Self Organize
Organize Thyself!
By it's very nature, wiki encourages people with divergent ideas and processes to collaborate and work through conflicts in a constructive way. Self Organize is a philosophy in the wiki culture to promote ways of dealing with these conflicts, encourage Collaboration and help build something more than the sum of it's parts.
In the wiki world, part of the BeABuilder philosophy is: there are always opportunities for each of us (Organize Thyself!) , such as pages to create, to extend, to enrich with media, to streamline, to merge, to (re-)structure, to re-factor, to interlink or to improve in other ways.
At its core, Self Organizing is a process for doing this work in a spirit of AssumeGoodFaith, Collaboration and full Transparency. The general idea starts from a single seed: Self organizing is about the get it done mentality, just getting together and when something needs to be done, getting it done rather than waiting around for someone else to do it.
Wikis are about:
- Presenting opportunities that inspire and invite us to take action.
- In wiki, that action starts with clicking on the edit button.
- We click on the edit button because we want to create and share the fruits of synergies (where sharing useful information is only a subset). As it happens, there are other people out there who have information, skills, knowledge, relations, workpower and other resources to cultivate and share with each other.
- As the occurance of other people doing these things goes up as time goes by, then we have to determine if we want to work together or not when conflicts arise. (And it appears sometimes ok to choose not working together -- LawOfTwoFeet).
At some point in the BeABuilder process, conflicts will arise from other community members who are also trying to build something for the collective good. Self Organizing is really about learning to work together to overcome those conflicts.
The Self Organize philosophy believes it is in working and struggling together that true Collaboration and beautiful things can arise.
The role of self and working together
Self organizing is about taking responsibility for the things that you care about. Because the community is full of others who are taking responsibility for the pieces that we care about, occasionally these interests and projects will bump or collide. This is where self organizing comes into play.
This goes back to the idea that who ever shows up gets to BeABuilder and that self is the person who showed up. Welcome to new friendly and constructive members of the community:
- Your ideas are the ones that are going to be heard
- Your ideas are the ones that are going to be taken
When a conflict arises, we have a couple of choices:
- Working together. More often, this is done over the WikiWiki, using "talk" pages, but it could also happen via email, phone, Skype or in person.
- Not working together directly but
- Deciding to work on disparate parts in the same area (which could really separate AboutUs from say Wikipedia, there could be a world in which there are various AboutUs pages organized from a central point, each with a different viewpoint or idea expressed. Imagine a "George W. Bush" page from a Republican viewpoint, one from a Democrat's viewpoint, even from a Wiccan or Freemason view -- we can.)
- Deciding to work on something in the wider environment of the community and leaving only that special project (LawOfTwoFeet)
- Not working together and keep conflicting with each other (which is the worst case when never reaching resolution)
In any case, all are ways of self organization and create unique outcomes that wouldn't have been created by a person working alone.