[HCoop-Discuss] Proportional Representation?

[Michael Potter]

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 18:48 -0500, Adam Chlipala wrote:
> 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. ;-)

Constructive criticism aside, that's a cheap shot, although I do lean to
the left. My influences come from many different eras, 60s included. 

You did once say that the co-op aspect was just a convenient structure.
I find this bewildering. Our assumptions about the world are very
different. 

> 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."  

It's more like "the underrepresentation of people." Despite the word
"cooperative" in the name, and the yearly elections, there is almost no
power for rank and file members. 

Incidentally, don't know where people got the idea I'm non-technical, I
have ten years of production experience, about half and half
corporate/academia, most of it with Linux. 

> 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.

My messages might seem bizarre compared with mainstream thinking, though
labeling them such is uncalled-for. Besides, you mention one such issue
below. 

> 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.

I'm rethinking how I can influence the co-op. Complaints aren't working
and could get me tarred and feathered. God forbid I run for the board. 

Michael Potter