[HCoop-Discuss] Proportional Representation?

[Adam Chlipala]

My general response to this thread is somewhat on the meta level.  
Michael, please take this as constructive criticism, as I have no doubt 
that you are acting in good faith.

Most of your messages leave me feeling bewildered.  I almost feel like 
you aren't keeping up with what's going on with HCoop, and that you're 
instead fitting bits and pieces of reality into a template you pulled 
from 1960's hippie revolutionary movements. ;-)

There are sort of two angles to the basic complaint you're bringing up 
in this thread.

One angle is something like "the underrepresentation of non-technical 
people."  We don't have the resources now to provide quality services 
for people not comfortable with UNIX system administration.  Prices will 
get much higher if we need to start doing that.  I write "will" and not 
"would" because I expect it to happen when we have enough members to 
make it palatable.  Going from all volunteers to paid staff is a big 
leap, and I think it's required to be accommodating for any potential 
member who isn't willing to spend an hour reading documentation to use a 
new feature.  This isn't intended to make HCoop most attractive to 
potential members viewing our co-op as a black box, with the toils of 
volunteers hidden.  This is just a consequence of reality.

Another angle is the claim that our social organizational structure is 
systematically ignoring the views of members on issues upon which 
reasonable people might differ after analyzing the facts.  I have to 
disagree.  We have technical suggestions that are unworkable from 
different members from time to time, and we have your occasional bizarre 
messages that describe the tyranny of the majority without providing any 
evidence that things could be better given our real constraints.

Michael Potter wrote:
> It's not so much the details as the point of creating a form of
> proportional representation. I'm talking more about acknowledging real
> divisions, like allowing people to opt-out of AFS if using 'fs'
> irritates them, for example.

I support entirely the idea of giving people traditional local storage, 
and even pushing to set their home directories, etc., as much as 
possible to make things look like the traditional UNIX world.  I think 
we have some more pressing concerns right now, like the basic stability 
of our new infrastructure, but that we should consider this seriously 
relatively soon.