---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 10:49:49 -0400
>From: Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: From a "A Cathedral" of Public Policy to a Public Policy
"Bazaar"
Hi Ed:
Thanks for your careful and insightful comments.
You as others, have pointed out the "Direct Democracy" implications of a
"Policy Bazaar". However, I'ld like to reframe that notion and look at it
in the context of a "disintermediated" rather than a "direct" democracy as
I think the DD notion has a history and set of associations that are not
very pertinent for this discussion.
For better or for worse, "the market" is giving us some very strong
signals concerning the role of "middlemen" in the variety of transactions
in developed economies. Amazon.com and Ebay.com are only the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to what it appears may be a fundamental
restructuring/disintermediating by means of the Net of large areas of
commerce and other information intensive elements of contemporary life.
The bankrupty of that Cathedral/icon of Canadian retailing T.Eaton Corp.
is only the beginning, I think. Matt Drudge as a news purveyor alongside
(on top of) the NYT on so many Bookmark indexes is another.
The political/policy process will not be unscathed. In fact I've already
had private communication from a couple of sources indicating that some
sort of real linkage between the "policy bazaar" and the "policy
cathedral" has been proposed and shot down at fairly high levels. And
most of us are probably familiar with one or more of the "policy forums"
which for example the Brits gingerly undertook around their privacy law
and here in Canada by the CRTC around the New Media hearing. What was
interesting about these was how the policy folks wanted the cake and they
wanted to eat it and in the end everyone went away hungry... Without real
engagement (and real rules of engagement), the Canadian process turned
into a marathon "California Ideology" cf. rant. The British case was
rather more polite and rather less interesting...
What is so very interesting to me about the Open Source methodology and
the Cathedral/Bazaar metaphor is how there are some quite interesting
embedded alternative organizational principles which have actually been
operating quite successfully in a highly complex area over large distances
and with multiple unconnected actors. Open Source is not anarchy and the
bazaar has very clear rules of operation, but they both rely on internal
processes of self-organization and self-management rather than
hierarchically imposed controls.
To respond to your first point, I believe, that it is the orderliness of
the process and the multiple and decentralized localizations of authority
which are the ultimate protectors of the rights of the individual rather
than the simple existence of representative government. My guess is that
the Native Schools matter for example, would have been better resolved 40
years ago with an open policy process rather than the process of
"bureaucratic/Cabinet infallibility" which then (and now?) prevailed.
>Mike,
>What your paper does not seem to recognize is that government does not
>usually respond to the public as a whole, but to particular groups and
>interests within the public. This is not inappropriate if one views
>democracy as being founded on two often contradictory principles:
>recognizing the public interest as a whole; and protecting the rights and
>interests of individuals and groups. Bringing the public as a whole into
>policy formulation via a medium such as the internet might, if the
>initiative were genuine and sincere, satisfy one of these principles but
>could violate the other.
Excellent point but see my response above...
>Much of my experience in government and outside of it as a consultant has
>been with aboriginal issues. The content of these issues is complex.One
>has to become very deeply immersed in them before one really gets to
>understand them to the extent of being able to make an effective
>contribution to policy. I would question the willingness of most of the
>public to put enough time into developing an appropriate level of
>understanding. Moreover, aboriginal people have a longstanding proprietory
>interest in aboriginal policy making. They would strenuously resist an
>encroachment on this interest by the public as a whole. I would refer to
>the recent angry babble out of British Columbia on the Nisga settlementto
>illustrate what I'm saying.
>
>Other fields of policymaking would encounter similar problems. Could a
>life-long Toronto urbanite really understand the problems of marginalized
>prairie grain grower or the social devastation currently being faced by
>communities based on mining? Perhaps the role of the internet here is to
>educate--to put the farmer or miner into direct contact with the urbanite
>so that he can then go after his MP. But to expect the urbanite to be
>sympathetic or even objective without such education is expecting too
>much.
I agree on the specifics but not on the general. Clearly, some method
needs to be found to respond to this. However, the same methodology with
the same results but with different players has lead to 20 years of wasted
money and effort here in Cape Breton, with closed and highly party
politicized processes propping up structures which should probably never
have been allowed to continue. And now the recent about face and the
neo-liberal abandonment of a population to find their own way out of a
mess for which those responsible have long gone to their indexed
pensionable valhalla.
>The role of government as cathedral is to try to balance a great variety
of
>often mutually exclusive and mutually incomprehensible interests. I've
>worked in the cathedral and like the idea of the bazaar, but I quite
>honestly can't see how it would work. I read parts of the paper on the
>development of the Linux system. I came away with the impression that
>widespread input to the development and debugging of that system worked
>because everyone who contributed had a pretty good idea of what it was
about
>and how it worked. I honestly cannot feel the same way about the
>development of Indian policy or many other issues government must try to
>resolve.
It also worked because the Linux developers were working on problems that
were broken down into chewable chunks...problem bits that were capable of
being resolved in small dispersed units. I think one of the key elements
in one of the papers is that much of the process of development was a
process of incremental debugging and using the base level of software
resources to respond to new requirements and then through a trial and
error process (rapid prototyping) finding ways of solving them.
Maybe the deeper message is that the Cathedral is just too big a
structure...the resources required to keep it afloat might be better
applied to responding to the localized problems by means of a whole bunch
of dispersed bazaars, each debugging the problems that need to be
addressed locally. (The Cathedral hasn't worked very well here in CB, and
now after we voted the last Cardinal out of office, even the holy mother
Church has given up on trying to maintain it...but unfortunately they
haven't torn it down yet and made space/resources for other things to
grown in its place...and it will take generations and what will be for
many, tragic life adjustments for the effects of this particular Cathedral
to wear off.
>Ed Weick
Mike Gurstein
