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Developing a community that develops code - organization first

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last month6 min read

TL;DR: I'm looking for volunteers to help bootstrap Steem's best open source incubator.

Background

Last weekend, I posted the articles, Programming Diary #22: Boosting organic conversations and reflecting on support for open source development. and Should we reconstitute the Steemit development incentive program as a permanent online steem hackathon?.

^{Public domain, AI-generated image}

In these articles, I started considering the possibility of using Steem communities to support Open Source Development for the benefit of the entire Steem ecosystem. Here is the Cliff's Notes version of one possibility from the first post, a "perpetual Steem hackathon".

Perpetual Steem hackathon: Community participants announce their goals for the next two weeks and post their progress, and gain support from investor-curators who are dedicated to supporting development. Efforts could be on any open source project that benefits the ecosystem: new or existing, coding, documentation, design, testing, etc...

Feedback in the comments has been mixed, but we received this response from Steemit, the Steem ecosystem's largest stakeholder.

Interesting to see where the Community can take this...

#votesavailable

So, I'm considering that a green light 🚦 to explore next steps. Where do we go from here?

Step 1, of course, is to start getting organized. To do that,

Let's talk about decentralized governance

Before moving forward, let's go back in time and recall concepts from some articles that I wrote in 2016 and 2017,

For today, I'm thinking about framework, not details, so none of us need to be experts at any of these so-called "social technologies". You can start with this video for a basic overview, and we can revisit these concepts later if/when needed.

It's been a long time since I reviewed those sources, but here's the bottom line (as I recall it). Sociocracy and Holacracy (and I think there was another, but I'm not finding it right now) are governance strategies that are specifically intended for decision making in decentralized communities.

Sociocracy emerged from the Dutch Quaker community in the 20^th century, and is built on four basic principles:

Shared decision making based on consent,

Circles as semi-autonomous units,

Connecting circles by double-linking, and

Electing people to functions and tasks

Holacracy may or may not have emerged from Sociocracy, but it's very similar. In Holacracy, the governance strategy is comprised of circles, links between circles, roles, and authorities (property rights). A "link" between circles is a person who is a member of two circles. Those people are responsible for conveying information between circles.

I asked a bunch of different AI assistants what circles we would need in order to implement Holacracy as a decision-making strategy for a community like this, and none of them really gave me a satisfactory answer, but here's a short list that I excerpted from Llama and ChatGPT:

Circle of Planning: Defines the purpose and goals of the community; Oversees the strategic direction of the community.
Circle of Rules and bylaws: Develop and maintain community rules and bylaws; Address licensing considerations and eligibility criteria
Circle of Operations: Manages the day-to-day activities and tasks of the admins and moderators
Circle of Curation: Manages curation-related activities in the community.
Circle of Developers: Focuses on development activity in the community
etc...

This is already getting too complicated too fast, but hopefully you get the idea. What I'm thinking is that we can gradually identify, create and fill the circles, roles, and links that we'll need for our hypothetical community and establish a shared decision-making model that is a Steem-specific version of these social technologies.

For now, let's go back to Gall's Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

Let's start with the simplest possible system

For this week, I'm proposing that we launch a single circle - a planning circle. Members of this circle will be responsible for the following (with community feedback):

Choose a community name
Define the purpose and goals of the community (with more specificity than just "support open source development")
Oversee the strategic direction of the community
Create circles, roles, functions, tasks, and/or authorities, as identified and needed

I would suggest that, at a minimum, the circle should have representation from the following stakeholders:

Steemit and any other "whale" investors who want to participate
One or more top-20 witnesses
Developers
Other Steem influencers/stakeholders

So, our very first community decision making challenge is this:

Can we populate the planning circle?

I guess I'm in by default, but once the circle is populated, I can be voted out, just like anyone else.

Who else is interested in helping to bootstrap Steem's best open source incubator? Feel free to nominate yourself or someone else.

I'll approve the first person to join me in the planning circle, and everyone who joins after that must be unanimously approved by all of their predecessors (and that's also how we'll determine the final size of the circle). If private communications are needed, we can use encrypted STEEM memos, steemchat.org, and/or agree on some other platform.

(some relevant knowledge/experience and a positive standing in the Steem community is required)

If no one volunteers, I'll start nominating people. 😉 And, if no one still volunteers, then we'll scrub the project.