On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 1:25 AM, John Plocher <john.plocher at gmail.com> wrote: >>> Again, this is what I'd been assuming we all understood all along. It's up >>> to every "collective" to decide what justifies Contributor status; >> >> Which contributor status? Are you talking about >> >> 1. The auth/website roles of Developer and Affiliate? > > As I said many times before, the current website's treatment of roles > and permissions is fundamentally misguided and needs to be ignored for > this discussion. ?Doing otherwise simply confuses things.
Not so. Pretending that the internal operations and governance of each collective can be ignored trivializes the day-to-day work of every collective. And - my belief here - when collectives are managing their own affairs, it is *this* definition of the roles that come first to mind, because that's what people work with every single day, rather than once a year. >> 2. The constitutional role of Contributor as defined in the >> electorate collectives? > > Exactly. > > Operationally, collectives are the only place where contributions are > made and the only place anyone can verify that they were actually > made. ?We are creating a system that is driven off of contributions (a > meritocracy), so it is important that, at the core grassroots level, > the collectives manage their acceptance and acknowledgment. Collectives manage their own contributions. Collectives manage themselves. That doesn't imply that all collectives must manage the global electorate. > You are making a false simplification when you say that contributions > and their associated merit are only part of the Electorate and not > part of the local governance of a collective. Not at all. But we're here talking about the electorate. > You can't have it both ways - if you care about building a community > where collectives themselves are governed by a meritocracy, then you > must build in a structure that recognizes and rewards the generation > of merit. ?If that structure ignores the merit associated with > contributions, then nothing anywhere in the community can be based on > contributions, because there will be no mechanisms for tracking them > or valuing them or acknowledging them. The trouble is that there are two definitions of contributorship in play here. There's the "this person has contributed to this collective" and "this person gets the vote". Failing to recognize these as conceptually distinct will tie you up in knots; one way of looking at the problem we're addressing here is how to reconcile the two. >> If the definition of "Contributor" here is 1 (Developer/Affiliate) then each >> collective awards it as it sees fit, and the idea that the OGB can dictate >> and micro-manage the internal operational affairs of each and every >> collective seems absurd. > > It is the OGB's job to set and enforce community norms as part of its > governance of the community. ?Each collective awards "contributorship > acknowledgments" as it sees fit following the guidance and policies > set forth by the OGB. ?This isn't absurd - it is how every form of > society (other than anarchy) works. Only if that's the structure we wish to enforce on the community. We're only talking about global elections. That's a global thing, and doesn't imply that we have to micro-manage the internal operations of each collective. >> If the definition of "Contributor" here is 2 (each collective awards voting >> rights), then you effectively force - within the framework as described >> above - each collective to manage the electorate. Why force every collective >> to take on all this bureaucracy for something that the collective itself >> doesn't need? > > This is your blind spot - each collective needs to self identify their > own contributors so they can figure out who their own leaders are. > Remember meritocracy? ?The ones who generate merit by contributing get > to make the decisions in a collective. Which is exactly what I've been saying. And you've cemented my own position by those last three words - '.. in a collective.' >> A. Each collective is free to hand out and remove Developer/Affiliate >> status according to its own rules and desires, with no interference (or >> even guidance) from the OGB. Those roles only have meaning within >> the individual collective they are awarded by. > > I obviously strongly disagree with this. It is self-evident. As far as internal workings of the Nevada community are concerned, whether someone has a role in the Far Wittering OSUG is neither here nor there. >> B. From A, there are - and should not be - any expectation of equivalent >> standards between different collectives, even of the same type; and >> this isn't a problem. > > And this. > >> C. Governance is a global concept; it thus seems to me that it should >> be administered globally rather than locally. > > I disagree again - governance is local to a collective as well. > Global governance simply builds on top of the local governance > mechanism - everyone who is, by right of their contributions, > participating in the local governance of the community can also choose > to join the electorate and participate in the governance of the global > community. But we're not talking about local governance. We're talking about global governance. >> D. We have decided (or are working on this basis) that electoral right >> should be contribution-based; contributions happen at the collective >> level. > > Yup. > >> >> E. We have decided that wanting to take part in governance is a key >> part of awarding the vote. > > We have decided that wanting to take part IN THE GLOBAL governance is > a key part... > We ASSUME that LOCAL governance is merit based as well. > >> >> F. We want to eliminate bureaucracy and complexity. > > But not at the expense of anarchy or chaos. I'm trying to avoid anarchy and chaos. As far as global governance is concerned, that's pretty much where we are; assuming that local governance will automatically happen, that it will happen everywhere to some centrally imposed standards, and each individual collective is sufficiently structured and globally-aware as to be able to manage its global governance responsibilities that you seem intent on forcing upon them, simply seems unrealistic. Such weak foundations will lead to chaos and anarchy at the global level. > I don't think we are converging here. I don't think we are. And the more this discussion makes me think, the more I'm pushed into divergence. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
