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+# Governable spaces
+
+=> https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.181/
+
+## Introduction: democracy in the wild
+
+* Online communities are different to in-person communities.
+* Online politics in the small reflect in the large.
+* Online communities must explicitly be democratic, self-governance instead of top-down authority => governable spaces.
+* Democratic erosion in the world is influenced by online communities.
+* Users of online communities perceive arbitrary rule enforcement, unaccountability.
+* Online movements have not resulted in lasting gains.
+* The design of online spaces has atrophied everyday democracy skills.
+* Garden club from 1960 with eight pages of bylaws => more successful than most only communities that will not live as long.
+* Fervent US enthusiasm for forming associations observed by Alexis de Tocqueville in 19th century US.
+* Tocqueville: democracy requires education, democracy in education requires political engagement.
+* Tocqueville: associations can serve the social order.
+* Will bad players behave better if they care about mini-democracies?
+* Online spaces are different, more churn, faster, distributed, diverse.
+* Participating in online spaces correlate to political participation.
+* Author unclear about his disagreement with Tocqueville's conclusions, author is more optimistic.
+* Democratic self-governance is harder in online spaces, but possible.
+* Design to achieve self-governance, refuse corporate control.
+* Technical solutions are not sufficient.
+* People do not believe their governments are democratic.
+* People are more willing to change due to technological progress.
+* Governments use technology as an "unavoidable excuse", but it doesn't have to be this way.
+* Introduction of citizen voice happens even authoritarian governments (!)
+* Crypto ledger structures have new power structures, even though it's often antidemocratic, but presents an opportunity.
+* For many, democracy is something that was created for them before they were born, or something they won't have in their lifetime.
+* Online communities are closer to most than their democracy.
+* Designing online communities offers chance to learn how to shape the larger government.
+* No single design can work for all scenarios.
+* Design should be based on accountability.
+* Democracy on a small scale gives hope that it's possible on a bigger scale.
+* From server control to community control.
+* Implicit feudalism: power derives from founders and admins.
+* "Governable stacks", "modular politics" to learn from.
+* Widespread participation => burdensome, elitist, uninformed governance? Overwhelming to participants.
+* Sometimes governable spaces should be highly participative, in others, use representation.
+* Governance designs sensitive to economy of attention.
+
+## Implicit feudalism. The origins of counter-democratic design
+
+* A popular group that called for accountability had a flagship organization with a single board member.
+* Facebook claimed having "the hacker way": open, meritocratic, but Mark Zuckerberg has majority control.
+* Founders solidify.
+* Early social platforms had technical conditions that grant administrators complete control.
+* Use of "feudalism" is not historically precise.
+* "Implicit" because it is not explicit.
+* Sometimes platforms do not even allow transfer of power.
+* Democracy can arise in feudal technologies due to pressure, this democracy can be similar to primitive democracy.
+* But democracy in technology tends to go against the design, the most natural outcome is nondemocratic.
+* Implicit feudalism is not a feature, it is merely seen as a non-intentional lack of features.
+* First step: perceive lack of democratic features.
+* "Exit" vs. "voice"; can only leave, vs. can change things.
+* Exit can have costs => captivity.
+* Refine voice into "Effective voice" vs. "affective voice" => venting vs. being able to make changes.
+* BBS: runs in the sysop house, sysop has absolute power, but also most responsibility and maintenance burden.
+* Users being able to leave makes some accountability.
+* Limitations of real world (sysop responsibility) lead to implicit feudalism.
+* Usenet was bigger scale than BBS, but ultimately "the big 8" ruled (and they named their successors). But Usenet hosted more popular communities than BBSs.
+* Usenet hierarchy is decided by the big 8.
+* Mailing lists follow similar patterns, administrators have all the power.
+* In IRC, iconic channel/network names are a big factor in popularity over performance.
+* IRC pioneered bots to execute authority.
+* BBS, Usenet, mailing lists, IRC's structure follow that of UNIX, with root, etc.
