Comments on: The current state of conflicts in open source production and movements https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-current-state-of-conflicts-in-open-source-production-and-movements/2015/04/11 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 13 Apr 2015 22:50:42 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: David Week https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-current-state-of-conflicts-in-open-source-production-and-movements/2015/04/11/comment-page-1#comment-1145565 Mon, 13 Apr 2015 22:50:42 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=49678#comment-1145565 It’s much easier to describe what community should not be than to describe a positive model for community. Matt Asay does the former well (and dispels some myths in doing so), but glosses over the latter. I suspect that for many, “community” is an empty signifier, a marker for an undefined but desired ideal, characterised more by an absence of problems than a specific form.

I’m with the anthropologists and the sociologists who would say that all of the above negative examples are also “community”—just of different types. I see in the story of Torvalds the story of any “president for life”, who after a while ceases to see any need to be civil—and in some cases, even humane. Who will topple him? Who will vote him out? In the case of Chu, I see mirrored France’s National Front and the UK’s UKIP: people who are rendered so anxious by the influx of foreigners, and the short term demands they make on the local economy, that they become xenophobic and impose immigration controls.

There are many forms of community and governance with which we have become disenchanted. Some new forms have been been proposed, mostly in the forms of sets of rules and constitutions. I think that such documents are useful tools for communities, but not essential. They are, after all, a fairly new inventions. Much older is the cultural image of the governors. Ordained by God? Programming prodigies? I suspect that any community that cloaks its governance workers with hopes of excellence, and adorns them with wealth and privilege, whether gold crowns or corporate jets or tolerance of assholiness, is following the same cultural model, and will re-create the same form of community.

An alternative might be to see governance as boring, stressful, dirty work that someone has to do, and is absolutely necessary to society: like, say, the sanitation worker. Such governance workers would not have high salaries, have no perks of office, and (if they are working well) be rarely reported in the press, precisely because they do their jobs well, and therefore require no comment. Their work would be 90% listening, 9% synthesising and checking what they’ve heard, and 1% action. Speeches and sound bites would be a thing of the past.

Part of this equation is exemplified by Evo Morales. I suspect that Morales’ behaviour was informed by his experience as an indigenous person, a place we might be look to for lessons (but not models) of governance. We have to invent what we want to see.

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