Guides vs Realizers
Dear all :)
It is awesome to see the platofrm! I have two design-related questions which I hope do not come too late:
1) Shouldn't only Needs have unique Guides? My proposal is that all the Responsibilities underneath a certain Need have the same Guide. I am happy to elaborate on my thinking but the basic premise is that accountability for a certain Responsibility is with its Realizer. That Realizer works on having the Responsibility done and has the Need's Realizer as a de facto guide who supports her in fulfiling the Responsibility (+ Reality Guide of that Need on top)! In the end, it is the Need's Realizer who is accountable for the overall fufilment of the Need--together with all the subordinate Responsibilities. From my perspective, adding an additional organizational layer of additional Guides here is detrimental.
2) Is it so that Responsibilities have only one "fulfils" connection at maximum? And all the other connections would then be "depends on"? That makes the most sense to me and wanted to check if that is the premise here.
Have a great day!
Piotr :)
Hugi Ásgeirsson · Wed 27 Dec 2017 5:00PM
Right, good points!
1) When I first started designing the architecture, this was my thinking too. However, two factors brought us to the way it is now, with guides for both needs and responsibilities.
First of all, it comes down to the flow when creating responsibilities. Anyone can create responsibilities, and all responsibilities must have a guide at all times. There are then three possible outcomes; first outcome is that you become the guide of the responsibility you create and stay guide until the responsibility gets reassigned, the second outcome is that you can assign someone to be guide when creating the responsibility, the third way is that the need guide automatically becomes responsibility guide.
Borderland is a place where we generally don't like to "be assigned" responsibilities just because someone feels they are needed. It adds additional stress to the role of being a guide that anyone can make something your problem. I don't like that process.
Rather, I'd prefer that this is handled with a more human process: Random Borderling creates responsibility to fulfil need, becomes guide. Borderling discusses with need guide, and if guide agrees, guide takes over responsibility guide role.
Second, the current system also allows us to have "specialists" guides for certain responsibilities for a need while others are handled by another guide. An example of when this could be necessary could be this case:
Need: Maintain good relations with the municipality, Guide: Andreas
Responsibility: Point of contact for sound complaints, Guide: Andreas
Responsibility: Negotiating group purchase of local produce, Guide: Andreas
Responsibility: Negotiate terms and price of electricity, Guide: Hampus
In this case, it could be that Hampus has specialist knowledge on what's needed in order to realize the electricity responsibility. Perhaps Hampus is also guiding the Need electricity, so it makes sense that guides this too.
2) No, that is not the case. There are as many fulfil as needed, usually more than one.
Depends on is used to create connections between different needs.