Zooid talk:ethic

From eg

Please use this page and not talk:zooid:ethic. Three level namespace is scary and easily abused. See mediawiki gronks for more of an explanation. This name will soon be priveleged as Eg_talk:names are presently, so the workaround is strictly temporary.

New trolls wrote:

It makes a certain sense to not enact an implementation without having policy and to not set policy without an ethic. That's the proper way to bootstrap an organisation: start with a definition of purpose and everything else follows. Otherwise, we're "just" hacking.

Some claim that ethic -> brand -> policy -> implementation -> feedback -> organizing

In other words, without an ethic, your brand will attract the wrong people. Policy will be pulled by these "customers" in the wrong ways, violating the ethic. Implementations will become muddled by total lack of focus and trying to please people whose needs and views fundamentally differ. Feedback will add entropy, e.g. feature creep, rather than removing it and converging on a simple single design. To the degree that organizing depends on the feedback and the artifact, the organizing will then fail. Since an ethic consists of self-claims it could be said that a service organization that can't set one has an identity crisis. So hard as it is, you have to do this first. At least, that is what Dee Hock says.

Some questions that could be resolved by an explicit ethic include proper use of troll timeout and how to balance the right to disappear against other norms in the wiki, e.g. accountability

Question: does Zooid need bootstrapping?

Maybe not, there are various degrees of reflexive self-investigation possible and the same job can be done by a clique or a dictating single voice: "here's how it will be". But some longish service outages recently do suggest that some things might have to change if people are going to keep trusting zooid to do anything important. Also it can't be bad to bring in people committed to lateral relationships and efficient self-organized behaviour. The present shell users do seem to be of that sort:

There's obviously been something going by that name for quite some time now. There are property rights to equipment being used and maybe even to names of things. Could we hear from some zooid.org sysops their feelings about the process?

Some are expressing those by email now. Maybe they could join Sysop Discussion or zooid:trollgnaw.