- We use the Optimism Town Hall snapshot space for scheduling specific topics in advance for each event. If a topic is selected via the rules of Cagendas in the Optimism Town Hall Snapshot Space (ie it has the most votes on Monday at 17 UTC), then it is scheduled as the main/first topic for the upcoming town hall event. This is useful when someone wants to schedule a topic in advance for a particular event, give people a few days to prepare for the topic, and have time to organize promotions around it.
- We use the OPTOPICS snapshot space for organizing an ongoing list of topics that we can discuss at any event. This is useful when there’s a topic that someone wants to discuss but it’s not very time sensitive, could be discussed at other events in the future, or is proposed within a few days of the event. It provides more flexibility, allowing the community to choose the topic(s) at any point after Monday at 17 UTC while still having a well-organized and democratic process for choosing the agenda.
If there are no topic proposals for a week specifically in the town hall space, then I think that we should discuss the top voted topic on the optopics snapshot space. Over the past few weeks nobody else has been proposing topics and there hasn’t been anything in particular that i’ve felt the need to schedule in advance, so I’ve been proposing optopics each week prior to 17 UTC on Monday to provide a clear process for choosing topics and ensure that we don’t have a situation where there are no topic proposals in the town hall space each week.
At some point in the future, it would probably be helpful to modify the rules of Cagendas to add that if no topics are proposed that week then we’ll play OPTOPICS instead. This could also help in situations where an approved topic for that week is deemed to be sufficiently discussed at the event (ie if an approved topic is finished after 15 minutes). I’ve thought about making a proposal to the Optimism Fractal council about this and we could do it at any time really. I think it would be a good change that would simplify and clarify the rules, but I’m not sure if it would use the same rules of OPTOPICS for topic transitions. So it would take a bit of thinking to design well and it doesn’t seem like a very big priority at the moment.