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Main article: The subjective and community ratings system
Policies are plans of action and guidelines for solving problems. They are not necessarily specific solutions to individual problems although they can result in that when implemented. They are usually not quite as general as a mission statement (which often conveys no meaning) but they don’t always tell you “how” to do anything in particular. They just guide you in a direction, eg
Our policy is to promote human rights around the world by aiding human rights advocates in countries where we can make the most difference.
Some steps in policy making might be:
- Identify the issue. This starts by users submitting issues that they feel haven’t been addressed or whose direction is unclear.
- Of the issue that seems most important, hold a vote to take up a policymaking round for it.
- If the vote succeeds, start by soliciting policies for the chosen issue.
- Aggregator blends duplicates together and creates a coherent set of policy choices.
- The floor is opened for comment and review on the aggregated policies.
- A separate vote, perhaps via committee, may take place to approve changes.
- Users vote on the policy choices through a cardinal vote.
- An optimization round takes place with aggregator blending high ranking policies.
- A new vote is taken on the new blended policies. The highest one wins.
- Return to 2 and repeat for the next most important issue.
A similar process can take place for policy implementation details and laws. It is likely that every community will have its own policy-making process, decided on by that community, through some consensus mechanism. Perhaps the first thing a community will need to do is set up a constitution or some basic bylaws to govern how consensus is achieved. Once these fundamentals are addressed the community can move forward with policy-making in general.