[IAEP] [SLOBS] Motions A & B for Tomorrow

[Dave Crossland]

On 3 June 2016 at 07:54, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 1:13 AM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
>> On 2 June 2016 at 11:27, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Or is the intention to *add* another person separate from any concrete
>>> goals within the organization some unilateral spending privileges?  If the
>>> latter, what problem are we solving?
>>
>> The recent domain renewal is a great case study about why we want to add
>> another person separate from any concrete goals; that person acts as a
>> 'catch all' or 'back stop' to solve the problem that there is a small
>> expense that needs to be covered quickly but without a formally structured
>> role in place it isn't clear who can approve the spending.
>
> This example is broken. Bernie in fact is the one whom should have been
> approached as head of the infrastructure team and he could have approved the
> spending unilaterally.

And yet, despite Seb being a contributor for many years, and me being
somewhat familiar with the idea that Bernie can spend unilaterally,
that didn't happen.

For myself, I didn't approach Bernie because I understood his
unilateral spending authority to be limited to thing he needs to do to
keep the servers running, and since Seb has the domain registered
himself, it seemed a little bit far from Bernie's remit.

I also note that Seb posted to the community lists about this, and
no-one, including yourself, replied to say "Bernie can do this" CC'ing
him.

Without formally structured roles, we rely on informal structures,
which are inherently subjective and ambiguous. The example appears
broken to you now because in your subjective perspective Bernie is
authorized to renew the domain, but the observed reality is that his
authority was not exercised and this is a failure of the informal
structure. A formal structure might succeed :)

> But I cry "uncle"

lol :)

>> If you still find yourself puzzled by the motivations for more structure,
>> I recommend a close reading of http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm -
>> I found it very enlightening as to the problems inherent in
>> flat/distributed/self-empowered organizations :)
>
> I am puzzled and will read the article before the meeting.

:D