Proposal:Call for Proposals
Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.
Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!
- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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This proposal is being implemented through the Call for proposals page.
Summary
A Proposals process will encourage people to articulate their ideas and discussions into concrete proposals. It will also bring greater community attention to these proposals, which can then be further refined, translated, discussed, categorized, merged, forked, and so forth. The proposals will help inform the larger strategic planning process by helping all of us make sense of what we know and don't know, and by encouraging more multicultural participation.
Proposal
We'd like to propose a Call for Proposals process for the 2009-2010 Strategic Planning process as a way to encourage participation and to help everyone make sense of the ideas and possibilities. Proposals would be pages on the Strategic Planning Wiki under the "Proposals" namespace that would follow a basic template (of which this is an example). People would be able to make proposals in the language of their choice.
As a best practice, proposals should be as concrete and as granular as possible. Once proposals are submitted, we would encourage people to refine, translate, discuss, categorize, merge, and fork them as appropriate through a traditional Wiki process.
We would encourage people to deprecate proposals that are merged or are no longer relevant, but we would discourage actual deletion. This is essentially a brainstorming / sensemaking process, and we want to be open to all ideas, no matter how radical.
There would not be an "official" deadline or review process, because there isn't an "official" reviewing body. We would strongly encourage people to use the proposals to inform their own thinking and decision-making process. With the 2009-2010 strategic planning process, for example, we would encourage Task forces to review relevant proposals.
Motivation
Our goals for this meta-structure are:
- Encourage community engagement. The proposal process would be completely open. This also enables people to carry out conversations in the language and space of their choice. When they're ready to draw greater attention to those ideas, they would submit a proposal.
- Inform the overall strategic planning process. The proposal process would encourage the articulation and self-organization of ideas, which will give all of us a greater shared understanding of the challenges and possibilities.
- Encourage action. We expect to see many great ideas, and only a small subset will make it into the final plan. The existence of these proposals will hopefully empower people to act, regardless of whether they make it into the final plan.
Key Questions
- Realistically, how many proposals can we expect to translate, and what should be our strategy for doing so?
- How long can this continue? Can this become part of the weekly life of the projects? See also Proposal:Call for proposals always open.
Potential Costs
The time of the individuals submitting proposals and contributing to the overall process.
References
This process is loosely based on the IETF RFC process and various instantiations of it among the open source software community (in particular, the Perl 6 RFC process and Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs). With a sprinkling of Wiki magic.
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