On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:16 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
The discussion has to take place somewhere, meta seems the best option (the only obvious alternative is to have closure discussions on the project in question, but that would most likely result in few people from other projects being involved, which is a bad thing).
Why is that a bad thing? Why should people not involved in a project be involved in deciding whether or not the project should exist?
Reminds me of an anecdote by Clay Shirky ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html):
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3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
In the early Nineties, a proposal went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture, called soc.culture.tibet. And it was voted down, in large part because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it down, on the logic that Tibet wasn't a country; it was a region of China. And in their view, since Tibet wasn't a country, there oughtn't be any place to discuss its culture, because that was oxymoronic.
Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong answer. The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture should have it. That was the core group. But because the one person/one vote model on Usenet said "Anyone who's on Usenet gets to vote on any group," sufficiently contentious groups could simply be voted away.