Confusion Committee Proposal
This is a proposal for the Confusion Committee. Contact orblivion at gmail with comments or questions, approvals or disapprovals.
What is The Confusion Committee?
It's a committee I'd like to start with the purpose of improving communication within the group, and to the outside.
Why?
As it stands, PSOne, as I see it, has agile, sometimes tightly knit groups of people working on setting things up, and on other interesting projects. People may like to know the latest on your progress. The problem is, when you're involved in one of these groups, reporting on all your activities is not something you want to focus on. Our strength is our agility, and I wouldn't dream of asking you to change your ways.
On top of that, there's other official, basic information that we could improve on. Official contact points, perhaps voting history, etc.
I believe that improving communication could help in a couple ways. First, some people, perhaps some who are still a bit out of the loop, who aren't actively participating in a given project, but would like to, could more easily get up to speed, and know where and when to jump in and help. I know this is already possible, but I think that it could be made smother. Secondly, everybody is simply curious about what's going on. Knowing the state of, say, designing/theming/building the space, is something that I imagine everybody would like to know.
What's your plan, then?
So we could bother people to remember to give updates on what they're doing, but people are too busy to think about what and where to post, and I wouldn't want to take productive time and energy away from setting the place up, or other projects. Those people are interested in, say, construction. Myself? Believe it or not, (among other things of course) I actually have an interest in organization. I bet there's at least a couple others out there like me. I think we could leverage this interest to the advantage of the group, just as those interested in construction leverage theirs. So we could be our own independent, agile group, in charge of gathering information and keeping it in order. In line with our awesome naming convention, I dub this potential group, The Confusion Committee.
What this committee would do is be in charge of asking questions of people about the latest significant happenings, decide what should be announced where, and announce them, or tell the appropriate account holders that we'd like it announced.
What this committee would not do is ask people to impose any sort of order on what other groups doing. As I said above, I think your agility is working very well for you, and I don't want to ruin a good thing. We won't ask you to remember to make reports or anything like that, we'll just ask questions when we're curious (though that could admittedly be fairly often). Also, if anybody feels that there's not enough information about a certain topic, we can be the go-to people that they can comfortably bug.
Sounds good, so just do it. Why do you need to ask us?
- The main issue is that I'd like the support of the community at large, particularly those heavily involved in projects, those more active in setting things up. I want them to understand and to be sympathetic to why we'd be pestering them for information. Otherwise we'd just be getting in the way. Particularly important is that they have to understand that what may seem like a stupid or obvious question to them may be the source of curiosity and confusion to others.
- Secondly, I also need the understanding and approval of the account holders I would pester to put information down. Since I've recently been given access to a few things, I guess that just leaves Eric for the Twitter account, so this issue may be all but moot.
- Thirdly, of course, if there are others like me, interested in keeping info current, I would like some help, as this is probably a somewhat large undertaking.
So what do you want to see exactly
I think we could see potential improvements in the following areas. Of course, a lot of these things do get taken care of as it is, and I wouldn't want to necessarily manage any of this stuff. Our job would just be to stay vigilant, making sure that nothing slips through the cracks.
Blog
If there's an important development that the public (potential interested members) would want to know about, it should be put on the blog, fairly promptly. I actually feel like this one is improving as it is, but I'd put it under the things we keep an eye on.
Meeting Notes
I think these should be made into a feed after all. We discussed this possibility once long ago. Otherwise, our group would at least make sure that the meeting notes are in order on the Wiki (sometimes meeting notes don't get categorized/templated).
Announce List
We got one, we should use it! Anything important happening should be mentioned here. Any particularly significant things that happen at meetings perhaps should be echoed here as well.
Certain announcements should be echoed here as well.
Wiki
The wiki is an awesome place where people can work things out without worrying about overhead. See my above comments an agility, I wouldn't want to change that. What I would do is, have our committee swoop in periodically to catalog things properly after the fact. I think our Wiki front page should be a useful guide for members on the latest state of affairs for the group. How things are organized. What committees, groups, notable projects are going on. What is the state of important projects, such as designing/building the space, etc. Instead of asking those involved to write up what they're doing (assuming they're not doing it already), the committee could ask questions and write the updates ourselves. One guideline I'd like to encourage is that we be able to easily know about and reach every page on the wiki within a few clicks from the front page.
Bottom line
I need to know what everybody thinks here. I'm not really asking for any position of authority, just for the cooperation and approval of those we'd be interacting with, and generally whether you guys think that this committee is a good idea. If this doesn't resonate with anybody, if nobody feels there's any significant interest in improving on communication, then I'll drop the idea.
I am interested in organization, but I would continue to respect the productive chaos that is Pumping Station One. The Confusion Committee would collect data and report in an orderly, useful fashion, that would help make the chaos even more productive.
Let me know what you all think!
Orblivion 18:53, 5 May 2009 (UTC)