19 Mar
2013
19 Mar
'13
2:49 p.m.
Case in point of the cultural item I wrote about yesterday in this
thread, that most hackers are more interested in hacking than in
political/administrative tasks.
Which to my mind supports the case for a representative structure rather
than trying to engage everyone in tasks that many will find are tedious
and even incomprehensible. Those who have the expertise and the frame
of mind to take on issues such as revisions of bylaws and so on, should
be encouraged and formally recognized to do so.
Re."rules": There's rules and there's rules, and there's
agreements
among consenting adults.
Nobody here would think it amusing to try to hack a rule that forbids
physical aggression against others, e.g. "Hmm, if I just discretely push
someone so they fall down, and then claim it was an accident, can I tie
up the group with a six-hour meeting about this and still end up keeping
my membership?" Or rather, it would be a paradigm case of the most
obnoxious kind of trolling.
Same case about serving alcohol to people under 21 who might be at
events. That carries the risk of the place getting shut down or
otherwise subjected to external legal sanctions.
In the end, we're self-governing, so the "rules" we make are _agreements
among consenting adults_.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-19-Tue 2:28 PM, Naomi Most wrote:
Look, here's the problem with deliberating long
hours over bureaucracy
in a hacker organization:
Greetings lovelies,
If I may step in with some perspective based on about a decade of
hanging out in hacker groups...
Hackers' primary M.O. is GETTING AROUND RULES.
So, if you, on an individual level, enjoy making up rules and getting
semantics perfect, you should do that... as a project... on your own
time.
Because I guarantee you that *at least* those 11 people who abstained
last week, plus several more I'm sure, were sitting there completely
disengaged from that special interest project, because it is not
fundamentally interesting.
Why is it not interesting? Well, for something to be interesting, it
has to feel as though it actually affects you.
If you believe that rules are made for getting-around, then of what
interest is it, really, what the content of those rules actually is?
I can make some strong arguments as to why front-loading your
rules-making in a hacker culture is a waste of time at best, and
dangerous at worst. (One example: some of the people who are most
interested in the letter of the law turn out to be the most interested
in twisting it to their own ends.)
But to be honest, I'd rather get back to hacking.
I'll see some of you tonight for sudo room radio stuff. Many of you I
will not see for radio stuff, because it may not be of interest. :)
Cheers,
Naomi