Sociocracy for governance and Restaurative Circles to solve conflicts

roughly once a year i mention these two technics (e.g. in drupal mailinglists), so also this year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy

I quote from wikipedia:

Sociocracy is a system of governance, using consent-based decision making among equivalent individuals and an organizational structure based on cybernetic principles.

This says it all, i try to point out some aspects, which are in my opinion essential for a open source community.
The community lives from the contribution of individuals, and individuals act driven by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy (imho).

• decision macing: there is a point in time when decisions are made - everybody can read the scedule and see what will be decided and when, so everybody can give its two cent to the arguments - means you do not have to be present on all meetings, read whole drupal planet feed, hang out day and night in IRC, watch literaly hundreds of issues to be on the right page on the right time.
• consent-based: means the community can decide how to hande each decission, eg. on has to be dicided by consensus, for another decision a majority is enough, and again another decision is delegated to a working group - the community decides (e.g. the community can also decide to throw a coin to decide something)
• among equivalent individuals: equal in there rights to take part in the decision process, equal right to vote for persons to jobs and to suggest people for jobs - this does not mean everybody has a veto-right in every decision - but equal rights to participate.
• organizational structure: drupal as a system and as a community has growen enormous, but not the organization, so in my point of view we have to many bottlenecks - if you don't believe: every good patch rotting in the queue is a prove for this argument (and shows that the doocracy is not as good working as some expect). And this issue queue also shows we need more organizational structures.
• based on cybernetic priciples: we accept that everythig (in our community and system) is changabel, and we try to reach goals, we are open to experiment and we decide based on facts, to get the best solutions in place - if we see something does not fit (maybe any more) then we search for better solution - thats cybernetical and exactly what a open source community does or should do.

If you agree to this point then reading the wikipedia articel about sociocracy is defenetly worth the time to spend for.

http://www.restorativecircles.org/

A Restorative Circle is a community process for supporting those in conflict. It brings together the three parties to a conflict – those who have acted, those directly impacted and the wider community – within an intentional systemic context, to dialogue as equals.

well exactly my requirements to a conflict solving process in a community where i want to contribute (and there are much more than code!) .

To the statement

Code is golden.

Sure Code is very important - but how much time in your project from the first contact with the client to the last support ticket is spent on coding?

The bigger the project the smaller gets the amount of time spent for coding - for some procjects maybe down to 15% ?

So there is much more than code - and you should accept this - we need all kinds of skills and all kinds of contibutions - even this comment.

What do you think about these concepts? What are your requirements against the community, the governace and a conflict resolution process.

I'd love to read / hear your two cents.

best
Thomas Zahreddin