I agree that this is a good idea to make thinking more concrete. Unfortunately it is harder to put into practice and impossible to automate since real people must be involved who ideally would be as invested as they would be if something real were at stake and would act accordingly.
I proposed something similar in the context of the community democracy project: that the budgeting procedure they propose actually be carried out on a regular basis to build experience with it and find bugs.
For sudo room, for our meetings and other routine procedures, we do the equivalent anyway, and for exceptional things i.e. conflict resolution, the difficulties mentioned before present themselves.
Even as a repository of thought experiments, it still could be valuable.
I thought of this during the meeting but didn't want to veer too far off
topic, but since the analogy of articles amendment to software
development (particularly version control) came up, I thought this was
pertinent. At certain points during the Articles of Association, it
might be a good idea to write tests.
Test Driven Development is an integral part of a lot of software
development - coming up with different situations and contexts of how
your software is used. But it can actually be applied here quite easily
- especially to the 'conflict resolution' sections. How well do the
articles we've agreed upon handle different types of conflicts? Well,
we can write test cases for them. For instance:
Test Case 1: Someone has stolen money from the donations jar
Test Case 2: An injury happens at Sudoroom
The more tests we write, the better the coverage of the articles are in
different situations. This may also help elucidate the gaps where our
articles may need amending.
Writing tests also actually helps clarify the meaning and intention of
articles with more obtuse language.
I was going to go create a wiki page on it, but the server rejected me
from creating a login for some reason :(
Bill
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss