On 6/24/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Wait a minute! I woke up this morning and, in all senses, smelled the coffee. What are we doing here!?! We appear to be embarking on a serious discussion of structuring an entity that, supposedly, already exists. We are not developers staring at a blank screen, or sheet of paper (to place it in my era) planning something from the ground up.
Before I spend another second of my time on this issue, or ask anyone else to do the same, I need to be taught some things:
- Where does the founder, Jimmy Wales, fit into all of this? Isn't this
something he should be initiating, or, at the very least, directly involved in? And what do you, Jimmy, think of the present day-to-day operating structure of the Project?
- What is the Foundation's role in the issue of the Project's structure?
And, what responsibility does it have in overseeing such a venture.
- Who, or what, in fact does direct the day-to-day functioning of the
Project right now?
- If we did come up with an extraordinarily creative plan for structuring
the Project (and with Berks in the works no doubt we would :-)) to whom would we present it for implementation?
Our work on this should not be seen as simply a catharsis for some restless natives.
Marc Riddell
I hate to be the one who rains on your moment of revelation, but your questions seem to be underpinned by the fallacy that, because a structure exists, it was created. Wikipedia and many of the structures attached to it are examples of emergent systems. Not only do the structures you keep expecting to find not exist, but the structural foundations they would rest on also do not exist.
An appropriate metaphor is that of a hurricane; it's large and "organized", but nobody (well, no meteorologist) would claim that there is any agency or intention behind the organization; that's just what sometimes happens when you have water, angular momentum, and heat. Now let us say that you have a big mirror in space that can warm or cool the planet by directing more or fewer of the sun's rays at the Earth. Could you potentially use this mirror to affect hurricanes? Yes. Could you do so with any precision or assurance of success? Absolutely not. You would be using an instrument far too large and blunt to have any idea what the result would be.
You keep making the presupposition that we can create a new culture and new structures, because we have a culture and structures that we must have created once, and we can easily repeat what we have already done. The trap is that we did not create what we have today; it arose organically. And we don't know what changes we may try to make will converge to zero and fizzle, or which ones will have a multiplier effect that will spin them out of our control, like something out of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. We don't know; we provably cannot know, until we try. But we need to know going in that our tools are very large and very blunt.
Our article on emergence, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence, is actually not that good; it doesn't lend itself to the layman, although as usual it does present a somewhat decent overview. However, the external links section is stuffed with gems, including http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/emergence/, which uses cellular automata to introduce basic ideas (requires java) and http://www.timgooding.com/, which talks about emergence in human behavior. I highly recommend reading up extensively on the topic of emergence, because until you grok it, very, very little of this place is going to make any sense at all.
Thank you, -Michael Noda