Talk:Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Iteration 1/Resource Allocation/F

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it.

Most likely, new comments will not be taken into account by the new three Working Group members in their work of developing the final Recommendations. You are free however to continue discussing in the spirit of "discussing about Wikipedia is a work in progress". :)

Does anyone who wrote this know what it means?

I ask this question because the "recommendation" is supported by no evidence. "Resource allocation for deliverables needs to draw on Complexity Theory"... why? Simply because something is complex does not make it suitable for evaluations that employ complexity theory. The concepts of "Complexity Theory" and "spaces" were fashionable in academia 5–10 years ago; that's not a licence to throw the terms around. The second bold part advocates "testing, evaluation, iteration", while the following paragraph draws a contrast – "rather than 'tried and tested' approaches". What is a tried and tested approach if it's not one that has been tested and evaluated through an iterative process? If there's to be "a strong focus on sharing lessons learned with the movement", why would we want to throw away tried and tested approaches? Surely we'd want to share them. In short, this recommendation is contradictory and appears to use terminology – "Complexity Theory", "spaces", "iteration" – without justification or indication of sufficient understanding of what they mean. EddieHugh (talk) 21:40, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

On behalf of the working group: complexity theory a framework we have found useful when exploring this issue. As for your second question, there is no contradiction. You can try new ways to do things, evaluate the results, and then iterate. We do want to encourage a desire for innovation, but in a smart way, so that we don't get dazzled for instance by the technology du jour and then have to undergo hard, expensive lessons. It's a delicate balance, but one we believe is worth attempting and investing in. Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) 13:51, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for replying. Something being useful during discussions/initial explorations is very different from making that thing the first sentence of a "recommendation". Again: you need to provide some evidence for why "Resource allocation for deliverables needs to draw on Complexity Theory". At the moment, it looks like someone has read about a theory and then tried to fit a "recommendation" around it.

I suggest changing "rather than 'tried and tested' approaches" to "in addition to 'tried and tested' approaches". It sounds closer to the balance that you seek. EddieHugh (talk) 23:56, 9 September 2019 (UTC)