ReferendumGroupToolkit

referendum is a now discontinued web-based community toolkit which was the basis for the shortlived (defunct) hacktree.org, and was written by LynHeadley

referendum is based on several key features:

Emphasis on voting

All discussion threads are considered possible issues which can be resolved through proposing options and voting. This is useful because often at the end of a thread it is nice to be able to summarize the group's opinion about the discussion. Voting is also much easier than posting, and is a real form of communication. VotingIsGood.

Group Tree

The community is organized as a tree of subgroups. I believe that any sizeable community will display a natural tendency to split into more or less coherent subgroups. hacktree.org was a community of programmers organized by programming language and language characteristics. E.g. the group Eiffel had the parents Static Typing, Object Oriented and Design by contract.

Trust the users

Any member can create a new subgroup at any time

Any member can propose an option for any existing issue

Why is the project over? What caused its demise? Perhaps there are lessons here for us all to learn.