This site's content was compiled from 1993 to 2006. Beyond that, Google is your friend.
Lyn Headley
A drop-in web aplication used for understanding and empowering on-line communities through the democratic process, based on a completely open source foundation.
It's a community-creation web toolkit focused around issues, and their resolution through voting. Each referendum installation defines a community tree of parent-child groups, where all members of a child group are also members of all of that child's parent groups. Members can create new child groups and propose, discuss and vote on issues pertinent to their groups.
From the distribution:
What's the problem with all those tree-based hierarchies out there? They're too big! Nobody knows everything; we all have our passions and interests, but they only extend so far. Referendum is designed to allow its administrators the freedom to structure their communities in the way they see fit.
Start with a community you _know_, that you're involved in and passionate about. Base it on any common interest. If you look carefully, and the community is large enough, you will see that it is composed of many smaller communities, where each child shares interests with its parents. Spend some _time_ identifying all the important parent groups and some big child groups.
Remember that the group tree will evolve, as any member is allowed to add a new child group at any time. But the Root groups are up to you. NOBODY but the site administrator can add a parentless group to the system. That means you define the spirit of the system as a whole, so you've got to do it right, because once you release it to the world people will build on whatever you've started.
So let's take a simple example, say the animal-lovers community. You spend a few hours with a pen and paper and come up with the following root groups (actually I spent 5 minutes on this; think much harder):
In effect you are saying that ALL animal lovers will belong to one of the above three groups. If they don't fit into the above you don't want them on your website.
Then you might go and define some child groups to get people started. I'll notate each child's parents in parentheses:
And there you go. You've got a minimal group hierarchy and you're ready to turn it loose on the world. Note that a group can have multiple parents, and also note that this hiearchy is too basic to be true. Put some thought into it!
Now, you're wondering "how do I actually create the root groups?" First, make sure you've built and installed referendum. If so, there should be a program called rootgroups in the ref_src/bin directory. That's what you use to create the root groups; all you do is type in a bunch of group names and descriptions, one after the other. Child groups should be created from the web.
