How can I participate in civ.org?
Please see the jobs to be done page for all the ways you can participate. This contributor guide is focused on the forums. You can participate in the forums by doing any of these things:
- Ask a question
- Share your thoughts and opinions
- Upvote someone else’s contribution
- Make a factual claim
- Challenge a factual claim
- Add an idea
- Cite evidence by linking or uploading
- Add a suggestion
- Categorize and tag ideas, thoughts, opinions, claims, and evidence
- Link a news article to a discussion
I saw a proposal and I think it can be better. How do I contribute my idea?
When we have forums working, you can click the ‘idea’ or ‘suggestion’ button, then submit it. For now, you can also use the “contact us” button.
I saw a proposal and I strongly disagree with it. What can I do?
First, identify the part you disagree with — is it the intent, the concept of the proposal, or an implementation detail of the proposal, or something else. Check if someone else already shared the same opinion — if they did, upvote that one instead of posting a duplicate. If someone else shared a similar opinion but you have more to share, post a related opinion about the proposal and share what you disagree with and why. It’s really helpful to call out what you agree with and what you disagree with separately, for example “I agree this is a problem but I disagree about the solution” or “I agree this is a problem but this solution will make things worse because…” or “… this solution won’t solve it because…” or “I disagree with the premise, this isn’t a problem that needs to be solved because…”.
What if people don’t agree about the problems aka modern challenges?
For example, some people think global warming aka climate change is a problem and some people don’t. So how do we talk together?
It’s ok if not everyone agrees. Here is our procedure for resolving these:
If you disagree with a problem statement:
First, share your opinion about disagreeing with the problem, and be sure to state why you think so and point to any evidence that supports your position. If someone else already posted the same thing, please don’t repeat them — just upvote what they already wrote, or cite them and add anything that they didn’t already share. You can watch it and respond to any questions or challenges. It’s good for everyone to know about objections to the problem statement itself, but people who do think it’s a problem are going to continue talking about it, and that’s ok.
Second, watch the topic to see what solutions people come up with. Then, look at those proposals and the impact they would have on you or people you care about. If you think it will have a negative impact, share your objection to the proposal and be specific about what the negative impact will be, why you think it would happen, and link to any evidence that might support your position (for example has something like this been tried and failed already in the past?). You can watch it and respond to any questions or challenges. Remember that objecting to the problem statement itself doesn’t mean you have to object to all the solutions. It’s already understood that anyone who objects to a problem statement itself is probably going to think that any solution of that non-problem will be a waste of time and resources. But if people want to spend their time and resources on it anyway, the next step is to look at their actual proposals and see if there’s anything there that you object to, or that could be better, or at least if there’s anything that can be done so that solution won’t negatively impact you or people you care about.
In particular, an objection like “This is not an important problem, we shouldn’t spend time on it because there are more important problems to solve” is NOT a valid objection because it’s not objecting to the problem or solution presented, it’s objecting to some imagined prioritization of resources and trying to get people to stop talking about something that is interesting or important to them just because you think it’s a waste of time. On THIS platform, if you think a certain topic is a waste of time then don’t spend time on it — you don’t get to tell other people how and where to spend THEIR time. There are many people in the world, and every day there are multitudes of people working on different things. Pick the topics that are important to you and contribute there. This answer is strongly worded because some people use prioritization as a “debate trick” to stop discussion on something they disagree with by redirecting to some unrelated topic. Prioritization is a separate concern and is not a valid objection to a problem statement. If a solution proposal calls for prioritizing resources a certain way, then it is a valid objection to dispute the prioritization in the proposal and to suggest an alternative prioritization. However, do not attempt to stop a discussion entirely on the claim that there are more important things to be working on.