I've been mulling over the ideas of "change management" for the last several months. With the next phase of the mod, especially as some modders go into periods of hibernation or even leave the mod, how do we ensure the tenants of Vox Populi are maintained while still allowing for change to continue. Further, how do we ensure that changes made, after time in the mod, are in fact changes that the community wants to keep?
We have used polls as a middle man for some of this, allowing polls to guide the decision process on what the community wishes to change and what they want to leave the same. However, I think polls are suffering from two primary issues:
Change Management - Formal Poll Voting Process
Summary: When a change is desired, a poll is created at the beginning of the month. Primary Modders (such as G or Recursive) could veto the poll on various grounds. People have until the end of the month to commit their vote. The poll is then treated as a formal "majority wins" vote process.
Now in more detail:
Benefits of this Concept
Consistency - Currently polls happen at any time, and for any duration. By putting them on a set schedule, forum goers can know when to check the forums for new changes to review and vote on. This ensures that more casual forum goers don't feel they have to check the forums constantly to know when "real decisions" are taking place, they could drop in on the 30th of a month and do all of their voting if they really wanted to.
Speed - For the more experimentally minded community members, this schedule helps to ensure there is a pace to change. Right now changes happen when a vague consensus occurs, but that consensus is vague, sometimes very quick, but other times ponderously slow. With this new schedule, people desiring changes know exactly how to get their proposals in place, and exactly when they will know if they are desired (or rejected) by the community.
Participation - By making polls a true vote and giving them the formal power to make change decisions, it greatly increases people's desire to use them. That combined with the set schedule gives people time to review polls and participate in discussions, but also gives them a true inclusion in the decision process.
Executive Oversight - Though the mod is "Vox Populi", at the end of the day its the modders having to make changes. And so the power of the poll veto ensures that while the community has a lot of power in the process, ultimately the big modders can veto if the community gets a bit crazy or is asking for the impossible. This also allows for the modders to make that clear to the community, that X is just not going to happen, and so the community can continue with other ideas or discussion, rather than wondering if their idea hasn't happened because its hard to do, or because it was unpopular.
Change Re-Review - One of the big weaknesses of the change process right now, is we very rarely review changes after they have been made. While we love to say "lets try it out and then roll it back if we don't like it", its rare for that rollback to occur, partly because there isn't a good feedback loop for that. With this concept, all changes effectively get a "2nd review" after they have been playtested a while. This can allow us to be more experimental, while ensuring that none of the crazy changes linger on due to momentum even if the community is not finding the change to be an improvement.
So that's the concept, still in a rough draft phase. I greatly desire thoughts on this concept as it could be a big change in how change works on the mod if people think its worthwhile.
We have used polls as a middle man for some of this, allowing polls to guide the decision process on what the community wishes to change and what they want to leave the same. However, I think polls are suffering from two primary issues:
- Statistical Vagueness and Complexity: We have used the polls as a reflection of the "greater community", like a sample taken during an election. However, this requires statistical math which is not intuitive to all people, and is difficult in the face of the small sample body we have.
- Minimal Participation: The participation of polls waxes and wanes. Sometimes people get very interested in them and we get a lot of responses, other times we get fewer. This can frustrate the change makers who make the polls but don't get enough responses to know what the community wants, in any direction.
Change Management - Formal Poll Voting Process
Summary: When a change is desired, a poll is created at the beginning of the month. Primary Modders (such as G or Recursive) could veto the poll on various grounds. People have until the end of the month to commit their vote. The poll is then treated as a formal "majority wins" vote process.
Now in more detail:
- A member of the community creates a poll with a formal proposal for change (perhaps in a new polling area of the forum). The poll would be very simple and straightforward, often a single choice yes or no question. Such polls would only be allowed in the beginning of the month, such as from the 1st to the 10th as an example. Past this time window, any new polls would wait until the beginning of the next month.
- Primary Modders (such as G or Recursive) can review the poll and veto it on various formal grounds. For example, perhaps the poll is very vague, or needs some more discussion before it goes to a vote. Or perhaps the mechanic is impossible to code or completely out of scope for the mod. G would have the ability to empower other modders with this veto power as he sees fit.
- The poll closes at the end of the month, with every member of the forum able to vote.
- The poll acts as a majority wins vote. If the vote is yes, this serves as an element for the modders to adjust in the mod. If it's a no, no change occurs.
- After a new version comes out, after X time (say 1 or 2 months), the elements that were changed are polled again. The idea is that once people actually try out the idea in the mod and get some time with it, they can vote to keep the element, or roll it back to the original.
Benefits of this Concept
Consistency - Currently polls happen at any time, and for any duration. By putting them on a set schedule, forum goers can know when to check the forums for new changes to review and vote on. This ensures that more casual forum goers don't feel they have to check the forums constantly to know when "real decisions" are taking place, they could drop in on the 30th of a month and do all of their voting if they really wanted to.
Speed - For the more experimentally minded community members, this schedule helps to ensure there is a pace to change. Right now changes happen when a vague consensus occurs, but that consensus is vague, sometimes very quick, but other times ponderously slow. With this new schedule, people desiring changes know exactly how to get their proposals in place, and exactly when they will know if they are desired (or rejected) by the community.
Participation - By making polls a true vote and giving them the formal power to make change decisions, it greatly increases people's desire to use them. That combined with the set schedule gives people time to review polls and participate in discussions, but also gives them a true inclusion in the decision process.
Executive Oversight - Though the mod is "Vox Populi", at the end of the day its the modders having to make changes. And so the power of the poll veto ensures that while the community has a lot of power in the process, ultimately the big modders can veto if the community gets a bit crazy or is asking for the impossible. This also allows for the modders to make that clear to the community, that X is just not going to happen, and so the community can continue with other ideas or discussion, rather than wondering if their idea hasn't happened because its hard to do, or because it was unpopular.
Change Re-Review - One of the big weaknesses of the change process right now, is we very rarely review changes after they have been made. While we love to say "lets try it out and then roll it back if we don't like it", its rare for that rollback to occur, partly because there isn't a good feedback loop for that. With this concept, all changes effectively get a "2nd review" after they have been playtested a while. This can allow us to be more experimental, while ensuring that none of the crazy changes linger on due to momentum even if the community is not finding the change to be an improvement.
So that's the concept, still in a rough draft phase. I greatly desire thoughts on this concept as it could be a big change in how change works on the mod if people think its worthwhile.
