(3089/898) Practical anarchy

1605) The Internet [...] evolves through the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF. [...] In the IETF, there's a kind of direct populist democracy that most of us have never experienced: Not in democratically elected government, where too many layers of pols and polls and images and handling intervene. Not in radical politics, where too often, the same old alpha-male/top-dog politics prevail despite the countercultural objectives pursued. And not in the feminist collective world, where so much time is spent establishing total consensus and dealing with the concerns of process queens that little gets done. The IETF provides a counter-example of true grassroots political process that few of us have ever had the privilege to participate in. [...] IETF group process succeeds because of a profound connection with, and understanding of, the real world of networking.

[...] MIT professor Dave Clark, one of the grand old men of the Internet, may have unintentionally written the IETF anthem in his "A Cloud Crystal Ball/Apocalypse Now" presentation at the 24th annual July 1992 IETF conference. Today, it's immortalized on T-shirts: "We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." Which might translate to, "In the IETF, we don't allow caucusing, lobbying, and charismatic leaders to chart our path, but when something out on the Net really seems to work and makes sense to most of us, that's the path we'll adopt."

[...] The best of the IETFers are folks you'd want to have with you after the nuclear holocaust the Net was originally funded to survive: well-intentioned, clear-headed, results-oriented, communicative (these are communications geeks, after all) - and community-minded. [...]

[...] [T]he typical IETF populist assumption [is] that all citizens are equally able to make important decisions [...] and the process has worked quite well.

Pauline Borsook
"How Anarchy Worked"
Wired (10/1995)

1606) [There is a] a mailing list of about 30 people who routinely bark at each other about the meaning of life, the events of the day, and esoterica such as the roots of the Peloponnesian War.

What's [interesting] about this mailing list/debating society is the number of Net GSGs (Genuinely Smart Guys/Gals) who subscribe to it. And even though formal education (some have PhDs, some dropped out of college), religion (some are fundamentalist Christian, some have lived in monasteries in Japan and India), geography (some live all other North America, some in other hemispheres), and politics (some consider themselves far to the right of Newt, some consider themselves tree-huggers of the first order) vary wildly, good manner prevail while arguments rage. Typical of the mailing list's fierce-but-friendly style is the ongoing debate between its creationists and its Darwinians, a bit like a match of the World Wrestling Federation - much shouting and posturing, much goodwill. And no one gets hurt.

Pauline Borsook
"How Anarchy Worked"
Wired (10/1995)

1607)
- We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
- What are we good at? Responding to short-term reality, building stuff that works, calling bad stuff bad.
- What are we bad at? Growing our processes to match our size, setting long term direction.
- Our best success was not computing, but hooking people together.

Dave Clark
"A Cloudy Crystal Ball/Apocalypse Now" (1992)
quoted by Pauline Borsook in
"How Anarchy Worked"
Wired (10/1995)