Wikipedia talk:Community Facilitation

Sam - this is an excellent idea, and will lead to a new group of contributors who are interested in facilitation but may not be that good at or interested in editing or policy. This proposal will be easier to get off the ground and make productive than the elaborate proposals for committees and closed-membership committees, and should address almost all of the same issues in a simple and lasting way.

I added a few ideas and revised a few sections, including how to create a new issue - simply adding a subpage to Issues.

That formatting you do with the article title is confusing - why not just move it to the WP: namespace? +sj + 22:31, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Facilitation
your page on facilitated discussions deserves more attention. I left updates there and a comment for you. +sj + 22:32, 27 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your kind feedback. Would you be interested in starting a new Wikiproject with me?  I'm thinking of calling it Community council and its mission would be to start writing the issue pages as I've described them.  The council would be open to all, and have a fairly strict code of conduct on how the pages were to be written.  Along with writing the issue pages would be the explicit goals of creating order out of chaos by using a creative problem solving approach; focusing discussion; encouraging collaboration; and reducing noise.  Hopefully the council would become the main focus of attention for dealing with difficult issues.  The work of the council would not be to discuss and decide issues, but rather to document and organize what has already been done.  Project members would help organize and write issue pages with links to discussions, essays, etc... that have already taken place.  It would document and collect the work of the community.  The project would also link the appropriate issue page to any relevant discussion about the issue, whether it be on the talk page of an article, a policy, a guideline, or a user. Gradually, the Community Council could expand more into facilitation.  As I've envisioned facilitation, it will only work if the issue pages are created and the community focuses their attention on an issue to one centralized place.  Since Wikipedia only changes in small incremental improvements, the first step is to start creating the issue pages.  Does this sound like something you would be interested in working on with me?  Let me know.  Thanks. -- &#x2611; Sam uelWantman 07:17, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

The focus should be on facilitation and discussion, not on forming a council, else you will attract people who want to work on scaffolding rather than idea organization, facilitating, and brainstorming. And the point is to let anyone interested join the project, yes? So I would call it something like Community facilitation, and get to work inviting good people and writing good initial pages. Aside from that, I'd love to work with you on this; and to develop sibling efforts on other Projects. +sj + 18:15, 28 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Your point about finding the right name is right on the money. While I'm just not sure of the perfect name, I'll stay away from anything that would imply decision-making authority.  So I'm ok with  Community Facilitation, and it should be very clear that it is a wikiproject, open to all, with no decision-making power.  Along with creating that page for organizing the project, there should be Community Issues, which would be a centralized directory of issue pages, each issue having its own subpage.  Talk pages should be organized the same way as article talk pages, so the discussions on the issue's talk page should be ONLY about the writing of the issue page, and not about discussing the issue itself.  The issue page can link to discussions elsewhere and summarize them in a NPOV way. If  community members knows how to write an article, they'll know how to write an issue page.  The first order of business for the wikiproject should be writing the issue pages, and as that work progresses, there can be discussion on the best ways to help facilitate the community decision making process.


 * I'm going to move my user page proposal to Community Facilitation, adapt it into a wikiproject, and also move this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Community Facilitation. If the links are blue, join me there to continue this conversation. -- &#x2611; Sam uelWantman 20:49, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

thoughts from Kim Bruning
do not underestimate the wiki, or the consensus system, they are VERY powerful, and they are still very very much operational. at any point in time, only a very small percentage of pages can't be managed through straight up consensus it's a long tail, if that makes sense to you?

I'd estimate that maybe 1Kpages out of every 1Mpages may have issues where consensus doesn't work I've considered having different rules for the 1Kpage exception and this would be where regular wiki-consensus doesn't work

that doesn't mean that whatever the religeous society of friends does might not work or what the provinciale staten of the province of noord brabant does might work (my dad actually participated in a consensus gathering exercise on a national highway once... quite cool!)
 * See quakers, poldermodel respectively

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Sj (talk • contribs)


 * I've experienced how the Quakers use consensus -- it was my first experience with consensus decision making. I've been part of several organizations that used a consensus model for decision making.  They all used facilitators, especially for major issues.  Most problems on our wiki do not need facilitators or any complicated process to be resolved, but more and more would benefit from some structure. -- &#x2611; Sam uelWantman 04:59, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Outreach to similar groups
We should reach out to mediators, people who try to start feel-good projects in the project namespace (and often get ridiculed for it), and others who clearly feel strongly about facilitation. My sense is that without a concrete way to make use of those desires to contribute to article writing and policy improvement, good facilitators can leave the project feeling unfulfilled or useless. (two people in an edit war don't really want a facilitator. they don't always want mediation either.  but people struggling with a difficult issue for months and years certainly do - and one successful facilitation is remembered for a long time.)

Some groups that may be interested:
 * participants in Lectures
 * regulars at RfC ?
 * — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sj (talk • contribs)


 * This seems like a good tact. I've also been thinking that we should start by focusing on a single issue, create an issue page, link all relevant discussions we can find to it, and let the participants in the discussion know what we are up to.  If editors have no experience with facilitation it is probably difficult to imagine how this might work, and even if they do, it might be difficult to imagine how it might look applied to a real issue.  Demonstrating the value of an issue page, by creating a real one, is about the only way to get the process going.  The issue pages have to become the focus of attention, but without a good deal of work, they won't.  -- &#x2611; Sam uelWantman  02:34, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Also, please steal concepts from GUERRILLA (never activated due to lack of people with clue. We need to train them faster!) --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:30, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Advice/documentation/literature that might be useful?

 * User:Xavexgoem/advice
 * I encourage anyone to add to that. While I'm shamelessly plugging that, I'd ask that anyone who does edit that page use horizontal lines instead of headers for separation, for reasons I can only describe as dictatorial.

