On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org wrote:
<hopeless>I'd really like to hear Jimbo's opinion on the matter</hopeless>
A few years ago, Jimbo came by en.wn, and we were trying to explain to him how our project infrastructure works. Understand, a central part of our concept at en.wn is that the community chooses reviewers in whom we place an enormous amount of trust. Of course I can't know what the exchange looked like from Jimbo's side, but from where I was sitting, it appeared that as we were explaining to him how this works, at first he was incredulous we were actually putting that much trust in the hands of users merely selected by the community, and then, when he did realize what we were entrusting to reviewers, he reckoned we had to be insane. As I say, I don't know what it looked like from his perspective; but it sure did look like that from mine.
This attitude, of not trusting the community to select people worthy of trust, seems to be a sort of conceptual trap, that's easy to fall into, probably without even noticing, and hard to get out of. One suspects it's got a bunch of folks at the Foundation in its grip. It makes a striking contrast with "assume good faith" --- mind you, I don't subscribe to AGF, in fact at en.wn we have instead "Never assume"; but one of the subtler reasons I disapprove of AGF is that I think it actually transmutes, in practice, into "trust no-one".
Pi zero