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Proposals
The procedures to follow when making a proposal for a new project for Theoretic.
Location to Develop
After logging into your account, create a "page" for the goals and guidelines for your new project in this "proposals" folder. After you think you have a good draft, "publish" the document using the "state" drop-down menu near the top right corner of the page. Then other Members will review your draft, comment on it, and help you refine it into a solid proposal.
Finally, assuming all goes well, the Membership will vote on whether to accept your proposal as a new project. The details of this voting have not been worked out yet, but the first time we need to do it will be a good time to develop them :-)
General vs. Specific
When creating a new project, it is always best to have the focus and goal be very specific as opposed to broad and general. Avoid projects that are open-ended or contain many different possible solutions.
When there are multiple ways that a problem could be solved, and they are all very different, it is best to discuss the many options as proposals here, then create projects for the most viable or interesting ideas individually.
An example of this is the early "Emoticons" project. A problem that faced it is whether to keep the project general and develop the many different ideas for handling emoticons, or to simply take the most popular and viable idea and develop that as the sole purpose of the project. It was decided that it would refocus on the lead solution, called Emoticon Skins.
Using this "small and specific" mentality, every project can start with something simple and rapidly improve on it using many minor changes.
Project Phases
Another issue to take into account is the different "phases" to any effort. These Phases are steps to be taken in order after the project has been approved. Phases that may be taken into account when planning the project are:- Briefly researching related and similar efforts, constructing a list of them, before the project even starts building requirements or the specification.
- Specify requirements the project must satisfy in order for it ever to be considered successful.
- As the project is being developed, create "test implementations" to try and see how the specification needs to be improved or how proposals would work.
- As the project is being finished, the advocacy phase begins, in order to implement the results of the project in the real world.
Project Sections
Each Project should have the following sections, in order to help organize and standardize all of the information associated with the Project.- Problem that needs to be solved
- Vision for how to solve it
- Requirements for success
- Specification
- Resources (FAQs, Glossary, Links, etc.)
- Unresolved Issues being discussed
- News on the progress of the project