+* Linux and Wikipedia are very productive.
+* Linux has BDFL (feudalism).
+* Git seems to break feudalism with its distributed nature, but Linux uses a mailing list and the BDFL to control.
+* GitHub promotes forks, and user voice in issues, but each project has owners and collaborators.
+* Git/GitHub make "exit" easier, but not effective voice.
+* Linux added a code of conduct, GitHub encourages project to have one.
+* Debian Project Leader is elected, technical barriers of entry.
+* Debian/Apache are outliers, non-profits. (Linux is a non-profit too.)
+* Wikipedia also has self-governance, but also has BDFL.
+* Wikipedia uses MediaWiki for governance (dogfooding).
+* But most MediaWiki sites do not have self-governance.
+* After Wikipedia's BDFL overreaches, BDFL has diminished power.
+* Although software designs can have power vacuums, in the absence of technical software vacuums, "tyrany of structurelessness" often arises.
+* Anyone could participate, but not everyone has the time, knowledge, and incentives.
+* Big corporate platforms could not have the technical limitations of smaller earlier platforms.
+* US Communications Decency Act protects platforms from liability from user behavior.
+* Companies could control the platform, but let communities self-govern.
+* Facebook/Reddit are different (real names vs. pseudonyms) and in theory provide more control to users.
+* Management of communities requires a lot of effort.
+* AOL tried to reduce cost of access to voluntary moderators, but moderators realized they made benefits for AOL without sufficient compensation.
+* To offload moderation to volunteers in a cost-effective manner, they are paid with unchecked power.
+* Author thinks Slashdot moderation worked well and satisfied users, but failed in producing benefit from provocation/engagement.
+* Facebook/Reddit grant "affective voice" through karma, etc.; but not "effective voice". Exit is the most effective voice.
+* Facebook/Reddit provide moderation tools and gamify moderation (reports on groups performance to incentivize admins to maximize usage). This amplifies implicit feudalism.
+* Mark Zuckerberg has power over the Facebook group admins, and engages in democracy theater (2009 referendum on changes to terms of service, required 30% of participation, only 29% achieved, declared "advisory", did what they wanted).
+* 2015 "Reddit revolt", blackouts by making subreddits private. Reddit tightened their rules.
+* Conway law => structure of software reflects the structure of the organization.
+* Facebook/Reddit => the structure of the software shapes the structure of the organization.
+* Facebook tried to go to individuals over communities, mirroring WeChat/TikTok which have no social graphs, only driven by personal habits.
+* Because TikTok etc. do not have communities, there is less politics, but everything is still controlled by the company.
+* Implicit feudalism => control over communities, founder authority, named succession, opaque policies/decisions, supression of user voice, user exit only effective means, only platform owners resolve disputes.
+* Implicit feudalism made some sense with limited resources, but not so much with unlimited resources from large corporations.
+* Implicit feudalism is part of the business model.
+* In contrast, authocratic governments have more democratic "performances" because it resembles legitimate authority.
+* But no major online community offers possibilities of even democratic "performances".
+* Implicit feudalism is not so effective; most Reddits are small, Miecraft servers median lifetime is eight weeks.
+* Exit leads to variety, choice, innovation, but effective voice leads to comitment and stability.
+* Example of BDFL becoming inactive led to subgroups becoming more resilient.
+* Debian does not exist in isolation; sits between Linux and Ubuntu (both with BDFLs).
+* Ubuntu benefits from Debian.
+* Debian/Wikipedia combine elections with meritocratic barriers.
+* Self-governance seems to emerge more in nonprofits or cooperatives, mirroring ownership structures and technical infrastructures.
+* Usenet has some shared governance and autonomy in newsgroups.
+* Combination of different power structures helps self-governance; electoral processes + meritocratic barriers for popular but capable leaders.
+* Multiple governance mechanisms helps prevent one entity from becoming too powerful, but also allows differently-skilled users from having voice.
