At Drupalcon, there was a recurring theme of "do-ocracy". Simply explained, a "Do-ocracy" is Drupal's version of a meritocracy. Well, it's not even so much Drupal's version, as how people perceive the way that Drupal works, or how they choose to explain what a meritocracy is. Being involved with Habari and our own brand of meritocracy, I'm glad that they've come up with their own ridiculous term to explain how their project works.

As part of the definition of meritocracy on Wikipedia, you have this:

In a meritocracy, society rewards (by wealth, position, and social status) those who show talent and competence as demonstrated by past actions or by competition.

That's the ideal scenario. But what the folks presenting do-ocracies at Drupalcon are advocating is something slightly different. They're giving wealth, position, and social status (or whatever the open source equivalent is) to people who simply "do", not by people who show talent and competence. That is, your work needs to be of no merit, you simply need to do it. That's not right.

Shouldn't there be some implication that a meritocracy involves contributions of some merit? I expect that the Drupal project would choose to award additional project rights and responsibilities based not solely on volume of work, but on its usefulness or importance to the community. Some will point out that this treads a somewhat dangerous road.

The main reason this is controversial is that there needs to be someone or a group that decides what has merit. Who is to say that one person's 35-page dissertation on the virtue of the l() function has more or less merit than a patch that enables OpenID logins? And how do you even start making those comparisons of worth?

I think that's where the cop-out is that leads to this do-ocracy. I think people see that difficulty and are unable or unwilling, most likely because they don't want to subject themselves to the resulting community abuse from their decisions, to decide what things have merit. Instead they simply give credit to anyone who can "do". So what's wrong with that?

The result of the do-ocracy is at least twofold. First, the people who do a lot, and I'm talking volumes, get more credit, regardless of the quality of their work. One might think that if you wrote a resource full of errors and misconceptions that it would be shunned. But in a do-ocracy, this should not be the case. Deciding on merit would result in that outcome. Bottom line: People are getting credit for contributing crap.

Second, the level of acceptance of anything done is high. So many people contributing a lot of code results in a lot of code (and documentation, and testing, and... etc.) being accepted into the main project that is not good. Bottom line: The project gets filled up with unvetted crap.

In the case of Habari, where we like to think of ourselves as implementing more of a meritocracy, the value of the contribution is considered before it is accepted. This is my controversial point in my own social group. I personally believe that contributions need to be qualified for acceptance. We should accept all contributions, but there should be no expectation that every contribution has merit. There are some in the community that assume that their contributions should be accepted blindly as in a do-ocracy, and that they should be awarded due credit for simply contributing, even if the quality of the project is reduced by their contribution, the functionality they've provided is not welcome by the community, or their contribution is not in line with the direction of the project as a whole.

The inevitable question is, who decides what has merit? Usually, it's decided by the existing managing members of the project. This is how meritocracies come to be thought of as "old-boy's clubs". If you weren't in at the beginning, then you're already a step behind in getting your contributions accepted. You're being excluded because you're not "in the club". The problem with this thinking is that this is how these organizations are supposed to work, and it's beneficial that they do so.

Think about it. The body of organizers is self-selecting. Why would a management committee elect to include another member who didn't share their philosophical beliefs about the project? They wouldn't! Likewise, they would not accept contributions as having merit that do not also align with the originally established philosophy and direction of the project. Granted, those beliefs would get diluted and permute over time, but there would be such an established culture that new contributions would necessarily have to fit into the consistency established by the early members.

I've exaggerated many things in this post, especially about the Drupal process of accepting contributions, simply to make my point that a do-ocracy is not a meritocracy, and that people who consider meritocracies as working primarily on an unvetted, volume-based submission queue are wholly incorrect.

My Home Owner's Association has a web site that's pretty sparse. I thought that I would take a bit of time to create a new site for them using Drupal, and increase my Drupal skills. There's nothing like throwing yourself into the fire to get out of the comfort of the frying pan, you know? So I was thinking about some features that I might like as a home member of the association, and how I might accomplish them with Drupal.

The first thing I'm going to want to do is get a theme that pleases by aesthetic sensibilities. It's not that the Drupal themes are ugly per se, but they all seem to offer the content in the same way - with the admin stuff exposed for anyone to see. I think that I want the full administrative side of the site to look different than the typical member-facing side. Rather than providing all of the functionality of Drupal the way Drupal does, I would like to select specifically what features appear on the site, and display them in an appealing fashion.

There are some features that I would like to offer. I think that a message board is important for our community. If people could post events to the board and others were subscribed to it, we could all be aware of things in the community that were of interest to us. Having a kind of "classified" section would be nice, too. People could sell items to other people in the community, and offer services, like babysitting. (Oh, that would be fantastic.) It would be extra interesting if you could subscribe to only those channels of interest that you wanted, so then I could eliminate from my feeds things like Historic Yellow Springs events, in which I have no interest.

It would be nice if we had a good event calendar. We could keep track of things like when construction is due and when the nearly-monthly lawn treatment is set to happen. There are some people in the development that take care of the plants around the entrances in the common areas. With a calendar, we would have an idea of when they are active so that other people could help.

Posting photos of events in the community could be useful, but I don't know of many things that have happened that would have photos. The one even on the existing site is for cleaning up part of the walking trail, an event that you wouldn't even have known was taking place if not for word of mouth. See? We need a calendar.

The site would need to have association information. This includes phone numbers for all of the companies with whom we have service contracts would be great - trash, recycling, sewage, landscape, snow removal, etc. Today I noticed that once again the mower people were laying around all day, with their parked trucks blocking a lane in the main through-way, then suddenly started mowing around 4:45pm before everyone started coming home. Not that I mind seeing topless Mexican men laying in the common areas with hats over their faces, but... No, wait, I do.

There should also be web-based forms for requests common in the association, for things like outside maintenance or requests for pools. The site could keep a record of the requests and the request documents, which could be uploaded as PDF or TIFF and referenced as-needed. But for common applications, a web form would be great - allowing more flexible use of property in a more timely manner. We're already using the site for board elections, so I think this is a natural step to take.

Minutes from the association board meetings could be published in a timely manner. It bugs me that I have to wait until the next meeting for the board to approve minutes from last month. Without attending the meetings, I have no way to know if I should act. What should happen is the minutes should be compiled by the secretary, then published to the web privately for the board to approve electronically. When the minutes are approved, which could be two days after the board meeting, the system would put them online for viewing by the association members.

It might be neat to have a map of the development in flash. Show the homes that have registered users in a different color. Let you measure distances on the walking trail.

There are a lot of good directions to take the site, and the existing site is pretty lackluster. I think it needs some love. I'll have to see what I can come up with.