WP:FAR
I am not sure if this falls within the scope of this project, but the discussions at WP:FAR may benefit from skilled facilitation – not just now, but on an ongoing basis. See e.g. comments made here by Bishonen and Dabomb87. Discussions have gone awry there in the past; good facilitation may help keep things together.  JN 466  09:19, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Next steps
I'm glad to see that a couple of people have joined, even though the project has not been publicized. I'm wondering how we should launch this project, and how we should coordinate with the strategic planning wiki started by the WikiMedia foundation. It seems that our project should focus on issues that are not foundation issues, but specific to the English Wikipedia. That doesn't mean that there won't be some overlap, and that some issues are common to many projects. If the discussion seems more relevant to the foundation, we should just briefly define it and point to the relevant page at Strategic Planning. Likewise, pages there can reference issues here. I have started an Issue page at Stategic Planning, and might (if I have the time) start grouping questions and proposals by issue. --&#x2611; Sam uelWantman 10:16, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Brainstorming methodology
We currently have the following wording:

It's generally been found that ideas should not be evaluated during the idea generation phase, because it tends to inhibit contributions. Cf. the notes on brainstorming in the guidelines at WP:ARFR and the Brainstorming section referenced there. Can we tweak this to ask people to delay critical comment and evaluation until there is a good number of ideas there?  JN 466  11:23, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Please tweak. Yes, evaluation should happen after brainstorming.  But as this is a wiki, it will be difficult to keep everyone in lock-step.  I'm wondering if a set of criteria that is used for evaluating alternatives can be created before brainstorming begins.  Then the proposals could all be evaluated as they are created.  What needs to be clear is that the evaluation that happens should not be of the "approve/disapprove" variety that normally happens, but instead be part of a collaborative effort that improves the alternatives such as "this would better meet the criteria if it were changed this way..." -- &#x2611; Sam uelWantman  02:05, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Wikimania discussion
the wikimania panel of arbcom + others on decisionmaking and dispute resolution touched on this -- it was mentioned that this community facilitation idea could be related to a global facilitation group that help across language barriers and project norms, especially in areas where there's no local mediation, arbitration, or other process... (there was strong consensus on the panel that it would not be so helpful to have a 'global' ac, and might be harmful - but that global facilitators were needed.)

James F's point : tis' very hafrd to find someone woith time to go int othe deatils of a big dispute in the right alnguage, who isn't already part of the project in that language. 190.2.21.21 (talk) 20:07, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Sometimes it helps to be an outsider. And google translate can help a lot, as can translation memories. (Typically you would read what other people have written using software, and answer back in english). Using a translation software does mean that you might fail to pick up on subtleties though. :-/ --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:14, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

duplication
Good luck with this, but i will be interested to see if we will be able to even define the issues without debating them. How will we avoid having the issue pages being just one more of the dozens of possible policy discussions to keep track of?  DGG ( talk ) 15:56, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The issue pages should not be forums for discussions. They should be articles about the issues facing Wikipedia.  They should be written with a NPOV and have citations to back up what is said.  Certainly the issues facing Wikipedia are not as contentious as the geo-political issues facing the world today which have NPOV articles.  We can document the debate and link to where the debate is happening.  I do not want to have to read hundreds of kilobytes of debate to find out that no consensus was reached and most people repeated the same points back and forth.  Neither does anyone else.  Those discussions can be summarized with an NPOV paragraph or two.  Many discussions can be summarized by reporting what the key differences in philosophy are.  All sides should be able to reach consensus about where there is disagreement. -- &#x2611; Sam uelWantman  07:12, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
 * what kinds of things do you intend to facilitate, and at what scale? --Kim Bruning (talk) 21:03, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Idea coordination across the dozens of places that a single idea or topic might currently arise. The individuals talking in those dozen places don't need to directly engage one another, but their ideas should engage one another and be represented side by side in an overview of how the issue has been addressed in different contexts and forums.  +sj +  04:21, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

To DGG's original comment, we will be lucky to have so many people creating proposals that the edit wars over how they should be named and defined become significant. As noted on Issues, names and definitions of issues will certainly change as they are discussed. +sj + 04:21, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Archival and presentation of past discussions for easy searching
Has this project considered maintaining Centralized discussion/Archive? Would that fall within its scope? -- &oelig; &trade; 02:24, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
 * That's a great idea, and I should think so. Likewise the archive of perennial proposals.  I think we might want to start polling places such as that for participation in community facilitation.  Xavexgoem may have some specific ideas here.   +sj +  04:19, 8 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Indeed, what good are all the past set precedents when the discussions get filed away, lost in some archive, unable to be cited or found and read by new editors to the project who then end up rehashing old ideas. There definitely needs to be a searchable organized page of all the various RFC's and other precedent setting discussions so Wikipedia can move forward in progress instead of stagnating due to lost knowledge. I am very surprised that there isn't already a searchable RFC archive that dates back several years, it just seems like they're scattered all over the place and to find a specific RFC you have to know what you're looking for and type it in the search bar.. unless.. i'm missing something? -- &oelig; &trade; 01:43, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Updat to Issues
I've cleaned up the page a bit and updated the category of WP Issues to match. +sj + 04:19, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

global
Administrators%27_noticeboard

related project
Hi CFI. Do you know about the similar User:Juliancolton/Project ? -- phoebe / (talk to me) 10:42, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

How to hold effective discussions?
I'm starting to work on a page about how to hold effective discussions. This is not about civility, nor is it focused on dispute resolution per se. What I have in mind is more like handling a lot of participants, keeping things clear and on track. I would welcome input. Maurreen (talk) 16:59, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Status of this group
I've opened a discussion about possibly making this historical here. You are invited to comment. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 20:23, 14 August 2011 (UTC)