RE: Voting (again)

Dear Phillip,
I suggest you consult http://bootstrap.org. I think you will have a clearer 
picture of an underlaying culture of the IETF system. There is some work to 
do to fully evaluate that thinking, its cons and pros. Where it leads. What 
it implies.This is quite interesting. May be as much as the Plato's paradigm.
Doug Engelbart located node nr2 (first was Larry Roberts'). He created the 
NIC and if I am correct hired Steve Crocker and Jon Postel (if people here 
can confirm? I try to rebuild the links and dates. The history of the 
thinking/doctrine is very interesting to understand the design). You will 
see that in his story, he came to McDonnell Douglas where "seing no 
commercial value in his work, the company's executive fired him and his 
staff, and closed down his laboratory". I may be one of the first there who 
believed in the potentialities of his technology at McDD but  found his 
concepts did not commercialy fly because of the underlaying faith in 
"collective IQ augmentation" and activity A, B, C you may also think 
present in IETF. IMHO the world is not built that way.
Obviously time has flown. Many other contradictory influences were added. 
But for having related, studied and finaly technically/commercialy opposed 
in part these ideas, I am probably more sensible to them. I feel they found 
the IETF, IAB, IESG, ICANN, etc.
jfc

At 01:16 18/04/2005, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> > Why do you think a decent-sized, randomly-selected subset of
> > the IETF (i.e. the NomComm) are taking actions that are
> > substantially more conservative (in terms of keeping people)
> > than the IETF as a whole would do?
>
> Because they only get to do it once and have no expectation of
> repeating.
>
> > The *whole point* of the
> > NomComm is for it to have roughly the same views as the IETF
> > as a whole, except in a smaller body. So what makes you think
> > that were the IETF as a whole making the decisions, they'd be
> > any different?
>
> The people whoe wrote the constitution certainly thought that there
> would be a difference. Otherwise they would have done it the obvious
> way.
>
>
> >     > Why do engineers believe that they are experts in innovating
> >     > organizations? Is the result an improvement over traditional
> >     > arrangements that have been incrementally improved over
> > centuries?
> >
> > I find this comment particularly hilarious, in view of the
> > fact that an important part of the inspiration for the whole
> > NomComm process was the Athenian Constitution of 508 BC; in
> > particular, the mechanism for the selection of the Boule (the
> > Council of Five Hundred), which was the chief executive organ
> > of the state.
>
> As I said, ignoring the 2,500 years of experience since that date.
> Moreover the Athenian constitution was not exactly a success, they
> murdered Socrates, got whacked in the Peleponesian war and finaly got
> whacked by the Romans.
>
> Given the fragmentary nature of classical accounts I find it astonishing
> that you would think that you could understand the dynamics of the
> organizations at all, let alone whether they were satisfactory. Most of
> the accounts were written by the people whose interests were served by
> those arrangements. The one dissenting voice, Plato provides a critique
> so devastating that the same experiment is not tried again for two
> millenia.
>
> > As you will perhaps recall, this constitution was in itself
> > the result of several hundred years of tinkering with
> > democratic systems for use in small societies with direct
> > democracies (i.e. a very different environment from today's
> > mass representative democracies, with their millions of members).
>
> The only large scale organization I know of that has anything similar is
> the Socialist Workers Party - and for similar reasons, it allows the
> politburo to keep talking about decentralization and grass roots power
> while keeping power firmly concentrated in the hands of an elite.
>
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