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.
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.