Anthony wrote:
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Wednesday 25 June 2008 03:21, David Gerard wrote:
May I link yet again to "The Tyranny Of Structurelessness", about how hierarchies will form,
I don't know where this ridiculous straw man came from.
You said that Arb Com does not need to be disbanded, but need only be ignored. I thought you were suggesting that this would be a sufficient solution to the problem. If I'm wrong about your suggestion, I apologize. But even so, this is not a straw man. It is an additional statement.
I don't have a problem with hierarchies, in general.
I do have a problem with hierarchies imposed externally by the fiat of one man who's not all that special, upon what is claimed to be a "community" project.
C'mon, Arb Com was imposed by the incorporator, president, and board chair of the foundation which controlled the domain name and servers on which the project ran (the servers were actually *owned* at the time by a corporation of which I believe Jimbo was the majority shareholder, and which he was definitely in control of). At the time Arb Com was imposed, Jimbo had every right to install the arbitration committee. To say he's "not all that special" is to be incredibly ignorant of the historical context.
Sorry but, as someone who was there (volunteered and got appointed to try and make a go of the mediation committee), this is spun so far that it bears almost nil relation to the real historic record.
Jimbo did not impose the arbcom structure. He asked for volunteers to see if a workable group could be convened that could take some of the work he no longer had time for.
The arbcom, when it formed itself, immediately morphed into a body that had nearly zero resemblance to what Jimbo or others had at first described as how it should operate.
At first it did not satisfy nearly all the wishes that were hoped it would satisfy (though it was markedly more effective than the mediation committee I was a member of, that isn't saying much - and this does really reflect badly on me individually). Despite this Jimbo said that he would give it respect and support, and try very hard to not meddle or countermand its decisions except in a very extreme miscarriage of justice.
I honestly don't know if Jimbo ever overturned an Arbcom decision, but positing that Jimbo instituted the Arbcom as his own creation, is just not even close to any form of veracity.
We've come a long way since then. Jimbo is no longer president, no longer chair, and sits on a board with 7 others. The servers are owned by the foundation, having been paid for by money raised from public contributions. Jimbo's no longer "all that special". But the Arb Com is a vestige from a day when he was. It has enough of a claim to legitimacy that it should be disbanded explicitly, by a mechanism which has an even greater claim to legitimacy, and not simply ignored. By far the easiest mechanism which would have a claim to legitimacy would be a new governance system which is at least approved by, if not designed by, the current WMF board.
Given what I said above, I think it is obvious that "designing" a replacement for the arbcom would be an excercise in futility.
Yours;
Cimon Avaro