+* Python had PEPs, when BDFL retired they had some prior art in choosing their new governance, with elections.
+* Disassociation/cancellation => no appeals, how long does it last? Affective, not effective voice. These things come because there is no process to challenge those in power.
+* communityrule.info => online design of community rules and publication/forking. Try to make it easier to create self-governance.
diff --git a/blog/content/notes/cliffs/mythical-man-month.gmi b/blog/content/notes/cliffs/mythical-man-month.gmi
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+# The mythical man-month
+
+## Chapter 1: the tar pit
+
+"Program": complete in itself, ready to be run by the author on the system on which it was developed. What we initially develop and delivers some value is normally a program.
+
+"Programming product": can be run by anybody, in any operating environment, for many sets of data.
+
+* A programming product is thoroughly tested.
+* A programming product is thoroughly documented.
+* A programming product costs three times the cost of the program.
+
+"Component in a programming system": works as a part of a larger product.
+
+* A component in a programming system follows a well-defined interface.
+* A component in a programming system is tested in integration.
+* A component in a programming system costs three times the cost of a program.
+
+"A programming systems product" is a programming product and a component in a programming system. A programming systems product costs nine times the cost of a program.
diff --git a/blog/content/notes/cliffs/peopleware.gmi b/blog/content/notes/cliffs/peopleware.gmi
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+# Peopleware
+
+## I. Managing the human resource
+
+People are different from software.
+
+### 1. Somewhere today, a project is failing
+
+* 15% of all projects deliver nothing.
+* 25% for projects >25 work/years
+* Not for technical reasons, "politics" => sociology
+
+### 2. Make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger
+
+* Errors should be encouraged
+* A project objective is to be ended. Therefore, a project is never steady. Therefore, a project is always changing and there is no steady state
+* Need to think more about "why" this task needs to be done rather than how the task must be done
+
+### 3. Vienna waits for you
+
+* Spanish Theory Management: increase productivity by extracting more work for the $
+* Mechanizing development, lowering quality, standardizing procedure reduces enjoyment of work
+
+### 4. Quality-if time permits
+
+* Self-esteem makes people emotional
+* Self-esteem is tied to the quality of our work
+* Deadlines conflict with quality
+* Manager: Market wants time-to-market over quality
+* Builders: want to match their past best achieved quality, more than what the market wants
+* But quality is a means to productivity
+
+### 5. Parkinson's law revisited
+
+* "Work expands to fill the time allocated for it"
+* Parkinson was a humorist
+* Motivated people do not want to work forever in the same task
+* The team can motivate people better than the manager
+* Productivity by task estimator. No estimate > Systems analyst (unbiased expert) > Programmer > Programmer + supervisor > Supervisor
+* Bureaucratic work does expand
+
+### 6. Laetrile
+
+People are desperate to increase productivity, fall to the seven sirens, seven false hopes of software management 
+
+* Missed something obvious: no
+* Others are succeeding, you are getting outdated, not using the right programming language, need more automation: technical gains affect just a small part of the total effort
+* Need to get to the bottom of the backlog: bottom of the backlog is worthless
+* Workers need more pressure
+
+## II. The office environment
+
+It's hard to increase productivity, but easy to decrease it
+
+### 7. The Furniture Police
+
+Optimizing for cost, and uniformity is not productive
+
+### 8. You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5
+
+Top performers work in quieter, more private, with less interruption, bigger spaces
+
+### 9. Saving money on space
+
+Cost of workplace is a small past of cost of worker
+
+### Intermezzo. Productivity measurement and unidentified flying objects
+
+* Gilb's Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all
+* Individual productivity should only be measured by the invidivual
+
+### 10. Brain time versus body time
+
+Interruptions are expensive
+
+### 11. The telephone
+
+Ensure people attend their email with reasonable frequency (3/day) to allow prioritizing non-interrupting communication
+
+### 12. Bring back the door
+
+People work better in quiet environments
+
+### 13. Taking umbrella steps
+
+* Developers should design the working environment
+* Windows
+* Provide outdoor space, public space
+
+## III. The right people
+
+Get the right people, make them happy, let them work
+
+### 14. The Hornblower factor
+
+* Difficult to improve people, choose well
+* Appearances << capabilities
+* Do not hire for uniformity in the company
+* No dress codes
+
+### 15. Hiring a juggler
+
+* Interviews are about performing, not talking
+* Portfolios
+* Aptitude tests are not for hiring, they are for self-assessment
+* Audition on topic related to work selected by the candidate
+
+### 16. Happy to be here
+
+* Turnover is expensive and leads to short term planning => needs quick promotions, leads to inexperienced people doing the building
+* Company moves are the worst
+* Good companies *retrain*
+
+### 17. The self-healing system
+
+* Humans can improvise, automated process cannot
+* Big M Methodologies automate: a) No improvisation, so must grow to cover all cases b) Lots of documents
+* Big M Methodologies take responsibilities away from people into the Methodology
+* Big M Methodologies lead to malicious compliance- follow the Methodology even if it has bad outcomes
+* Convergence of methods is good, easier to onboard, etc.
