Re:Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
by dredmorbius on Friday November 15, 2019 @05:05PM
(#21549277)
Wouldn't an assumption of good faith presume a capacity for frank discussion?
Oddly enough, I'm debating (on Mastodon) against the notion that a Single Global Authority defined as "suitably free", supported through taxes, would be a prefered / acceptable alternative to present private Internet service provisioning.
I agree with most of the sentiment, particularly public subsidy of comms capabilities. The concern is that it's not possibly to simply define a thing as "suitably free", you've got to work in a real world, in which definitions don't simply instantiate themselves, in which adversaries may take control of critical regulatory bodies (I pointed out that One Geopolitical Party with interests Significantly Opposed to Another has in recent history held the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, where the UN was the proposed Internet provisioning entity).
Similarly: you can't simply declare by definition or fiat that we're all on the same team. For multiple parties' interests to be fairly represented and addressed, there must be some mechanism for representing and addressing those concerns.
Otherwise the proposal simply ignores existing realities and complexities and attempts to abstract them out of existence. They'll reappear in time in other places or forms.
Additionally, my understaning of "presume good faith" may be different from yours. It's not so much a belief I'll maintain, most especially in the absence of evidence. It's an operating and communications modality I will attempt to sustain (and hope others do), up to the point at which it is clearly no longer tenable. It's an extension of all feasible grace and credit, to the point that no possible justification for that extension remains.
Andreas Schou, a Googler, used to have an excellent guide to moderation pinned to his profile page there. A copy survives here:
Oddly enough, I'm debating (on Mastodon) against the notion that a Single Global Authority defined as "suitably free", supported through taxes, would be a prefered / acceptable alternative to present private Internet service provisioning.
I agree with most of the sentiment, particularly public subsidy of comms capabilities. The concern is that it's not possibly to simply define a thing as "suitably free", you've got to work in a real world, in which definitions don't simply instantiate themselves, in which adversaries may take control of critical regulatory bodies (I pointed out that One Geopolitical Party with interests Significantly Opposed to Another has in recent history held the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, where the UN was the proposed Internet provisioning entity).
Similarly: you can't simply declare by definition or fiat that we're all on the same team. For multiple parties' interests to be fairly represented and addressed, there must be some mechanism for representing and addressing those concerns.
Otherwise the proposal simply ignores existing realities and complexities and attempts to abstract them out of existence. They'll reappear in time in other places or forms.
Additionally, my understaning of "presume good faith" may be different from yours. It's not so much a belief I'll maintain, most especially in the absence of evidence. It's an operating and communications modality I will attempt to sustain (and hope others do), up to the point at which it is clearly no longer tenable. It's an extension of all feasible grace and credit, to the point that no possible justification for that extension remains.
Andreas Schou, a Googler, used to have an excellent guide to moderation pinned to his profile page there. A copy survives here:
https://www.voidstar.com/Takeout/ActivityLog/Comments.html
I've posted it, with paragraph breaks to Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/raw/W3vpntgM