Post in CivicEvolution - pushing information up to the meta teams

Feb 13 16:45 UTC

Some details on pushing information up to the virtual teams

Let me clarify the terminology since everything online can be considered
"virtual"

A "base team" is group of actual participants, and this forms the base
of the pyramid.

A "meta-team" consists of all of the members of the constituents teams
below it in the pyramid.

           meta level 2
         /                    \
    meta level 1a      meta level 1b  ...
    /   |  \                     /   |   \
20  20 20...             20 20 20 ....

Meta level 1a membership includes all of the actual team members below
it.  There could be 20 base teams below it, but experience will dictate
what size is most appropriate.  Likewise, Meta level 2 will consist of
of the actual team members below it, in this case the actual members are
2 levels down.

In a base team, members have full posting and voting rights. Currently,
voting consists of endorsing key points posted by you and your immediate
teammates.  I will expand voting to all of the content type in the team
which currently includes comments and resources as well as key points,
and may soon include "value statements"

When 50% of the members of a base team endorse a comment, key point, or
resource (etc) it is automatically posted to the meta team dialogue
directly above it.

In a meta team, members have full voting rights on all content in the
meta team dialogue.  Content that gets endorsed by 50% of the
constituent base team members is automatically posted to the meta team
dialogue directly above it.

There are several questions and challenges that will need to be worked
out in practical experiments.

1. Will enough team members vote often enough that this process will be
dynamic and useful? If not, each team may need to elect a foreperson to
speak on their behalf in the meta team directly above.
2. Within meta teams, is it better to  (A) aggregate the votes of the
constituent base team members directly, or is it better to (B) count the
majority vote of each constituent team?  (A) would allow a minority
opinion to be recognized while (B) might encourage more team
deliberation on the issues.   (Imagine 40% of each team supports option
2, but the majority supports option 1. In (A) 40% of the votes in the
meta team would be for option 1 while in (B) 100% of the votes in the
meta team would be for option 2.
3. How do teams respond directly to other comments in the meta team?  It
is easier to see how to simply post comments (like this email list which
is not threaded).  It is a bit more difficult to post replies to
specific comments/content in the meta team.
4. Can the base teams react quickly enough to maintain a dialogue in the
meta teams, or will the meta teams be primarily about aggregating the
votes of their constituent base teams?