The Community Integration Framework

This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com

At the heart of this project is the idea that development of the new game will be responsive to the community. This has to go beyond simple "suggestions." As should be obvious from the Cities XL experience, a commercial company may completely ignore community input if it decides that its goals are better served differently. We need to avoid repeating that situation; I believe that unless the community participates in development actively, rather than passively, there is a strong possibility of the end result deviating from what the community wants. So, we need to ensure that the developers are not only listening to community input, but are mandated to act on it.

For developers, though, it's not feasible to write software at the behest of a 100,000 member committee, all with different ideas and priorities. There is simply too much noise and disagreement for anything to get done. Our challenge is going to be finding a way to distill community input into something concrete that developers can act on.

We need to do this by creating an intermediary system, an agreed-upon framework for the community to organize itself, channel its input, and prioritize its directives. The goals for this system are:

For community members:

• To provide a forum for suggestions and discussion.
• To allow feedback on game direction or features.
• To allow input on crucial decisions.
• To give access to information about the game's development.
• To appoint leaders for the project.
• To make meaningful participation possible without a massive time investment.

For developers:

• To filter community input into clear directives on the project's shape.
• To give concrete feedback on decisions or ideas.
• To provide clear priorities for development.
• To make a dialogue with the community possible without impacting productivity.

So, how do we reconcile these goals? Since our project is, fundamentally, a democratic enterprise, our tools will be those of any democratic institution. Voting will be the primary one, of course. But if the project expands enough to fund a game (I estimated several hundred thousand members) it will be too large for direct democracy. So we will need to add some other tools: representation and petition. However, with our community being online, we can streamline these processes to make them more responsive and useful. Here's how I think this could be set up:

We start with the basics: one share, one vote. How shareholder status is determined is a subject for another post, but the short answer is anyone who's put money towards development. Members would be able to exercise their votes in several different types of voting forums, each with different voting methods in place. These forums would host different kinds of individual "items." For example:

The Referendum Forum (General Votes): This would be the most basic and fundamental voting forum, directly reflecting community will. Referendum items would receive a yes/no vote, with a majority vote winning and becoming a project mandate (although there might be some areas, like changes to the project charter, which would require a larger majority than half). An example might be something like "Should the project offer a time completion bonus to developers?" But this simple format on its own has the weakness of potentially being flooded with motions, making individual participation a burden and burying important issues under trivialities. That's why we would also have to implement:

A simplified layout for the various voting forums.

The Motions Forum: The Motions forum would be a kind of clearinghouse for Referendum votes, weeding out fringe or trivial issues from the general voting. Voting in the Motions forum would be on an approval system; in other words, if you believed an issue should be voted on by the general community, you would add your vote as an "approval," (simply ignoring it if you thought otherwise). Items that received a certain number of approvals would be considered "seconded" and would go to the Referendum forum as official motions.

These two mechanisms would give the community control over the project's general development, but we also want a more direct and less cumbersome way for the community to interact with the dev team. Thus we would also have:

The Development Forum: This would be where users could suggest features or vote on other member's suggestions. The type of vote could vary for the individual items: For a design choice it could be yes/no (Should the game be 3D or stay with 2.5D?) or a poll (Which model should be used for calculating fire coverage?) For a desired feature, on the other hand, it could be an up/down rating vote (Like, oh, I don't know, a building speed slider... ahem). This could be a two-way forum, as well: the developers could post items for the community to vote on or rate.

The results in this forum would go directly to the devs. Popular features (at some set threshold) or voting results would be automatically considered by the developers for inclusion. If approved, they would add the item to the development queue; however, they would also be able to "veto" the request if there were time, budget or technical contstraints making it unfeasible. But even vetoed items, if the community felt strongly about them, could be "overruled" by bringing them to the Motions forum for an official vote.

Last of all, this framework could accommodate the process of selecting representatives (the project Board of Directors). This could be done either on a single forum with an approval voting system, or separated into two stages (Nomination and Elections, for example.)

Of course there would have to be a great deal of tweaking and fine-tuning done to get such a system working smoothly, but I think what I've described is a solid foundation for a community-managed project to function. It would allow individual members to devote as much time to the project as they see fit: Those without any particular drive to participate would not be burdened with constant requests to vote on issues they don't care about, while those who enjoy being active in the development process could make their voices heard.