Community-Driven Development (CDD) is an evolving methodology that blends participatory governance with a festival-like approach to create a living legal constitution. This process combines a professional event team, citizens’ assemblies, and transparent archiving to ensure that the creation of legal frameworks is inclusive, dynamic, and community-owned.
Community-Driven Development (CDD) is a methodology that blends Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) practices, and the power of generative AI to create a collaborative and evolving development process. This approach leverages a federated wiki as a central hub for capturing the community’s domain knowledge and ubiquitous language.
# Core Principles
- **Domain-Driven Collaboration**: Begin by involving stakeholders from across the community to define the core domain concepts. Use a federated wiki to document the ubiquitous language and ensure everyone has a shared understanding of the domain.
- Behavior-Driven Scenarios: Once the domain language is established, use BDD tools (like Cucumber or Behave) to create living documentation in the form of natural language scenarios. These scenarios serve both as executable tests and as clear, user-friendly specifications.
- Generative AI Support: Integrate generative AI to help transform stakeholder conversations into initial BDD scenarios. The AI can suggest scenarios based on community dialogues, making it easier to turn discussions into concrete tests.
- Agentic Coding Workflow: Only after the community-driven scenarios are established do you move on to coding. Developers use agent-based workflows to implement the features, ensuring that code is always aligned with the community-defined behaviors.
## Why Community-Driven Development? CoDD places the community at the heart of the development process. By grounding software development in collaboratively defined domain knowledge and using living documentation, it ensures that the software truly reflects the needs and language of its users.
## Core Elements - **Curated Annual Festival**: At the heart of the CDD process is an annual event, curated by a professional team known as the VisionFish. This team of about 42 organizers is arranged in specialized subgroups and functions like a conference or art festival team. They organize the event, highlight and promote the best local constitutional projects, and award prizes to outstanding initiatives. - **From Curation to Community Ownership**: Initially, the process is curated like an art festival, with the VisionFish making opinionated choices to set the stage. Over time, the governance of the event itself evolves towards full community ownership. Each year, the community has more input into how the event is run, making the process increasingly bottom-up. - **Citizens’ Assemblies for Decision-Making**: Key decisions and governance changes are gradually handed over to citizens’ assemblies. These assemblies are designed to be diverse and representative, with members selected through random or democratic means. This ensures that the decision-making process becomes more inclusive and that the community has a real voice in shaping the constitution. - **Transparent Archiving**: All discussions, interviews, and decisions are archived on a globally accessible, transparent ledger. This archive is licensed under a not-for-profit community license and is open to analysis by academics, journalists, and the public. This radical transparency builds trust and allows anyone to propose improvements based on documented evidence. ## Why This Approach? This multi-tiered approach ensures that the creation of the legal constitution is both structured and flexible. The curated festival model provides initial momentum and engagement, the evolution towards citizens’ assemblies ensures growing community ownership, and the transparent archiving guarantees accountability and openness. Each year, the process iterates and improves, turning the creation of the constitution into a living, evolving work of collective art and governance.
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