+* Achieve convergence of methods by training, tooling and peer review, without forcing a Methodology
+* Hawthorne Effect: people perform better when trying new approaches
+* Do new things on every project to benefit from the Hawthorne Effect
+* But have a 10-page max. standard
+
+## IV. Growing productive teams
+
+Teams working as one on a challenge are the objective. Help the team form
+
+### 18. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
+
+* Jell: a jelled team is more than the sum of its members. Jelled teams enjoy the work
+* Jelled teams have a common objective, low turnover, strong sense of identity, feel elite, join ownership of product, enjoyment
+
+### 19. The black team
+
+* The black team tested other teams code.
+* The black team outlived the original members
+* Identity: dressed in black, some evil mustaches, mystique
+
+### 20. Teamicide
+
+You can't make a team jell, but you can prevent it from jellying:
+
+* Defensive management: preventing people from making mistakes. If the team cannot do the job, they cannot do the job.
+* Bureaucracy
+* Physical separation
+* Fragmentation of people's time: the team must be together most of the time
+* Quality reduction of the product: quality jells a team
+* Phony deadlines
+* Clique control (preventing the team for working together in further projects)
+
+### 21. A spaghetti dinner
+
+* Small successes lead to bigger successes
+* Perform small projects, demos, etc.
+
+### 22. Open kimono
+
+* Trust the team
+* Get them out of the office
+* Let skunkworks projects happen
+* Let people choose their peers and project
+* Natural authority by being competent
+
+### 23. Chemistry for team formation
+
+Some organizations have environments that favor team formation
+
+Managers do not seem busy nor manage a lot, they maintain the chemistry
+
+Chemistry building:
+
+* Cult of quality
+* I told her I loved her when I married her. Provide closure to each task. Small tasks for frequent closure
+* The Elite Team. Allow and grant uniqueness.
+* On not breaking up the yankees.
+* A network model of team behavior. Managers are not part of the team. Occasional leaders inside the team
+* Selections from a Chinese menu. Do not have a uniform team
+
+## V. It's supposed to be fun to work here
+
+### 24. Chaos and order
+
+Constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder:
+
+* Pilot projects. All projects as pilots, but limit experimentation
+* War games
+* Brainstorming
+* Provocative training experiences
+* Training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats.
