[A-List] How do the new 21stC organizations really function? Which structures actually work and work well?

[grok@xxxxxxxxx]

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The SOC-L list is definitely supposed to be the place to
discuss this stuff. Let's see how useful discussion on this
actually gets...


I'm sure many of us here pay careful attention to all the
trials, tribulations and resounding successes surrounding
"Open Source", and all the other collective phenomena
spawned by the Computer Age and the Internet -- and see in
it all, the kernel of our New (socialist) Society. And so
whenever we have succinct analyses from the principals
concerned plopped in our laps, it's all the more enjoyable
to be doing this work -- such is the leveraging power of the
Internet: so much faster than the speed of paper(work)..!

Now; I myself have the (in)famous 'fortune' program set to
run every time I open a GNUnix console on my machine; and
funnily and often enuff, the "fortunes" proffered give much
food for thought (though some are just plain silly or dumb
of course! ;) Today however, I came across a new one I'd
never read B4: an exquisitely perceptive quote of the kind
I'm sure Paul Cockshott, FI, just dies for:
;P


  "[...]On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for
  OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is
  `nitwit' -- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has
  always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan
  researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do
  several competing implementations, have a bake-off,
  determine what works best, write it down and make that the
  standard.

  "The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written
  contributions from a much larger community, you put the
  contributions in a room of committee people with, quite
  honestly, vast political differences and all with their own
  political axes to grind, and four years later you get
  something out, usually without it ever having been
  implemented once.

  "So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work
  well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to
  agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll
  see if anyone can implement it after it's an international
  standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it.
  One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it
  takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure
  out which.

  -- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI"


Now -- obvious elitism and libertarian individualism aside
- -- isn't this a very important function of organization and
committee-work being described here? Mightn't it be directly
and immediately applicable in some way to all future work we
and our compaÃeros in the developing social revolutions down
South undertake..? It seems to me that in some form, this
basic logic underlies much of what is already being
undertaken in the Bolivarian Revolution, and in other
locales thruout AmÃrica Latina where socialism in one form
or another is breaking out.

I know that, generally, these 'diametrically-opposed'
strategic organizing principles have been analyzed and
discussed for quite a long time elsewhere, and in other
contexts -- nothing essentially new there; but what _is_, I
think, novel here is what must be one of the most succinct
expressions of how to actually DEAL with the ongoing dilemma
of choosing between "committee-work" vs. the "individualist"
/ "anarchist" marketplace of the competition of ideas (not
that I've accepted those common premises myself. I actually
do think dialectically -- to the best of my ability --
unlike most people on the Left, unfortunately, who still
'think bourgeois', without realizing it...)


I await a certain dialectical development-on-a-theme with
bated-breath.
;P


- -- grok.



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