[P2P-F] transparency issue of p2p-foundation

[Michel Bauwens]

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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