+
+### 25. Free electrons
+
+Some people should be left to work at what they want
+
+### 26. Holgar Dansk
+
+A "sleeping giant" can oppose any bad change
+
+## VI. Son of Peopleware
+
+### 27. Teamicide revisited
+
+* Those damn posters. Motivational posters tell obvious things people already know. It is demeaning
+* Overtime: An unanticipated side effect. If someone is exent of overtime, it is even more damaging
+
+### 28. Competition
+
+Internal competition inhibits jell, Prevents internal coaching. Can come from:
+
+* Annual salary or merit reviews
+* Management by objectives
+* Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
+* Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
+* Performance measurement in almost any form
+
+Musical ensembles are better metaphors of good development teams than sport teams. Individual sport teams members can have differing valoration from the rest of the team
+
+### 29. Process improvement programs
+
+* Standardized interfaces are good, standardized processes are not
+* Goal is a good product, not building it efficiently
+* Good products are risky projects, process improvement avoids risky projects
+* Better teams do more complex projects, more risk
+
+### 30. Making change possible
+
+People fear change
+
+Degrees of fear to change:
+
+* Blindly loyal (ask no questions)
+* Believers but questioners: skeptics (show me), passive observers (what's in it for me?), opposed (fear of change), opposed (fear of loss of power), militantly opposed (will undermine and destroy)
+
+Blindly loyal can abandon a change for a newer one. Only Believers but questioners can be allies to a change. Work with them to make change successful
+
+
+elebrate the old system
+
+Phases of change
+
+* Introduce foreign element/catalyst
+* Chaos
+* Transforming idea (finding the "correct training"/correct way to adopt change)
+* Practice & Integration
+* New status quo
+
+People need to feel safe for change, there should be room for some failure
+
+### 31. Human capital
+
+* Money spent of people is only lost if they leave
+* Replacing someone is expensive
+
+### 32. Organizational learning
+
+* Organizations can only learn if people stay for a long time
+* Organizations learn when middle management works together without competition and without reporting to upper management
+
+### 33. The ultimate management sin is...
+
+Wasting people's time:
+
+* Being late for meetings, blocking meetings, inviting people who don't need to be there
+* Status reporting meetings
+* Early overstaffing (and leads to fragmenting time of people)
+
+### 34. The making of community
+
+* Aristotelian politics is building communities, extending ethics to a group
+* Creatin
diff --git a/blog/content/notes/cliffs/the-tyranny-of-structurelessness.gmi b/blog/content/notes/cliffs/the-tyranny-of-structurelessness.gmi
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+# The tyranny of structurelessness
+
+=> https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm A copy of the original article. These Cliff's notes focus on the generic points of the article, not on its original context (the feminist movement).
+
+Leaderless, structureless groups as an organizational form is a reaction to over-structured society in which most of us live that give others control over us.
+
+Structurelessness encourages participation in discussion and personal insight, but it does not achieve more than that.
+
+Structureless groups struggle when they want to achieve something more specific than raising consciousness, because the groups do not want to change structure when they change their tasks, because they think other organizational forms can be anything but oppressive.
+
+## Formal and informal structures
+
+Structureless groups evolve into having tacit structure due to the diversity of the people that form them.
+
+Structurelessness only prevents the formation of formal structures, not informal ones. Decision-making rules are known only by those who make the decisions.
+
+To give everyone the opportunity to participate, structure must be explicit and the rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, so they must be formalized.
+
+## The nature of elitism
+
+Elites can only be groups, not individuals.
+
+Elites have power over a larger group without direct responsibility.
+
+A person is an elitist by being a part or advocating the elite, not by being notorious.
+
+Elites are not conspiracies, generally they are groups of friends that happen to participate in some activity together.
+
+Elites are communication networks because they are groups of friends that talk.
+
+Groups might have one or more communication networks and they might overlap. The communication networks do not necessarily have to be an elite. Multiple communication groups might compete and only one might become an elite.
+
+In a structured group, the group competition is public and other members of the group can arbitrate and make demands on the groups.
+
+Elites can be spotted in groups, they listen and don't interrupt other members more than they do with non-members. Approval of the elite is necessary for things to happen.
+
+Membership of the elite tends to have some required characteristic. Common themes are related to the friendship nature of the elite, but not to the effectiveness for the larger group's purpose.
+
+It is easier to form an elite at the beginning of the group, by bringing existing friends in. Otherwise, the elite must be formed through new effort. Elites need to maintain themselves by adding new members. Outsides might find a member of the elite to sponsor them.
