Kerry Miller wrote: Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:23:49 +0000 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kerry Miller) Subject: [IFWP] Re: nobody has been expelled... >Joop, >> I am not IDNO's chair, I'm just the guy who has called IDNO into life and >> is trying to nurse it to a proper democratic existence. >> It is not yet democratic, because it has no officers yet of any sort to >> share the responsibility of keeping it alive. > >IDNO may not yet be democratic, but its not a question of having >officers -- the responsibility rests with the membership, not their >delegates, or the person who 'set it up.' (Indeed, I would argue that >the *office* of an automated listserver already cripples the >democratic impulse; on an 'authentic' list everyone would >resubscribe after each post. One's first responsibility, therefore, in >this age of 'servers' is to *overcome the 'bureaucratic machinery' >which seduces us to adopt *unquestioningly elitist roles.) This is a very insightful point. The sooner the members themselves are allowed to speak again the better. (They were doing allright, well on their way to approve the rules by which this constituency will live, until about a week ago two well known "observers" appeared and the members themselves fell silent) The office of list-moderator should not be combined with that of organizer. Neither with that of election committee. How true how the hierachic positions of power created by the server systems tempt those who happen so sit at the top end to abuse the instant power of the switch. It is much worse for those who, by dint of years of being in such a position, want to institutionalize that hierarchy that the systems have enabled. Right in front of us is the unfortunate example of the DNS. --Joop Teernstra LL.M.-- , bootstrap of the Cyberspace Association, the constituency for Individual Domain Name Owners http://www.idno.org
