A "swami" perspective on communities

[Martin van den Bemt <ml...@mvdb.net>]

Hi World of Apache ;)

> That's why we chose to just trust people's judgement.

The "freedom" adds the extra spark to j-c in my opinion. 

The leads to one of the great wisdoms the swami in me picked up from
somewhere :

<swami_mode>
Freedom brings up responsibility and rules remove people from being
responsible. By accepting rules of any kind a community actually is
saying "we don't have a common sense".
 If a community has a common sense, rules are not needed, period.
</swami_mode>

How does this statement apply to apache. 
Let's assume apache is the world
<apache_is_the_world>

Apache doesn't need any rules.
Now say Big Bad Wolf (who is part of the community) does an rm -rf
/home/cvs (intentionally)
What actually happened here ? 

1) Did Big Bad Wolf fail the community?
2) Did the community fail as a whole?

None of the above, since Big Bad Wolf failed himself.

Now the 3 piggies say : Hey someone deleted /home/cvs!!! 
We want to have rules that it is not allowed!

Whoops what happened here ?

1) Did the 3 piggies fail themselves ? 
2) Did the community fail as a whole ?

I hope you answered 1, since we are still a community. 

The 3 piggies start a vote to get this rule in place
The 3 piggies of course say +1 
When all votes are counted the majority decides to have the rule in
place.

1) Did the community fail as a whole ?
2) Did the community become stronger because of this rule ?

I hope you chose number 1


The effort of Big Bad Wolf to fail himself, has undermined a complete
community. The community now by default assumes that everybody is
capable of failing himself. 
Mistrust grows between each other.
What else are people in my community capable of ?
What if...

More rules come in place, since what ifs can be scary ones.

Ego's take over the community and so the community is gone.
Some seek power to control the others and the community sense is further
removed. 

Now we are just a bunch individuals who are having private agenda's and
private goals.

A couple of people however still have the community in mind. For the
greater good of the community they seperate themselves for the rest, to
not be distracted from the "spark" they still have.

If the community did not accept the rule in the first place, it would
still have the "spark" that comes with it and will still reside in
"heaven".. 

</apache_is_the_world>

<apache_as_part_of_the_world>

I did the seperation between the two tags, because apache needs some
rules, because the bad scenario described above happened in the world
outside of apache (liability, etc,etc,etc).

Too bad, these rules need to be in place to be able to keep the
community in mind.

Any other rule needed within apache is just breaking up the community
and will stand in the way of any progress.

</apache_as_part_of_the_world>

They, them, those etc are all signs of possible seperation in
communities, which undermine the goals we want to achieve. If we just
accept the fact that the community can never fail, we will experience
greater achievements then anyone can imagine.


Mvgr,
Martin
NickName : Swami Baahmi ;)