Week 2 Shift: Reading the room

Thirty days of your project's public record, read closely, turned into a map of the rules nobody wrote down

1 March 2027

Fieldwork. You will spend most of this Shift reading things other people got told off for.

Before the Shift#

Pull thirty days of your project’s public record. On Wikipedia that is the article histories and talk archives for a topic area you care about; on Reddit the modlog and removed submissions; on OSM the changeset comments and reverts; on a repository the closed-without-merge pull requests.

In the Shift#

Build the map in two columns. On the left, what the community says its rules are. On the right, what it actually removes. Work only from decisions — a rule is enforced if you can point at a case, and a rule you believe in without a case is a hunch and goes in a third column marked as such.

The delta is the finding. Expect it to be large, and expect at least one rule in it to be uncomfortable to state plainly.

Pair up for the last thirty minutes and read someone else’s map for a different project. The rules will differ; the delta will not.

Afterwards#

The norm map is the first entry in your Contribution Log, and week 3’s edit is supposed to survive contact with it.