Wednesday, June 28, 2006

The really big idea of the week

"The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity." [My emphasis]

News of Wikipedia's Death Greatly Exaggerated, by Clay Shirky

This is challenging to the hard core libertarians of the world that would just as soon see the government go away. Pure democracy doesn't work and gets us things like urban sprawl.

It's also very challenging to the public education establishment that emphasizes fairness over excellence. Excellence will always result in hierarchy, and they resent that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Libertarians oppose democracy.
They believe in using democratic voting processes, but only on a narrow set of issues about how to perform the few legitimate roles of government.