Hi John, Arlo, I've read the piece now ... I recognize all the usual suspects in there - this is the natural extension of the "Cluetrain Manifesto" and the "Long Tail" in on-line e-business from the earlier dot.com boom-bust cycle. All the various "dot.commies" rhetoric misses the fact that this is really bottom-up global-collectivisation rather than "socialism" as it became known - but these names are just games of political rhetoric. The fact that the software tools being used are called "social" misleads us to socialism.
Firstly however the point about openness - yes, openness with trust and accountability, but there is a problem if people see openness as total transparency without any kind of confidences and privacies in management and governance processes. I know from direct experience of the open-source movement in my day job - that there are real-time / total-openness expectations - and in reality this can provide very rapid and efficent creativity - dynamic quality - but the buck has to stop somewhere - there has to be some "governance". I often find mysef pointing out that the world-wide-web consortium founding fathers original "model" of information being shared this way starts with a layer called "trust". Total anarchic openeness is no substitute for trust. Regards Ian On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 5:21 PM, John Carl <[email protected]> wrote: > Ian, > I agree. The solution as I imagine it (with childlike mind) is to first > open up all closed-door meetings to public comment. > > Which doesn't mean that I would personally review every single decision of > say, the Chiropractor's board, but those who have the most interest could > bring their discussions to the attention of the governing bodies and search > the archives later, when and if, modifications seem necessary. > > That's the first step. > > Eventually, we'd see the regulatory bodies being phased out as expert > consensus made such cabalistic boards unnecessary, saving money and > improving quality in govt on all levels. > > Openess, discussion and Quality as a specific goal. > > And perhaps a modicum of tolerance for chaos. What the heck, as our current > system runs out of energy we're gonna have that anyway. > > And while we're on the subject of information dispensing, what is going to > happen to democracy in America when the last newspaper folds its doors? > Would government subsidy be appropriate here, perhaps out of the Public TV > budget? > > J > > > > On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 6:15 AM, Ian Glendinning > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> >> >> The biggest risk I see with the ultimate in social decentralization of >> anarchic total democracy is that if there is no governance (even by >> imperfect systems of imperfect elected individuals) ... is that we are >> entirely in the hands of the information circulating - how easily it >> circulates and is assimilated by the greatest number, rather than >> whether there is any value in complexity and subtlety of direct >> experience. Pure memetics. (Solutions to this problem will also >> evolve, but the relative pace of change in communications compared to >> human psyche makes the possibilities scarily unpredictable. All DQ >> with few trusty latches.) >> >> Ian >> >> -- > ------------ > The self is a point along a dynamic continuum, evolving toward Quality by > Choice. > ------------ > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
