Organizational Design
I was reading /. today and I realized that the entire GNU/Linux community has had a remarkable underground success, that can be attributed to a few key assumptions about people in general.
- Individuals are semi-intelligent, and don’t always act in their own best interest, esp. long-term intrests
- Individuals learn based on experience, wether derived from games or real life.
- Individuals act according to their proir experience and the information available to them.
- Social Networks based on informal, but close, relationships are more coherent and have better accountability tracing than political-machine multi-national conglomerations.
- Individuals want to be free to persue their intrests, and shape their world. (this includes desiring to control other beings)
If government can be organized in a way that each participant is personally accountable through a close, preferably informal, social network, then actual utopia could be achieved. Ideally, this could all be done without the need to resort to a third party, judge policeman or other official. Then there would be no grand Machine to emasculate our sense of personal justice, and the trappings of our lives can be kept within personal reach.
In the GNU/Linux community, no single person weilds power over many others. We have a significantly high degree of choice, and where choice is lacking many are capable of filling that gap. We have the power, skills, and knowlege to rule ourselves. There is no President or CEO deciding what Gnu/Linux bullying everyone around. Even our chief spokesmen, ESR, RMS, and Torvalds lack the power of enforcement.
But the community is alive and growing, while more platonically organized nations trap and control their citizenry. It’s personal freedom that has kept the community strong, and will continue to keep it so. The point is not to have a huge system to take care of things systematically, because it will never be able to do this both completely and consistantly. It’s much better to let people handle things themselves, rather than become dependant on some system (an broken embodiment of some incomplete/inconsistant ideology that not everyone agrees with anyway).
Truly, the best government is no government at all.