Name? 💭💡

[nelsonic]

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose 🌹
By any other word would smell as sweet;" 🍬
~ Bill S.

Naming things is often the most difficult part of the project.
This is a widely known fact in the tech community see: martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

Note: We're not suggesting that naming variables, functions or "Classes" in a given project is difficult, that's easy; just give things descriptive names based on what they do so the humans can understand the code! And let the compiler/interpreter worry about shortening the names ...
Naming software projects where you want a descriptive name that isn't "taken"... that's hard!)

You can have a super awesome project that has incredible innovation and creativity
and if its' name is off in any way (e.g: bland, uninspiring or unmemorable) or worse "taken" by some other project that has more "traction", most of the effort you made can be wasted. 😞

Note: I'm not suggesting for a moment that we are in the situation where the name of the project, or the lack of a good one for that matter, is affecting its' "success", just opening this issue to log that it's something we have thought about extensively and not yet found a satisfactory answer ... 💭

The name "home" has been our "working title" during development, a way of referring to the project internally. Most people have not given a thought to the name, and that's a good thing because we don't want naming to distract anyone right now. However some members of the @dwyl community have voiced a concern that "home" might not be a good "production" title. I see the point they are making; "home" is not exactly something we can trademark and get "brand recognition" for ... 🙄
At the same time, I get frustrated when people are dissatisfied with the name "home" but offer no suggestion of their own as an alternative. It's easy to say something is "bad" (or "not good" enough) whereas it's far more constructive/helpful to offer a suggestion for improvement. Mostly, I feel that people don't know they can make suggestions and that all ideas are very much welcome!

With that in mind, we are thinking of creating way of letting people anonymously suggest names and vote on the ones they like the most. Anonymous because we don't want it to be a personality contest where the person gets the votes, rather we want each name to be evaluated on it's own merits. 💡

Todo

Create a form that allows people to:

• 1. Suggest a Name Idea: 📝
  • Name*? Make a suggestion for a name. [max 20 characters?]
  • Why*? Give the "pitch" for the name. i.e. "home, because everyone already knows what it is".
  • Why Not? If you can think of any counter-argument for the name suggestion.

    This might not be immediately obvious to people, but as we learn from Adam Grant's book "Originals", carefully considering and dismantling people's "objections" during your "pitch" is the best way of showing people that you have already thought through their "it won't work because of xyz" argument and you aren't oblivious to the "downside" of your idea(s).
    see: https://github.com/dwyl/home/#why-it-will-never-work-risks-and-mitigation
    I think it's fair to not require people to consider the "cons" or "common objections" of their name suggestion, so we will make this field optional, but it's something we have to think about. We need to apply a "devil's advocate" to each name suggestion.
    For example: We need to translate names into various languages to avoid rude words. 😕

  • Any Other Details. Are any of the TLDs available? e.g: all variants of home.com home.etc are "taken" and it would be impossible to trademark the word "home" in any capacity.
• 2. Vote on the suggestions ✅
  • We need to decide if it's single candidate voting ("one person one vote for one name", i.e. the simplest approach to voting) OR if we are going to allow people to state multiple preferences in the order they prefer (more complex but also more representative)
    see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
    I have many thoughts on voting systems and can discuss them at length, but I want to hear everyone else's thoughts on this, is it worth the effort to record multiple preferences?
  • When displaying the list of name suggestions for voting, the list order should be randomised on each refresh to ensure that we are unbiased in the presentation.
  • Should there be a limit to the number of suggestions? (or a deadline for submission?)

Asking people to describe a fault with their name suggestion is like the infamous (and somewhat redundant) interview question: "what is your biggest weakness?"
People invariably attempt to give a quality ("I'm too much of a perfectionist") or if they are honest and say "procrastination" they try to "spin" it to sound like a quality, e.g: "I spend too much time analysing a problem which means I only get started on the solution quite late. This has played in my favour when selecting technology because it means I benefit from all the latest advancements and don't have to refactor any of my code before it goes into production" ... ⏳
In other words: they only do their work "last minute" before the deadline and it has "worked" for them.
I may be going off topic a bit here and @TomFrankly has a several great tips and videos on this subject.
But the point is this: thinking about things from a "Why NOT?" perspective is a great way to question your own reasoning for an idea and helping others to overcome the "FUD" they might have.

Obviously we run the risk of people making a suggestion and voting for "HouseyMcHouseFace" ... 😜
So we may need to "reserve the right" to not select the "winner" of the popular vote.

General Applicability of Voting System

One of the features we are going to need when fostering a community is the ability to present a topic and collect the votes of the members in an effortless and reliable way.
This might seem like a simple problem to solve, up-voting has been done in online forums since the beginning of the internet. But it's not that simple, especially if/when the stakes are high.
How do we prevent people from using email aliases to register multiple times and skew the vote?

Voting can be as simple as "what food should we eat at our community meal?" 🥗
to "should our country exit a common market?" 🙄

Estonia is a great leader in this area: https://www.zdnet.com/article/online-voting-now-estonia-teaches-the-world-a-lesson-in-electronic-elections
Interested comments on security in HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19352740

Obvs we don't need to build anything ultra-secure for capturing votes for the potential name-change of @home ... but we should still be curious about voting systems if we are going to use one in the future for making democratic decisions.

We don't need to consider generalising our voting system yet ... but if we do build something for this, we should at least consider the potential exploits an online voting system can subjected to.

Is there a viable Open Source tool we can use for this without having to write any code? 🤔

[nelsonic]

One of the suggested "statuses" for GitHub is: "Working from home" ...

[nelsonic]

'member this documentary?

https://youtu.be/jqxENMKaeCU?t=85

The documentary is a bit "slow" ... if you haven't watched it, consider speeding it up.

It's nuts how not much has changed (if anything the situation is worse) since it was published in 2009!

This number is conservative!

• https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/certainty-human-driven-climate-change
• https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/climate-change-is-a-threat-multiplier
• https://youtu.be/17aE91SBMoY

Note: (I'm) still 100% open to alternative/better names. 💭

[nelsonic]

Let's get this one out of the way: We're definitely not calling it "Housey McHouseFace". 😉

Some comedy genius already did that: https://twitter.com/hashtag/houseymchouseface 🤦‍♂

If ever there were a lesson to be learned from letting random strangers on the internet decide the name of your thing ... 🙄 What You Get When You Let the Internet Decide: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatface-what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html

For the record: I still laugh each time I think of them having to name the research vessel "Boaty McBoatface" ... I just think the joke has run it's course and the imitations are nowhere near as funny

As this Reddit comment puts it: 👍

https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/9lcsx9/this_house_is_named_housey_mchouseface/