1.7 6. Structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
1.9 4. Power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
There seems to be a lack of persistence of important information, at least as it exists in the 'institutional memory' / capacity / awareness of present players.
I'm not sure if this problem exists to the same extent within the core dm group - a lot of important things are probably being discussed amongst them, that they feel are not necessary or productive being shared in the players spaces.
So it is sort of like there is a lack of 'structures' within the coa 'people' element of the system, to help reinforce essential principles perennially as shifts redesigns and changes are happening, etc.
In some ways, its like having a huge amount of information, that is like... not always accessible (ie say when certain players aren't accessible) so since not all of the important information can be re-arisen simply from sort of superficial chatter, certain important things may be missing from some of these conversations.
A lot of excellent things have been stickied in the forums.
A lot of excellent things have been reupdated in the wiki.
But essentially the 'prime dogma' of core 'coa truths' is essentially 'implicitly known' by some of the 'old guard' and not really necessarily accessible to the 'new visitors/supplicants of the faith.'
The CoA religion falters because it is not preached among living devotees, and so the CoA Gods' powers wains... :P
I think the book 'the fifth discipline' talks a little bit about 'institutional memory' and has some tools for mapping systems and processes and designing mini-games to test features principles and processes etc to implement 'slow and small change' that has been tested before being scaled up and distributed broadly, etc.
So I think a small useful change that might create positive long terms changes, would be making sure certain fundamentals are available and accessible easily to people without too much /noise /work, ie very simple, well summarized, well cross-linked for those who need to search or read further, ie things like having little tables of contents like they tend to do in wikipedia pages that gives a sense of the present information available, and maybe even stubs or notes about work or information that still needs to be done.
So, not 'pruning' the information too much, but kind of creating more 'top level summaries' and making sure the most current, accurate information is what people find first, hopefully, at least in the most universal common basic essential things.
The forum with stickies does some of that, the wiki does some of that, so that is pretty good.
So the part about 'self-organizing' requires the organism to 'know itself' better (in this case, the organism being the 'entity' "CoA" consisting of the playerbase (including dms etc))
So this is part of the communication that I think maybe is not working in as good channels/ protocols/ routines/ habits in some ways. There are definitely some good habits.
Sometimes the template of how living organisms function in general, are sort of useful metaphors for how these systems/ self-awareness/ homeostasis /survival instincts and mechanisms as relating to keeping an emergent entity like the pw 'CoA' to sort of try to analyze where 'applying self-regulation and receiving feedback' are not working, ie hurt foot, stay off foot, , hungry need find food, tired need to sleep... making a little map of what some of these processes are for CoA might help in considering what protocols (habits or routines etc) might be useful in kind of like keeping certain things kind of balanced, etc.
One mode of self awareness in a digital world might be simply a statistics log of say keyword hits, etc. Meta-analysis of this sort of data, when enough exists, etc sometimes leads to useful insights.
I do not necessarily expect anyone from CoA (or myself) will necessarily be able to do, or choose, to do this.
But at its barebones, that is kind of like something that can give an idea of a system, ie really stripped down summaries with a clear sort of framing or question so the relation of information to the context available is useful for what people want to know, ie health of the system functioning based on its kind of 'system goals', which might be playerbase fun at core, but might be able to be broken down into sub-goals or dependencies, and maybe even prerequisites or systems which needs to be working in order for this to happen, etc.
wow late night ranting. sorry guys.
if it is ok and the thread is still here later maybe I will come back to this later.
my own brain gets confuddled thinking about this stuff, so it will probably take me awhile to try to think through some of this one my own. so my intent, if this is welcome, would be to just poke a little bit at this every week or so maybe, or every month I don't know a good timeframe. Anyways I could imagine once there is more analysis, more directed questions, and possibly polls to get player base input, might be more useful.
The poll being useful in that it is a way of summarizing a lot of information in a really short way, sometimes. Observing changes to polls over time is sometimes useful, also.
ie: 'Are people having fun?'; or even "On a scale of 1-10, how much fun are you having right now?"
ok i hope this is ok that I'm poking at this stuff on here.