree with this. I think having an MVP Nominations thread wouldn’t be effective. If there is only one huge thread, many users might ignore it due to being hard to follow. The current state of MVP proposals is “one proposal per thread” and I think it is a good model, as it allows discussion in context. Why should we not vote within the thread? Here’s what I think would be better: Proposals, that have been inactive for a while (at least five days) and where consensus has been reached, wi…