On Monday 21 August 2006 16:57, Kelly Martin wrote:
At my Wikimania presentation ("Does Consensus
Scale?") one participant
brought up the consensus building methodolgy used at Apache; someone
else during Wikimania (Lessig, perhaps) mentioned IETF "rough
consensus". My counterpoint to both of these suggestions (and which I
made at Wikimania) is that if I were to walk into an IETF meeting or
an Apache Software Foundation discussion and expect to have a say in
the discussion, I would likely be shown the door. Both of those
(I'm still sad my presentation was scheduled at the same time as yours.)
[[
http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/how-communities-work-well
2006 Aug 23 | How online communities work well
In 1999, while I was a fellow at the Berkman Center, I wrote a paper
on [5]Why the Internet is Good; in it, I noted 10 factors in Internet
community policy formation (e.g., IETF) that contribute to their
success. When I consider other open content communities I still find
this framework to be useful, even in the case of the Wikipedia.
* Open Participation: IETF (mostly), WP (more so).
No one is really excluded from the IETF, but you do have to pay
the meeting attendance fee and the interest in this sort of
technical things. Nearly any literate person might have an
interest in the Wikipedia.
* No Kings, but Elders?: IETF (mostly), WP (slightly less so).
Both the IETF and the Wikipedia have meritocratic governance
structures, which I now call [6]paramount leadership. I think the
main difference here is that many Wikipedians can live very
happily without ever encounter in questions of governance; they
can work on their own particular interests and make substantive
contributions they are. At the IETF, everyone is striving for a
single standard.
* Consensus and Competitive Scaling: IETF (partly), WP (partly).
In my 1999 essay I speak about the difficulties of consensus
scaling but note it can work when combined with many the later
factors: "This is because of competitive scaling: a small group of
people get to produce their best work under consensus, and then
compete, coordinate, cooperate, and learn with other groups." In
the standards arena it is possible for small groups of people to
work on informally competing specifications, and let the best one
win. (I talk further about this in [7]design by committee and the
possibilities of red/blue team design.)
* Implementation and Enforcement: IETF (mostly), WP (not really).
At the Wikipedia it can be difficult to dispassionately test
whether a given policy is unambiguously better than another
policy. And the technical domain when has the capability to
implement alternatives and see whether they work.
* Limitation of Scope: IETF (yes), WP (yes).
Just as "a Working Group to be extremely rigorous in defining and
enforcing the scope of its activity" the Wikipedia community has
been strict in specifying what their mission is, an Encyclopedia,
and is not.
* Funded Mandates and Lack of Fiat: IETF (mostly), WP (mostly).
"The implementation and operational use of a technical policy
demonstrate an interest and ability to deploy the policy at
large."
* Uniform Enforcement: IETF (mostly), WP (mostly).
* Descriptive Policy: IETF (mostly), WP (mostly).
* Policy Deprecation: IETF (partly), WP (not much).
"It is useful for a policy that is no longer in operation to be
stricken from the books; it simplifies the understanding one must
have about one's regulatory environment." This is basically
Shirky's observation about the formation of policy.
* Metrics: IETF (mostly), WP (less so).
This is tied to the implementation issue, but in the technical
domain it can be very nice to know that a particular algorithm
works 20% faster than the old way of doing things. The realm of
natural language and human meaning is less amenable to these types
of metrics.
...
References
...
5.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html#_Native
6.
http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/ethno/leadership.html#heading12
7.
http://goatee.net/2003/07.html#_02we-a
]]