+
+Elite forming and maintenance require time, so people with major commitments normally find it impossible to join. A formal structure of decision making helps the overworked (and others) participate in the group.
+
+Elites are not inevitably bad, they are only inevitable. Elites can do useful things. But elites have uncontrolled power within their group.
+
+Two negative consequences: liked people have power independently of their skills, which is bad for doing significant things; elites have no obligation to be responsible. The elite usually tries to be responsible to maintain their influence, but the group cannot compel them to be responsible, this is up to the interests of the elite.
+
+## The "star" system
+
+Society expects groups to make decisions and to select spokespeople. Society does not want to listen to all individuals in a group, they want to know what the group feels. There are only three ways to know group opinion:
+
+* Voting
+* Surveys
+* Spokespeople
+
+The public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.
+
+If there are no official spokespeople, the public might choose notable members of the group, but their opinions might not be representative of the group: "stars".
+
+The stars might not desire to be, and the members of the group might resent the stars.
+
+Stars cannot be removed by the group, because the group did not make them stars, only the press can. The press will listen to stars as long as there are no official spokespeople. Members of the group can attack the stars, who might then leave the group, remaining a star but maybe not aligned with the group.
+
+## Political impotence
+
+Sometimes the informal structure of a group might align with what the group wants to do, this gives the appearance of an effective group. However, this is hard to replicate. Normally these groups have four conditions:
+
+* They are task oriented, they were formed with a narrow and specific function.
+* They are small and homogeneous, so they have good communication reducing conflicts.
+* They have a high degree of communication. This normally limits the group to five people, although 10 to 15 is possible if they have subgroups.
+* They have a low degree of skill specialization, so everything can be done by more than one person, so no one is indispensable. (Not everything needs to be doable by everyone.)
+
+Groups composed of smaller effective groups do not tend to become more effective than their parts. These groups generates much motion and few results. These groups tend to be limited to the initial founders and exclude others, esp. the nongregarious, and elitism becomes institutionalized.
+
+Groups without projects spend their time maintaining the elite.
+
+When people cannot join the group and do things, they might do things on their own, which might lead to individual creativity, but many people cannot do this and does not foster cooperative group effort. Such people might drop out of the interests of the group, or join groups with other interests, maybe with new elites.
+
+The old elites can perceive these new elites as misaligned threats. The old elites can accuse the new elite of attracting specific groups of people from their group.
+
+The old elites can become public and formalize their original power structure as a formal structure. If the informal elite was well structured they might be able to do this, but groups that required structure the most might not be able to do it, because they adhere more to the ideology of structurelessness and they are more vulnerable to a takeover.
+
+Unstructured groups might choose to participate in larger groups with more influence and capabilities, but they can only have little influence in the larger group and their ideas might be diffused, but rarely implemented.
+
+## Principles of democratic structuring
+
+Groups should not blindly accept or ignore traditional forms of organization. These forms might be effective or not. Structure is not inherently bad, only excess of it.
+
+Essential principles:
+
+* Democratic delegation of specific authority to specific individuals. People who show interest or willingness who are selected are committed.
+* Delegates should be responsible to who selected them. This way the group controls the authorities.
+* Distribution of authority over as many people as possible, preventing monopoly of power and requiring consultations. It gives more people the opportunity for responsibility and learning.
+* Rotation of tasks among individuals to prevent responsibilities from being someone's property. But not too much rotation so that it prevents learning and satisfaction.
+* Rational allocation of tasks; by ability, interest and responsibility instead of by standing in the group. Learn through apprenticeship rather than sink or swim. Do not demoralize people by having responsibilities you cannot do well. Do not blacklist people from doing what they can do well.
+* Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible, giving individuals more power.
+* Equal access to resources needed by the group. Resources owned by a member can be controlled by a member. This includes skills and information.
+
+These principles prevent informal elites.