Why a Decisionmaking API?

I've gotten a lot of good feedback about our KDI proposal since I posted it up a couple weeks ago, although a fair bit has been through one-on-one conversations I've had with folks. Generally, the feedback has been great (in both the complimentary and constructive criticism senses), although the venue has been a little unfortunate - I'd rather it be in comments on the issue itself, because we could use the momentum. But as I've been reading the thoughts of those who have been intrepid enough to comment, I realized that I'd managed to write a very long proposal without actually providing any specific examples. In particular, it was the comments by and subsequent discussions with moshe and eaton that led me to this conclusion.

Originally, I was going to post something here that combined the examples with an explanation of the context into which all of this work fits. However, once I realized that that post would end up being even longer than the original proposal (which wasn't exactly short), I figured I'd split out the specific examples into a comment there, and use this post to illuminate some of the background that informs my thinking and passion around this particular project.

The way things are

I work with the Student Trade Justice Campaign (STJC) (yes, we need a major website overhaul - it's why I showed up in drupal-land in the first place!); we're a group of students (primarily college undergraduates) spread across U.S., sometimes even further, who educate, organize, and mobilize on issues relating to international trade and our global food systems. Most students who aren't on the same campuses as one another see each other every several months at best, but we need to maintain very regular contact for all sorts of planning/organizing reasons. At the moment, most of that contact is handled basically ad-hoc through an amalgam of free google tools (esp. Google Apps), free conference call services, and crap-tons of email. And we're not really the exception, either - STJC's partner groups - which include NGOs and social movements of all sizes and origins - are sometimes doing better, but the differences are typically incremental, not orders of magnitude.

Over the years I've worked with STJC, I've seen something that anyone who's worked with volunteer-based groups is all too familiar with: experienced people leave, taking with them rich knowledge of what our group has done, and why we chose to do it. And I've seen what naturally follows from such departures: we tread water organizationally while revisiting the same old questions with the new people who have come on, because it simply isn't reasonable to ask passionate activists to "just trust us on this one. And that one. And..." Nobody, activist or otherwise, really dedicates themselves to something unless they fully believe in it. We faced this problem repeatedly because a) yearly graduation makes student activists inherently transitory, b) not enough students really know how to take good, re-usable meeting minutes (it's truly an art, I've learned), and c) even when good notes were taken, more questions arise: where are they archived? how is that archive organized? how much is public? Fail to answer those questions, and you end up with an archive that only the archiver finds useful.

All that business about recording discussions/decisions assumes that whatever's being recorded is being done in person. When we're distributed across the country or the globe, other problems come up before we can even begin to care about archiving. It's because we're reliant on conference calls - and I'm convinced that group decisionmaking via consensus on conference calls has its own special circle of hell.

Even if you're not familiar with formal consensus, the problem is pretty simple. Between timing delays, bad connections, annoying scratches, and the simple fact that voice-grade telephone frequencies cap out at 4kHz - not even half of the frequency ranged used in regular human speech - it's just plain hard to understand people. It takes most folks months of regular conference calls before they can start easily identifying speakers by voice, while some people never seem to master it at all. It's also really hard to get into a good timing rhythm for when one person stops talking and the next one starts. All in all, communication on conference calls tends to strain and frustrate everyone involved. And strained, frustrated people can't listen carefully to others, and are much more likely just to let things go that they really care about, simply because bringing the issues up is too much of a hassle. Communication just breaks down. And that's a huge problem for consensus, because the process is fundamentally rooted in the notion that folks should be exchanging genuine ideas and opinions until consensus is reached. And no communication == consensus failure.

We get by as we can. For bigger decisions, people generally make the effort, but many conversations end up being only two or three of the more active people talking back and forth, making decisions for the group. For small, really targeted things, we'll just do a simple 'opt-out' - someone circulates a small proposal via email, and puts a reasonable deadline for people to raise a concern on it. If no one raises a concern by the deadline, we proceed forward; otherwise, we can open up a bigger, more formal discussion about it.

All of this still feels like just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the challenges of maintaining inclusivity and coordination in a geographically distributed, often-not-super-tech-savvy network of activists. But it's enough to start with.

The way things ought to be

If there's a holy grail of decisionmaking systems to be pursued, then it's built from a few basic pieces:

• It transparently helps all the participants focus on the particular matter at hand.
• It encourages separating sub-components of the decision into separate mini-discussions.
• It allows participants to respond on their own schedule, instead of requiring everyone to be present all at once for the whole process (this is a biggie)
• It archives completed decisions in a consistent, navigable way that can also take into account access control/confidentiality.

Those components would be truly transformational for STJC. Other features would be great too, of course, but I suspect these will be the core ones for us. It may seem odd, but this is one of the closest issues to my heart right now. Notwithstanding all the difficulties I've already described, STJC (and our two sister campaigns) consistently bring in people whose selflessness, quality of character, and commitment to a life in pursuit of a more just world just floor me. But I've seen far too many of these people I so admire work themselves to the bone, only to find their commitment rendered meaningless because, at least in part, of how horribly inadequate our technical tools are when stacked against our vision. And over time, those inadequacies corrode peoples' passion. It's a terrible thing to watch. A tool like this, though...well. I may be hoping too much. But I think the potential is very, very real.