I have the strong feeling that the guide that starts this topic is only a theoretical artifact. It describes something that does not work like that yet, and in order to make it work a planned transition from current reality to the desired organization structure is needed.
Try for instance to answer this question: If @dachary tomorrow announced they can no longer be part of Forgefriends for whatever reason… would the initiative live on and pick up pace without him? Or would it peter out and die?
I said before, elsewhere on this forum, two things:
- The Achilles Heel is on productization and community building.
- I didn’t feel like I was a community member, but just a passer-by giving feedback.
I am now typing this because in a different context, I came to re-read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” again. Thought to make a separate topic on it, only to see it already quoted above.
Some improvement to community decision-making was made, by @dachary creating this Governance and decisions category and the issue tracker for approved decisions. I think on a revamped website the governance could be further clarified in a 1-2 page ‘cheat sheet’, and without all the hyperlinks that make the above post seem quite daunting and TL;DR for most people, I guess. A new website might benefit from having a Just-the-Docs ‘Forgefriends Handbook’ where all documentation is intuitively collected.
But anyway this refers to point 1), and there are many easy and obvious ways to bring improvement there. I wanted to say something about 2), because here the Tyranny kicks in most.
I got a reply along the lines of “you are very much a community member”. Well, I guess it is all about definition then. Having a forum account technically makes me a member already. But that doesn’t entail any commitment. In what role do I see myself? In what role do I see other members? It is completely unknown, and it is Unstructured. It comes with all the downsides discussed in the article, if not very careful about it point for point.
The unclarity has caused me to not jump in on a possible opportunity that existed for DAPSI grant on the community-building side. And it may have cost the opportunity for someone after that to pick up the 12,500 Euro that @dachary had available, before returning it to the consortium. Because there was no one who understood forgefriends well enough, apparently. This hints at an inclusion and onboarding problem.
In forgefriends you’ve chosen to adopt a highly experimental organization structure, which you recognize yourself might be unique, only to give due attention to the ‘how-it-works’ very late in the project. I think 2nd stage DAPSI is a proper place to address it, but it must be TOP-priority now.
(And to highlight the experimental nature even more… when I say “which you recognize yourself” that is an impossible reference. As there’s no one that represents forgefriends. It is utmost Unstructured).
I feel that parts of the governance description above set up the project for failure. Take for instance this:
This commicates to me: There is no forgefriends community. There is no “we” in this. We are not in this together. No one has any commitment and the project can fall apart at any time.
The reality is much different: Everything hinges around @dachary who is taking most of the initiative here, as the Tyranny article predicts would happen.
If you want to do well in the 2nd DAPSI round you have to address these issues to greater extent.