Design Philosophies | General | Forum

You, sir, have read my mind!  I think we definitely need a page like this on the Wiki, I have been meaning to bring it up for a while.  I don't think we are likely to succeed at our ambitious projects without sticking fairly tightly to a doctrine like the one you have outlined.  I think this culture was fairly pervasive amongst the original team at Reddit, but now that we have welcomed a whole lot of new members (which is great!) it would probably help to come up with an explicit formulation of our design philosophy so that everybody is on the same page.

I think the old standard maxim "Keep it simple, stupid" should make an appearance somewhere, and perhaps also something along the lines of "do the simplest thing that could possibly work".

We need to be careful, though, that we don't come across as advocating a position of "cutting corners" or "near enough is good enough" or anything like that, because that's not accurate and it doesn't place us in a good light.

Really very excited to see this under discussion!

Out of all the major defining documents that I think we should endeavour to finalise and Wiki-lock within a week, this is the one that has received the most attention and is looking the most complete.  Nevertheless, it isn't necessarily finished.  Does anybody want to clarify anything that is currently on the wiki page or add anything new?

Since there has been no comment on the current version of the Design Philosophy for some time now, I am going to assume that everybody interested in it is happy with the current version.  So, this shall become our Design Philosophy 1.0!  I will moderator-lock the Wiki page after making this post.  This will be the Design Philosophy adopted at our first meeting after incorporation and any changes to it will have to happen in accordance with the bylaws (i.e. changes will be voted on and adopted only if more than a certain percentage of members want them).

Since the current Mission Statement and Social Contract have also gone a long time without comment, it makes sense to moderator-lock these too (again, these documents should be modifiable after incorporation in accordance with bylaws).  With these documents polished and finalised, along with good recent Wiki work, we can present a fairly organised and official looking face to other groups.  I think now would be a great time to push ahead with contacting other groups.  Some plans for how to do this are in a Friends of CSTART thread elsewhere, which have so far received very little comment.  Whether you love or hate those plans, make some noise so we can figure out what to do.  If we can lock in our documents and make contact with a few other groups (especially Copenhagen Suborbital) in the same week it will make that week a big achievement for us – worthy of the first post to our neglected blog, I should think!

All 3 of the official documents are now Wiki-locked with a fancy little notice at the top.

Your idea is a good one, we do need to have something like this, although I'm not sure where it would be best to put it.  Anyway, let's start a thread for this idea and get to work on it.

If  you have some spare time at the moment, I would very much appreciate your input on the Friends of CSTART stuff, too.

noumena said:Let's get rolling then :-) For what it's worth, I am satisfied with all of it.

That's the spirit!  And good to hear!

Have you read the Friends of CSTART info page and Offer of Friendship template?  There is a thread in the "Similar Organizations" subforum for discussing / improving them.  I know you've already mentioned you don't like the name "Friends of CSTART", and at this point we can still change that – just imagine something appropriate going in its place when you read the draft documents and worry at this stage more about what those documents say.