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A Hobbesian world doesn't admit to the overlapping
boundaries in domains.
The need for formal aggreements doesn't
extend to all levels and every case. A smart
manager isolates out the mission critical, agreement
sensitive aspects and works toward formal agreements
on those aspects, careful to fix values that must
be fixed and to leave dynamic that which must be
dynamic. In short, constants and variables.
The nasty brutish wrestling match starts over
seeking advantages in the classification of
members of these. Rhetoric is used to persuade
the crowd that something should be left variable
or made constant when the decision is in an
underdefined boundary case. Daring to do less
is an exercise in declaring large overlapping
boundaries and leaving the members of these
to choose sides.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
At the end of Walter Perry's presentation last night, C. Michael
Sperberg-McQueen suggested that Walter was describing a "Hobbesian world of
processes in competition...each process for itself", while for himself,
"call me a corporatist", he preferred to work with processes based on prior
agreement.
After too many years of working with web browsers, which share a common
agreement to some extent but which still have dark corners, I know that I'm
inclined to doubt the prospects of large-scale distributed projects run by
competitors proving genuinely willing to abide by the terms of the
contract. Contracts in the United States often start with the best of
intentions, but but sometimes turn into battlegrounds, specifying the terms
of engagement in a more bellicose style than was originally intended.
I'm curious at this point how the "XML project" of agreement-building is
proceeding. In most of my own work, I find that either I don't bother with
contracts (my own rules files, which others have been able to adapt to
their own needs) or the contracts sort of partially work (HTML, DocBook at
O'Reilly).
Are most people working on building agreements across communities? Are
they working on the I-publish-you-discover approach common to smaller
efforts and formalized by things like WSDL and (to a lesser extent) RDDL?
Personally, I'm happy to support prior agreements when all parties agree
about the nature of the agreement and are willing to continue supporting
that agreement over time, but I have some deep suspicions about the nature
of agreement that leave me suspecting that technologists and technologies
often live in a Hobbesian world. The results are less difficult than those
Hobbes predicted: we don't all seem to be living the "nasty, brutish, and
short" life, nor do I see much need for us to throw ourselves before the
mercy of an all-powerful tyrant, which I believe was Hobbes' solution [1]
to the ugliness of this world.
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