Community Operating System

CouchSurfing Community Operating System (CS-COS)

Overview

This is an outline of an idea for a community operating system. The tentative name was inspired by the old computer operating system MS-DOS. I hope this one works better. It is meant to support the CS 2.0 goals of decentralized participation, community-driven development, and making the world a better place through a cooperative information sharing network.

CS-COS is based on the concept of a voluntary and anonymous reliability link between members. The word reliability is used here like the phrase reliable source is used in journalism. The system would be useful for cooperative information sharing, community-driven development, and, in conjunction with the polling system, community decision-making.

With 150,000+ members and thousands of groups, we need a global system to support member participation. There are far too many members, groups, and information, and not enough time for any one person to stay directly connected to everyone and everything and process all the information available.

Basic structure

• A member can create a reliability link with any member he or she deems to be a reliable source of information or a high-quality source of ideas. There could be degrees of reliability with a different functional result. This is a layer on top of the already existing vouching/verification/friends/recommendations system that establishes a reliable identity for CS members.

• A piece of information, whether it be a news item, or a proposal for an action or a change (such as a new site feature), or a nomination for a position, is the basic unit that travels among members connected to the reliability network. Let's call it an item. Any member can create an item at any time. A form would be filled out where the member specifies the category of the item, an expiration date, and gives a brief description with links to more information such as a wiki page or a CS group.

• The item would be immediately reported to all other members who had established a reliability link with the original member. (This could be fine-tuned by category so that even if a reliability link exists, items could be filtered out according to category; also the reliability link could have degrees such as urgent-only).

• Once created, an item is fixed, but an offspring item (with additions or amendments) can be created at any time by any member. The child item is linked to from its parent, so that members following the parent item can easily see how much support is growing for the children.

• If a member who received a report endorses it (possibly with degrees of endorsement), the item would immediately be forwarded to others linked to this second member, and so on.

• The system would keep track of items gathering support. There would be community lists for each category ranked according to number of endorsements received. This allows the general community to learn of new items from people they aren't closely connected to that have gathered support. Members can judge items found this way own their own merit and endorse them if they wish. They can also form reliability links to members they discover on the community lists.

• The community lists would have a time decay factor built-in, so that if an item didn't gain enough support fast enough, it would sink lower on the list and eventually expire. And expired item could be re-introduced later or even before it expired, possibly in a modified form.

Applications

News sharing

CS-COS could help with the problem of information overload: too many groups to follow, too much news, not enough time. Members could link themselves with like-minded members who can then keep each other informed with only the news relevant to their interests.

Community driven development

CS-COS combined with the poll system could be used for the entire process of developing new features on the web site or proposing collectives, etc., beginning with the initial proposal, gathering feedback and support, and refining the proposal until it is ready for a formal vote.

Community decisionmaking

If an item is a specific action, change or nomination for a position, a criterion for being included on a formal ballot could be reaching, say, the top 5 on the community list for the respective categories within a certain time frame.

Recommendations

There are many issues that do not necessarily require a vote but only a a rough consensus. There are other issues which aren't decisions at all but recommendations for some kind of action that may be very effective if many members endorse it, even if it is entirely voluntary.

A recommendation could be something like: "Please contribute to the War on Them project." A recommendation would serve to not only inform many members-at-large of a possibility, but let them know how much the community is behind it, possibly encouraging them to support it or participate in it.

This concept could be extended to actions in the world, in which case CS could become a very powerful agent for change. For example, if an earthquake occurs somewhere, various recommendations could be initiated in response. They would be entirely voluntary, but in a large organization like this, if an idea has merit it will rise to the top of lists and if only 1% of the members actually act on the recommendation, it could still have a big impact.

Implementation

CS-COS would not be hard to implement technically speaking. The greater challenge is deciding on all of the various parameters. I imagine the system as evolving over time (like MS-DOS). A basic system could be implemented very soon and then used to drive further evolution.

One of the potential problems of this system is that, with 150,000 members, it might become difficult for an item to reach a visible position on community lists even if they are categorized. This problem can be solved by implementing CS-COS both at the group level and the community level. Items submitted to a group CS-COS could apply first two members of the group, but then the group could choose to endorse an item and put the whole weight of the group behind it for its community ranking.

Like the vouching/verification/friend/recommendation system already in place in CS, the hierarchical group structure is well-suited for CS-COS. In nature and in human affairs, complexity always ends up being handled in a hierarchical way.

Implementation note: There has been some discussion about creating a CS internal issue tracking system to easily track issues other than bugs and enforce accountability within the organizational structure. I started implementing an application system (for applying for "positions" within the CS organization such as ambassadors and the developer team; the database structure created for this was created generic enough for any "ticket" to be tracked within the site (which is exactly what part of the above aims to do - a few enhancements to the existing structure might still be needed). As the issue tracking system, as far as I know, is being endorsed by the current admin population, I think it could be used as the initial stages for the community operating system. ~~

If there's enough interest, I'll may start a group for discussion and refinement of this draft proposal.

Matrixpoint (John) Anu