Oh, I didn’t see this part. Go do stuff! (though one can form a kind of “stuff” online (I hope)).

the trouble for me looking at it that way is that i dislike gambling, but figuring and adjusting for probability is the strength of people networks, something we can’t help doing. it’s one of the things that distinguishes our branch of the tree of life. playing the odds more correctly by applying common knowledge, and incorporating new data in common knowledge through incredibly rich channels of language, music and dance.

the question is, does one want to encourage good practice, or to control systems. encouraging good practice might be as simple as developing open-ended think tanks with sustainable goals to shorten the path to good policy for community and regional people networks. even teaching by example requires a lot of good real-world applicable concepts for it to stick.

these things are being created like crazy on the net but they are all price driven because money is about as useful a token for meeting administrative goals as we have come up with. however to be most effective what we seem to need is a pan-dimensional framework for methods that allows for a variety of goals to be established and met with perpetually as-yet-undetermined actions, where money is only one of the possible goals. we could call this framework “people.” with enough “people,” it wouldn’t be necessary to concentrate on any one abstract goal (money, happiness, tyrannical authority) that one might care to believe to be a root of individual or general prosperity.

probably what we need to get rid of is the concept of “best.” that’s probably what causes bureaucracy in the first place. 

Posted by hibiscus

Hibiscus: Credit unions can be great. It’s a shame that the small local ones seem to be disappearing. I once researched all the credit unions in San Francisco and found that quite a few were ostensibly chartered but had like 40 members and no regular hours, no ATM cards — they seemed like shell companies waiting for corrupt actors to take over. A shame. The banking world seems to be in a phase of more-or-less “natural” monopolies. I suspect this will change with the collapse of the mortgage bubble, which will likely make banks even worse. Meanwhile I’m about to switch back to a credit union, as my bank charges insane fees for everything.

Saheli: Locally, San Francisco has a more transparent and democratically accessible government than most big cities. So I am not saying the whole thing needs to go. But schools, cops and emergency preparedness here are a mess.

The school system is frought with partisan bickering that is enhanced by the nature of the school board. Everyone who can afford it has pulled kids out, leaving behind a mess. Yes, Lowell High is great. It’s also one of 7 high schools; students forced to go to other schools (sometimes because they had the bad luck to be born Chinese-American) protest each August. The superintendent walked off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance while denying teachers a new contract. You distill what some people are seeking in a private school but don’t forget, many parents can’t afford what they want and others choose to home-school regardless. Put these groups together and there might be some energy there; I’m curious why it hasn’t been done.

Cops: like I said above, we need a nonviolent alternative phone number to call for things like domestic violence, vandalism, and other petty crimes. The sexism is sick but otherwise I understand why an 18-year-old would wear a T-shirt that says, “Stop snitching bitch.” (I saw one on 6th St last night.)

Disaster prep: All I can say is Annmarie Conroy . That and the lack of attentioni paid to Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams, which are exactly what I’m talking about — grassroots, motivated, effective organizations that are ignored in favor of giving every stupid little task to the gold-plated fire and police departments.

And anyway, forget the local stuff. Everything starts locally but how do we replace the horrible national machinery we use for defense, environmental enforcement, drug regulation, promotion of commerce, agricultural promotion, energy research, welfare, bankruptcy, right down the list of almost every federal responsibility there is.

My point in writing all this is that I am trying to decide how to spend more of my time. Because while NERT or the organic standards movement might be susceptible to bad guys, I am sure that they do more to keep our planet habitable and democratic than sitting on my bed with my laptop warming my thighs.

I’m going to go talk to real humans! Outdoors! Bye. 

Posted by hedgedog

There’s a reason why do-it-yourself culture routinely outperforms bureaucratic culture, from Firefox vs. Explorer to blogs vs. NY Times to terrorists vs. armies. 

w/o actually disagreeing I think a little more analysis of your two examples leads to refinement.

