In terms of presentation, @boopboop and I are happy to rename it. We never had strong feelings for calling it a competition.
Let’s make a firm separation between presentation and process.
In terms of process, what we are proposing here is a process for members to choose the featured playlist each month for the front of the resonate player. Folks make nominations, folks vote to show support for nominations, the one who has the most support becomes the playlist – there’s even a term limit of one month.
If this sounds familar, it’s because its an election process. Whether we are electing a playlist, a person to a role, etc, this is fundamentally a democratic process. It’s a limited one – there are many other processes available for making decisions together which are more refined. We can experiment with different things, but this particular format is a start.
So let’s take a moment to acknowledge that the process being proposed is more democratic than any process which has happened in the past years of Resonate concerning how artists are featured.
Up until very recently, the featured playlist “Staff Picks” has always been determined by resonate’s volunteers on a do-ocratic basis, with an overall goal to make the playlist diverse. There were Staff Picks where I called on volunteers to submit picks, few were submitted, I ended up having to pick most of the playlist myself. It was a lot of work for me and others who at other times found themselves curator, and terrible from a transparency and participation standpoint.
So this new process is a step forward. For presentation on the player and newsletter, we can state “The featured playlist for next month will be voted on by members. Try out the new playlist tool and submit your own.” – something like that. We are introducing folks to playlists as a feature on Resonate – its brand new! And I don’t think we need to stress to ourselves to “focus on discovery”. The whole catalog is discovery for most of us!
If we want people to be able to participate, both in the voting and in the playlist creation, we need to keep the rules and creative limitations as minimal as possible.
If we want to open a working group to explore the questions you raised above, let’s do it. I think it would be a great discussion, but what’s the timeline and what would the group do other than discuss? Let’s have a clear sense of that first. How does someone join the group? What do they make decisions about? Transparency must apply here as well.
All of these discussions will be ongoing ones. Broadly, we need to move to more transparent, responsive, and iterative processes throughout Resonate rather than treating such big questions as things we will have a perfect vision for before acting. Smaller cycles. Make small steps, reflect on them – “was this in the right direction? yes? did it cause any problems? no?” – then we do more of it.
To quote the sociocratic questions: “Does this do harm?” “Is it safe enough to try?” There was a wise objection that calling this a competition could do harm. That removed, is this experiment safe enough to try? @melis_tailored @richjensen @LLK