Hello Michel, It's good of you to respond so directly. I didn't intend any kind of challenge, I was trying to figure out how I might help and couldn't see how this could be done, ie how support for you could be enhanced/installed/orchestrated; I realised that I knew next to nothing about the Foundation. Since then I have picked up that there are four people in the Foundation engine room, Orsan connected me to a software app. page Datagraph where I posted some proposals about commons governance, he later mentioned that there is a discussion about the Foundation on Loomio which I will follow up. You are very generous in what you say below and I am well able to rest with it. Greetings Denis On 22/08/2014 08:56, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Dear Denis,
you raise the transparency issue,
on this list, what you see is what you get, i.e. there are indivduals, with various levels of influence obtained either from within or outside the list, that communicate around an issue; I have no technical power, both because I don't like it and have no time for it, but also actually as a conscious decision, i.e. I can't exclude anyone by myself;
then the p2p-foundation, well, to be frank, it's a group of people who are communicating in various ways, pragmatically, and hence, it is easy to feel excluded in some way, because it is not always visible .. most of our communication are just list of email addresses, of whatever people are most appropriate to contribute to a certain project .. ; the end result is, and personally, in a network of volunteers, I do not think this is a bad thing, is that it is the contributors that discuss , consensually, what needs to be done ;
we are now trying to be more formal, to avoid the tyranny of structurelessness, this is done by using Loomio; if I have understood the process well, a first phase is an open discussion, then the decision tool is used for the major orientation decisions, and it then moves over to the implementors to take the day to day decisions amongst themselves
remember, nobody is getting paid for this directly (we all have indirect strategies of making a living), though kevin will likely join us as first paid employee this october ..., and for people who work hard for free and with limited time, it is impossible to listen for ever to people who are on the sidelines thinking they have the right idea of how it should be done, without doing it themselves ..
if we were a membership organisation, or a coop, of course we would need to do it differently and insure every member has a vote (which would be a counterpart of their monetary or labor contributions)
but peer production networks almost never work that way, and it has been rather well studied; we are not very different from others in this, except that we are too small to entertain a formally democratic FLOSS Foundation
but the people who complain that do not have it, should be the ones building and constructing it,
discussions of the list are different, here everyone has a voice provided that a few social rules are adhered to,
in this case, we are insisting that the rule of no personal attacks and difamation are adhered too; no one wants to take away willi's freedom of speech, there are millions of outlets where mutual insults are the norm, and I have no issue with these freely chosen cultures of discourse,
but don't forget that countless progressive outlets had to fold and were destroyed, because they refused to maintain their culture, such as for example Indymedia accepting anti-semitism and a slew of conspiracy theorists (I have read about this without knowing the ins and outs)
but if that were the culture here, I would unsubscribe,
Michel
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