Welcome to the Military Community Members of DailyKos Openthread!
Civilian Kossacks are strongly encouraged to join in the conversation... this is all about bringing the Civilian and Military Communities closer together.
What a week! I have learned more about group management here at DailyKos in this single week than in the entire time that DK4 has been in existence. Seriously. The Occupy Wall Street group has grown exponentially day by day and I think we are finally starting to fall into rhythm that works well for us. My time has been well spent and I have lessons learned that will crossover well to the MCM or to any other group, for that matter.
Although groups are set up with an internal hierarchy of BlogAdmin, BlogEditors, and Contributors, we have been trying very hard to incorporate the General Assembly Model to help us make the big decisions. And we unfortunately had to leave DailyKos to make that work. You see, for right now, Group Messaging at DailyKos sucks eggs. It is unwieldy and less than capable of keeping up with the topics we needed to discuss. Half of our blogeditors never realized they had a group message needing attention and the contributors are left out in the cold.
Our quick time solution was to start a google group (anyone reading this who wants to be invited to the OWS google group, feel free to shoot me a private message; at least kosmail is good for that).
At the google group we have several threads of conversation going at the same time. We are still trying to figure out exactly what consensus means in an internet setting. Obviously we can't look across the room and see smiling or frowning faces much less waving fingers or down turned hands. I am coming to the conclusion that those with strong feelings, either pro or con, voice them. Those that are unsure or don't have a strong feeling one way or another tend not to post at all.
We are trying to follow the suggestions laid out in UnaSpenser's excellent Primer on Consensus and the General Assembly. She pulls together a myriad of sources to discuss Direct Democracy.
The link she gives for Consensus Decision Making lays it out very plainly:
- Discussion
- Identification of a Proposal
- Identification of any unresolved concerns
- Collaborative alteration of the proposal
- Assessment of support
- Finalizing a decision or returning to step 1 or 3
So, you might be wondering what in the world this has to do with the MCM.
When I started the MCM, I never saw myself as a leader. I saw myself as a community member in search of fellow community members. I wanted to help form a group that had a common goal - to write about military community issues from both a personal perspective and in a manner that informed the larger DailyKos community about our daily lives and about political issues where we need their help and support.
At times, it has been only DaNang65 and I making decisions and sometimes even we don't agree. It's hard to find a real consensus for our entire group when only two of us are involved in the decision making. Really, we are just being the leaders of the group instead of being active participants along side YOU.
So, I propose two things to start with. And I am hoping that we can find ways to find a consensus here in these very comments.
1. That we begin communicating with each other off site - either through a Google Group, a Yahoo Group, or a ListServe. Please give your opinion on what would work best, if any, in the comments below.
2. That we start taking turns writing the MCM Openthread. We started that way but people stopped offering and I stopped asking. We publish every Monday morning and the topic can be of your choice. Or, we can discuss changing the day in the comments below. Or getting rid of the openthread all together. Let me know what you think.
Date |
Author |
Potential Topic* |
Monday, Oct 17 |
- |
- |
Monday, Oct 24 |
- |
- |
Monday, Oct 31 |
- |
- |
Monday, Nov 7 |
- |
- |
Monday, Nov 14 |
- |
- |
*not necessary but will help folks who like to write ahead and don't want their topic taken by others |
We haven't been able to discuss a whole bunch of things that most of you know nothing about - potentially huge things for our military community that aren't yet ready for a diary but could really use some behind the scenes input. Please give us your thoughts below on how we push our group into the next dimension!