On 19/09/12 01:25, Blake Kaplan wrote:
I would like to note that although on paper a meritocracy sounds like a
goal to achieve, it may not be so. From what I have seen, meritocracies
tend to attract like-minded people and consequently drive themselves
against diversity.
Why is this specific to meritocracies? It seems like this is a pretty natural
problem for any community.
Absolutely. We hit the same issue in our social circles, our studies,
everywhere. We always tend to meet people from our own larger circles
and there are some communities you almost never meet.
Diversity? A community like Mozilla is interested in people
interested in software, web, innovation, coolness. It's a big filter
already, a very big one.
The only difference is that Mozilla seems to be a better
meritocracy: your diplomas are not the most important thing.
Seen from the Old World, that's a bit of something I must say: in
France, people with a 20 years career still put their diplomas on
the first line of the resume, in Germany the title (Dr, Eng, etc.)
is present on business cards, in the UK you can almost detect in
which university someone studied based on his/her accent, etc.
Pavlov? Joined Netscape at 16. Peterv? Graphic designer. We have tons
of examples like that and That Is Good. You tainted your hair in mat
blue? Who cares if you bring a lot of value to the organization...
"Never ask truly innovative people to be normal people" - one of my
univ teachers twenty-something years ago
So yes, it's a meritocracy because it's certainly the best system we
can get. Like democracy that is bad system but waaaay better than the
others.
</Daniel>
--
PS: if you're in the US, you can't imagine how subversive I am for
France writing the above...
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