comments on recent backNforth

[Kurt Cockrum]

I said:
> [...] high-flying thin-skinned prima-donnas who weren't willing to [...]

Rich said:
>About James' proposal being just a thin-skinned reaction, I don't agree.
>An audit is required.  That is not a "skin" issue.

I wasn't speaking of James, I was speaking of the much-vaunted
group of departed fundraising experts.  As far as audits go, a high-priced
auditor is never going to question the wisdom of their own hiring :)
Only Dogbert could get away with that :)

Several progressive organizations I've belonged to in the past used a
concept called "open books", i. e. any member in good standing could
get a look at them at any time.  This was seen as part and parcel of
the democracy that constituted the organization.  This implies, of
course, that the books need to be more-or-less in a state of
inspection-readiness at all times, rather than normally being in
disarray except at brief quarterly intervals.  In other words, the
books are the main product, for which a view is always available, and
the 909's (or whatever they are called) are toss-off views designed for
the specific reporting requirements of some government agency (but not
the main product, but derivative).

In another post, Rich said:
>You just got co-opted by the opposite side.  Joel is still trying to
>legitimize board revenge because I called him a creep.

I don't know what's going on here, but it looks like things are getting
kinda personal among various members of the board.  Maybe those people
should pony up some $$ for some mediation services.  This should
probably come out of their own pockets, which would look a lot better
politically.  Probably wouldn't cost more than $100.  In other words,
spend the money and get it fixed.  The mediator can be of assistance
getting to the root of the problem, which otherwise is probably not
doable without the parties somehow "rising above themselves", something
I've learned not to expect.

Steve said:
>Apparently, there are IP's who have been waiting a very long time for 
>such things as mailing lists, because we simply do not have the 
>personnel to handle these kinds of requests.

1000's and 1000's of people use majordomo all over the world.
I think there's even an O'Reilly book on the subject.  A lot of problems
could probably be fixed by individuals being less tight-fisted, or by
being more flexible.  Buy the book, check it out of the library, acquire
it by means I don't want to hear about, just somehow *get* the dam' book
and *read* it.  Or surf on the web to where the docs are, and read those.
"Water, water all around us, nor a drop to drink"
 --Coleridge, "The Ancient Mariner" (modulo my defective memory :)

"[...] we simply do not have the personnel [...]"??
You've *got* the personnel, namely the IP's and mentors themselves.
Can't they do anything but "steam over the interminable delays"?  This
obviously is not a very good way of solving the problem.  Is this some
kind of perverted class issue, where they don't want to get their hands
dirty?  It sure looks like it.  I'd expect the mentor, at least, to
identify the barrier and and work around it.  But it sounds like the
mentors are more used to hollering "help" and then waiting for rescue
(which may not come for a long time, given the overloaded condition of
the helpers).  Some mentor!  And it does no good to say "but a mentor
shouldn't have to do that".  The needs and requirements say this is
obviously false, no matter how much it sticks in people's craws.

There's an old saying, "the gods help those who help themselves".
I'm reminded of some bathroom graffiti I saw once in a truck stop:
	Here I sit with a pounding heart:
	popped 6 pills & my truck won't start!
and somebody wrote below it,
	If your pills were worth a fuck,
	you'd get out and pull your truck!

Ya know, it is *extremely* difficult to maintain a spirit of
egalitarianism and mutual respect when people yell and clamor for
things that they apparently don't *want* to know a thing *about*; they
just wanna step-on-the-pedal-and-go.  Then they demand respect and
deference for their leadfoot and skidmarks.  This, a hallmark of
American culture, is really pretty infantile.  And we always wind up
colluding with and reinforcing it.  Jeez!!!

Rich said, replying to posts from Steve & Al:
>However, a second problem relates to this point.  The existing
>committees/functions do not "apprentice" people.  This needs to change so
>that, if a Mac Truck takes out a key player (or he/she moves to _____), we
>will have people with significant skills.

In a recent post to the hardware list, Dave Barts said that he had no
difficulty getting Majordomo going, so we know it's *doable*.  So why
is it that we aren't able to use or replicate Dave's efforts in a
useful way?  Dave mentioned that majordomo wasn't "user-friendly".
Well, the software can't make itself more user-friendly, since it lacks
the agency to do so, and the author has rightly decided that no more
work on his part is necessary (so I would presume), so it looks like
the onus is on the user to compensate, as Dave has done.  He also
mentioned that Stefani had done some of the work.

AFAIK Stefani is an example of what I wish we had a zillion of --
a self-taught self-starter.  She came aboard not knowing anything about
news or mailing lists, and just bit the bullet and *did* it.  So, too,
are Rod and jj.  Maybe it would work better if we just *stopped* looking
for volunteers who *aren't* self-taught self-starters...after all, if you
are in a hole, first you need to stop digging, right?  And it would
reduce the wear-and-tear on that hard-to-find and burnout-prone
Universal Savior, the "Volunteer Coordinator", who has to figure out
interesting tasks for people.

All this, I'm sure, sounds just awful to mentors, way more than they had
bargained for.  But this is sort of like joining the Army and later
finding out you might have to go into combat.  Heavens to Betsy, what
did we get into!  Maybe the "job description" of mentors and/or IP's
needs to be reworked, so that unpleasant truths aren't edited out.
Army recruiters have to edit out unpleasant truths because they have
performance quotas imposed from above that couldn't be met if that
weren't done.  This surely isn't the case for us, is it?

Why can't IP's and their mentors work together to get together mailing
lists for their respective interests?  Surely *somebody* might be
successful, and they could *share* their knowledge.  As one example the
Linux Documentation Project solves this problem with little screeds
called "HOW-TO"s, edited collections of specialized knowledge distilled
over time, specifically designed to help newbies get up to speed.  Mentors
and IP's could distill their experiences for the benefit of others.
It is *this* sort of thing that I always thought would be an example of
SCN functioning at its highest level, *not* simply delivering prepackaged
"services" to demanding "consumers" the way for-profits do, only with
the additional handicap of working for free.  As I've said over and
over again, I think SCN should be teaching people to fish, not *delivering*
fish, in competition with for-profit fish-delivery companies.
I'm quite well aware that this seems to mark a fundamental philosophical
divide among the major SCN players :( .

It looks like what we wind up with is critical dependencies of the
"Mack-Truck-vulnerable" sort, hard-wired right into the system from the
git-go, with situations continually arising where somebody, playing a
"hero" role, has to "save the day" for the collectivity, unable to help
themselves for cultural reasons, and, of course, eventually burning out
the hero-person.  Our culture (and most others around the world) really
isn't very smart, and we human beings, for all of our much-vaunted
smarts, seem to be stuck in it, so that we don't function collectively
much better than, say, a pack of dogs.  Which is OK as long as all we
are doing is doggy-things, but doesn't work so well outside the dog
realm, deep in real-world problem-space.
--kurt
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