C&C Discussions and Decisions

[whistle]

We had a discussion about this the other day on #C&C and no one had any objections to me making this thread, so here it is.

Something I've been noticing recently with C&C is that it is confusing. I think this is partially due to to the fact that there is no central location for discussing policies. There is an IRC channel (#C&C), but not everyone uses IRC and not everyone who uses IRC wants to be a part of the channel; there is a social group (Contributions & Corrections), but its membership misses out on some people who contribute to C&C and probably isn't checked too often except by a select few.

1. When everyone is up to date, everything gets done more efficiently. I think the topics in the social group are good examples of what would get discussed here: issues like using 4 HP instead of 6 HP and writers saying what kind of grammar checks they prefer. I think this is also the reason I always feel confused about what's going on and since I don't think I'm especially clueless, this is also probably the case for other users -- and having people being perpetually confused is never good! I really like CM's post about the system in Concise for exactly this reason.

2. The current system is unintentionally exclusionary. I guess I probably hinted at this above, but not everyone can be a part of #C&C or the social group. I think this is especially problematic in C&C given that most of the threads here are individual projects, if you will. Minor decisions that get made regarding these projects usually aren't ever "released" while at the same time, writers and proofreaders who are aware of them apply them in analyses while those who aren't kind of just wonder where the decisions are getting made.

Pseudo-idealism aside, I don't see any practical roadblocks to this. The usual forum rules still apply, obviously, and there isn't really any reason the decisionmaking process should stay concealed until after the decisions are made since C&C *only* works because of the users, moreso than any other part of the site.

Essentially, the idea is this: I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with discussions in social groups or IRC channels, but the problem is only when the decisions made don't get revealed until they are implemented (which usually doesn't come with an announcement unless the decision is an extremely major one). To promote more openness in the decisionmaking process, if something is discussed on IRC, we can post logs of what was talked about in a new thread in the main Contributions and Corrections forum; discussions can continue from there, and a final decision is made by "whoever is in charge" in the thread.

For posterity here's the IRC log that prompted me to make this thread: http://pastebin.com/m2b77a675

[Matthew]

I like this idea, since throwing around the idea of 'what writers prefer X type of grammar check compared to Y' since I know people like Whistle are trying to accommodate what writers think is helpful and useful.

So yes, I like this idea Whistle

[Xia]

As do I. If you don't mind, whistle, I think it would be best if this thread addressed one aspect of C&C at a time. This will help channel the chart towards a desirable end result. Perhaps splintering the chat into separate threads might also be a good idea, so people can easily jump into a discussion without having to sift through a ton of pages not related to the subject.

[whistle]

oh, I meant for this thread specifically to be a proposal-ish that just brings up the idea of using the forum for general discussions. I agree that individual discussions should get their own threads because of what you said though. I don't know how many individual threads we'd have but if it gets to be too many I guess I can make an index in the OP here or something, but that seems like a bridge to cross when we get to it...

[eric the espeon]

I'm all for making having more discussion and making it open, and so long as we have the go ahead posting logs of relevant (read: logs with the social bits largely edited out) discussions from #C&C in C&C main is a great idea.

[jumpluff*]

I don't think this should even be a proposal (well, you can't make rules, so w/e). The day we're being locked into an irc channel is the day c&c isn't accessible to the wide userbase of smogon. Frankly, I'd rather we stick to #stark or #is anyway for internal c&c discussions, but evidently few people agree with me on that.

[Colonel M]

The conversations can be carried in IS and stark. The problem is stark is not "generally" for C&C talk all the time. This can be geared toward it when stark is busy with other business (such as general Pokemon discussion).

Even so, it isn't "closed doors". We can still paste the log discussions in here and I can highlight whatever is relevant to the discussion at hand, perse. I think this channel is a good idea to have though, so I am in full support of keeping it for the general purpose of discussion. It's a pity that we can't have "everyone at once", but that's the reality of it, and hence why we have a forum for these sort of situations.

[monkfish]

It would be possible to write an IRC bot that automatically posts the last xx lines of #C&C to a designated discussion thread when users with particular privileges issue a command like "!log xx". Just a suggestion.