Subject:
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Re: CFV: Jonathan Wilson's posting privileges on LUGNET, REV 1.1
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Tue, 24 Aug 1999 21:40:42 GMT
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Viewed:
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329 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Sproaticus <jsproat@io.com> writes:
> Paul Gyugyi wrote:
> > Wow. What's the point of using a totalitarian despot's private
> > server if we have to pretend it is a democracy?
>
> I was inclined to think along these same lines early on, since it is mostly
> Todd's time (and money!) invested into LUGNET. However, the democracy model
> seems to work better with Todd's vision of what LUGNET should be -- a
> friendly, collaborative society where ideas (and to an extent opinions)
> about LEGO can get maximum exposure. This could arguably happen just as
> easily within a benevolent dictatorship, but the administrative tasks from
> that would give Todd even more work to do.
>
> This is just a guess, anyhow...
Yea, Jeremy, that sums things up pretty well. Pure totalitarian,
authoritarian, dictatorial, or despotic architectures certainly may happen
to work out in the long run for communities like this, but that's not the
plan here. Neither of course is a pure democracy the plan. Rather, the
formula for prosperity IMHO involves ad-hoc varieties of regimens -- more
like modern corporations or constitutional republics and less like feudal
kingdoms.
An example of the republic model as it applies here is putting important
data marshalling decisions more into the hands of experts and less into the
hands of non-experts. (Of course non-experts must still be able to suggest
changes for consideration to the experts!) As time goes on, more and more
resources will become directly editable by localized experts. (Well,
editable by anyone, but with final editorial control residing in experts.)
An example of the democratic model (social equality) as it applies here is
soliciting opinions and acting positively on things that effect everyone,
such as removing the sub-hierarchy of .loc.uk newsgroups because there were
too many groups (rather than forcing everyone to exist forever with the
groups as is); or removing a person whom a group has decided contributes
more harm than good (rather than forcing people to exist with that person,
or forcibly removing that person without considering the collective opinion
of the group).
An example of the totalitarian despot model as it applies here is defining a
set of rules and principles of conformance (the Terms of Use document) and
enforcing that set of rules in a dictatorial fashion as opposed to a
democratic fashion.
- An example of dictatorial enforcement is shutting off someone's posting
privileges to the .build group temporarily because they accidentally posted
an auction announcement there after being reminded that the .auction group
was the only place for that sort of thing. Such an application isn't meant
as punishment to the individual, but rather to prevent any further immediate
damage (noise) to the group in question. In all cases of infraction so far,
posting privileges were restored as soon as the person demonstrated that
they clearly now understood the rules. I take it that this is one example
of what people mean when they say the phrase "benevolent dictator."
- An example of democratic enforcement is putting someone's infractions (or
non-infractions) to a public vote in a group, or agreeing to honor such a
vote when the vote is spontaneously called for by the group itself. In a
way, that's delegation.
BTW, with regard to the current noise issue (i.e., JW), the .cad groups
(especially .cad.dev) are special in that the LDraw community has a rather
democratic history going back to L-CAD and still continuing on with parts
voting. Were the present noise issue (JW) to have come up in a different
group (say, .faq or .robotics.rcx.nqc), I probably would have thrown JW out
long ago without letting it reach the present level of noise. (In the .nqc
case, I may have left the decision largely up to DaveB (creator of NQC) and
friends, whom the group was created specifically for; and in the .faq group,
I may have left the decision largely up to JeremyS and RobertM.) So there
are all kinds of possible mixes of models.
--Todd
p.s. In terms of throwing someone out, I still agree that a mentoring
system is something to shoot for.
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