GFSC Community Project Management Design Principles¶

2025-08-17 Thoughts by Kim

Overall goal¶

To create a reciprocal loop of the following (note that each person can wear more than one of these hats):

Organisers coming together to understand and create common understandings of community problems,
Designers design potential interventions that address these problems,
Technologists build the solutions,
Researchers evaluate their success
(and iterate)

How this might happen across diciplines:

State assumptions (if we do X, Y will happen)
Build interventions (do X)
Evaluate if the assumption was correct (did Y actually happen? what is our new Y?)
(iterate)

I would like it if:

All steps of the above are documented and tracked in public, which allows an overview of the whole project for any newcomers
Anyone can contribute to everything from one element to the whole process as they wish, on their own timescale
Meeting are not the core organisational unit, replaced instead with focussed activities like workshops, 1:1s, design sprints, etc
All these steps share a common project management tool, or at least integrate very closely
Those who lead on tasks are empowered to do what they see fit (a "do-ocracy")
However, there is an overall lightweight community safety framework that keeps this flowing and resolves conflict (codes of conduct, community management etc)
As much of the admin for this as possible is automated (e.g. automate convening meetings, closing inactive tasks etc)
The organising group explicity does not need to own the outputs, this is a structure for progressing community activity not an attempt at ownership of other peoples' labour
Roles within the community are automated as far as possible (e.g. moderators and project leaders are assigned based on activity)
Reproductive labour is centered in the project, and is tracked and valued just as much as productive labour