I like these lines of thought, Abd ul-Rahman. "Communities-of-practice" are similar to what, as I understand it, you are proposing and thinking.
A substantial amount of thinking and experience has now emerged around the communities-of-practice idea, and several such communities have received significant benefit from so organizing themselves. Many of these have been on-line creations. Cheers, Lawry -----Original Message----- From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com] Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2009 1:36 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-L@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Professors who have no interest in cold fusion At 12:15 PM 10/25/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote: >Many political leaders are aware that cold fusion is real, but they >have not lifted a finger to help it because it is too controversial >and they do not want to risk their credibility. This is appalling. Well, perhaps. However, the real problem is in the very concept of "political leaders." In a sane system, they are only servants. Not rubber stamps for popular opinion, but servants chosen for their character and intelligence, those who will use their intelligence to serve. So if action A is being considered, and is popular, and the servant believes that A is bogus and will fail, he or she will inform the employer. Us. And we need to be, collectively, smart enough to trust those we have chosen to be trustworthy, at least to trust them enough to respect their advice. We can still say, "We've decided to do it, having considered your valued advice, and if we are wrong, we will not only not blame you, we will remember that you were right." No smart employer hires Yes-men, except maybe to sweep the floor, and even then.... who threw away the Case carbon? So ... how to develop mass intelligence? It's been considered an insoluble problem. I don't think it is. But if we believe that it's insoluble, we certainly won't find a solution, and we will reject proposed solutions out of hand, or at least not waste time considering them. Kind of like cold fusion, eh? Indeed. That's what got me here. It's simply one more example. I'm trying to connect a community, call it my "customers." This community is formed to advise me how to serve them, but I make my own decisions, I'm not going to simply poll them and do whatever is most popular. But whatever I do will be transparent, so... if I get really stupid in my old age, someone else can take the position independently. Nothing will be wasted. As I'll be a servant of the community, and to the extent that I actually serve it, they will support me. This is actually how business functions, when it's working and when the customers are awake. I won't own my customers and they won't own me. It's a cooperative effort, continuously voluntary. (So: critical factor in whatever I set up: the customers can, to whatever extent they personally allow, communicate directly with each other; otherwise the central mechanism of communication can repress dissent, and even with that facility, the difficulty of initiating a new central communication structure and gaining participation can effectively repress dissent even when bypassing central control is still possible. Registered Wikipedia editors can email each other using the on-line interface, but.... when an editor is considered disruptive, and "abuses email" -- which can mean that they were so foolish as to email someone who didn't like it -- the bit that allows email communication can be flipped, and often is. I want a truly intelligent customer community, one capable of direct internal communication, not corruptible, always dependent for its activities on the individual interests of the customers, so that however it advises me is the best and most representative advice I could get from them, not just what I want to hear.)