F vs. IE—F is the hands down winner. But I think characterizing it as DIY vs burueacratic is misleading. Mozilla is an organization and does have structure and rules of order. Flexible leadership, focused interest, and transparent procedure are neither necessarily synonymous with DIY nor contradictory to competent bureaucracy’s undersung values like due process and consistent documentation/record keeping. Finally singlemindedness of effort–the firefox team works to further firefox. IE was tied to gallons of crap. A proprietary company as singleminded as the ff team might have done better. Purity of motive in the metallurgical sense, notthe moral sense.

NYTvsblarghs:firstly: sick of NYT being the stand-in for print journalism. Frankly it kind of blows, and is a dependent on NYC’s economic status.With that in mind is there any blog or set of blogs that has displaced or even truly competes w/ a non-singular (i.e. Non nyc or dc) paper? I don’t think so. I stopped reading the punditry long before I started reading blogs, and think they would have teetered regardless. How many blogs actually systematically notify us of what’s going on in our communities, even if only at the most cursory level yet even when they know we don’t care? Hierarchies and lines of command are useful for keeping unwanted but necessary tasks done. Software needs it less b/c unfinished work = broken project, but a newspaper w/o the boring schoolboard crap wouldn’t be obviously broken.
What blogs are triumphing at is building community, and producing speedy analysis, opinion, and a very particular kind of document-intensive jounalism. In blogs the archives are free and good, and sourcing more transparent, and commenting refines things much faster. Finally, since most blogs are labors of love, their internal and external motivationsare more likely to be aligned: focused interest.But newspapers have more naturally diverse (subject-wise) teams that don’t need to get along, and their getting out of the news is much less whimsically timed than either software or blogs.

So from these two examples I draw some important lessons w/o strengthening the dichotomy: transparency, documentation, archiving, low-or-no-barrier communication, focused interest/purity of motive, bitchily mandated boring/complete attention to detail, and deadline pressure are all good organizational values.

So then the question is, how much is government missing these and what is the best remedy?

w/ that in mind, reading your proposal makes me immediately ask—-which govt are you talking about? We have not 1, but 3-5 depending on how your school districts and counties work. And the things you’re talking about are first addressed at the local level. Now I’m very, very confident in your awareness & diagnosis of your local govt–much more so than in most anyone’s. So if *you* say that the average citizen of San Francisco is better off essentially starting from scratch and tackling these problems in the framework of an alternative, open-source organization, I’ll probably be easy to convince.
On the other hand! If you say the same thing of El Cerrito, Concord, Danville, Contra Costa, San Leandro, or even Berkeley or Oakland I’d be highly dubious. You know about Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disaster, I write about them a lot. They were formed from a community protest to previous bureaucratic failures. The City of San Leandro works with them a lot,supports them, and generally makes preparation a nice high priority. My best guess is that a citizen of San Leandro would probably be better off supporting their city govt, and volunteering w/ or donating to card. Similarly, I’m not all that displeased w/ my local law and order. My local recycling is excellent. The parks are well maintained. My main problem is w/ planning.My likeminded neighbors claim getting involved works. I kinda feel I should try first. I suspect a similar passivity applies to most citizens and blogreaders, if not yours, whom I suspect are a tad unusual.

Just to take schooling as an example, a lot of rebellious types pull kids out of public school and either send them to private school or home school. If all these people got together and pitched in the same amount of money they currently throw at the problem, there might be a whole range of much more effective schools that would have room for even more kids.

As a kid thus pulled out, I think you misunderstand the motives.People don’t want to get together. They want schools customed for their child.The best generic education in the bay area is probably Lowell High, inasmuch as a selective school can be generic. It does not, however, require backpacking or reading Zinn. DIY? How do you think private schools start? Nobody is going to pour that much blood into an optional project w/o control over who gets to go. Nonoptional DIY? How do you think public school districts start? Read Little Town on the Prairie. No, seriously. Melissa Gilbert and misbranding as girlylit have robbed young readers.

Bureaucracy is merely old-DIY where the founders overengineered perpetuation and underengineered the input of newblood/qualities mentioned above.

So if SF and the like are too ossified to splice in some new marrow, I believe you and wish you the best of luck. But I’m willing to bet that most people are better off participating in and rehauling their local existing machinery. The lesson from Katrina, for example, is that locals need to participate in local government and make it as self-sufficient as possible, and that a a nation wishing to extend a saving hand to any subpart had better either build a private network or not choose leaders who are explicitly contemptuous of the very public network they seek to run.

With all of that said I think there are a few federal tasks that are very much not getting done and could benefit from open source style diy:
1) Congressional oversight & budget analysis.
2) National resource management.
3) The funding, promotion and doing of several key but unprofitable&unglamarous areas of science–alt. energy, treatments for the diseases of poverty, preventative health science, ecology & organic agricultural science, environmental chemistry & atmospheric science. These are all nominally in the purview of DOE but it gets sidetracked by bombs.
4) reparational dealings w/ first nations peoples
5) oversight of the actions of americans, and particularly american corps abroad. Well, no one’s thought of doing this before, but I basically think we should turn the current model on its head.

Posted by Saheli

Posted by hibiscus

the storyline goes that social mobility in the USA compared with european countries is overhyped. i think that’s the current social sciences outlook – that people stay pretty much where their parents were. the hype is giant though. so how to stay sane while getting stuck in a way that the myth says only losers do… if i were a country filled with people going nowhere (as the summit rises) but afraid to admit it, i might find walking away from “loser” commitments in search of “winner” status very attractive.

if the distributed architecture is designated “political” it will attract peacocks, as do labor-agnostic may day celebrations. if it is thought of as a potluck effort, ordinary people may go for it. the problem is the fairness. what if there only appears to be slack enough for this? what if this is really just another way to say “ownership society”? 

Posted by hibiscus

american mass production worked really great – producing tons of stuff for cheap – but it had a quality problem. i think it was basically the toyota people who diagnosed it: competitive bidding and adversarial relations along the supply chain of the industry created an incentive to produce parts that were “good enough” and “cheap enough” to meet a price goal at the end of the line. stick with me this has a redeeming social payoff.

anyway a stream of “good enough” building on top of itself often resulted in “crappy” at the end of the line, leaving the sales teams needing to use a little extra song-and-dance to convince the buyers. crappy enough even that there were a significant number of DOA products, cutting into the economic benefits of the aforementioned cutthroat bidding process.

the toyota answer to this was to leap around the P’s D – never ever assume that there is only one round of the game, or even that it ends. make a long term relationship with your supplier. share information. if there’s a quality problem, diagnose it together, solve it together. without necessarily owning it all, integrate the construction chain to the point that the end-product designers can assume that very far upstream parts design is fully within their control. (this is why, as i saw recently, it takes toyota 28 hours to make a car compared to GM’s average 34. better communication = better design = easier assembly.)

the EU has also widely adopted this strategy because of its energy efficiency and flexibility. american companies are still tied up in P’s D thinking – this round could  be the last one so don’t get too chummy, and have lawyers and insurance agents at the ready.

the question of how to build a horizontal group, outside of a church (probably the closest american match to the japanese social ethic(s)), without everyone involved constantly on the lookout for the right time to sell out or hostilely overtake – it’s a tough one.

maybe it would be more accurate to say that in a wild generalization, japanese folk defeat PD by being making very sure of their partners’ intentions upon capture before entering into the clearly mutually beneficial criminal enterprise. by having that level of relationship, it becomes that much harder to catch them at all.

for an american participant in meetings of that nature, there is almost no near-term penalty for lying. even an expensive contractual shackle can be cut away with a sharply-worded lawsuit.

i don’t know – i’m sort of of the mind that if the thing really needs doing, such worries are inconsequential. 

Posted by hibiscus

I think, unfortunately, nominally open and democratic structures in many, many instances are ripe for takeover and become de facto the other kind. That’s not meant to be defense of formal hierarchical institutions, but just a cautionary tale from my observations (and ESS theory ).

Another thing I find interesting is the question of what what you need to make taking over a space difficult without resorting to authoritarianism or violence to stop it. For example, is it a shared culture of reciprocal respect, is it that bolstered by shared ideas, or other things (like a liberal notion of “civility”)? It’s a bit like that corollary of Godwin’s law that the more substantive a discussion thread is, the more difficult it is to dislodge.

Also, you guys might find this group intersting. 

Posted by saurav