Accountability

I am finally free to read the Candidate by Alex Nunns; the beginning of the 2nd chpter is a series of quotes about the new system of electing a leader introduced in 2014, and it is clear that the Blairite focus on Presidential systems was central to what they thought they’d done. In fact, they’re right and the Party remains unstable because the leadership is only accountable to the membership through OMOV. …

Prescience

Written 4¾ years ago; the mechanism is web site blocking …

This mechanism is also likely to become the arena of commercial competition as rich corporations, or maybe even political parties seek to damage and restrict their competitors by classifying their web sites and advertising material as somehow required to be restricted.

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Quality of Capital

I just found my copy of David Warsh’s “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations”. I have promised myself that I would review it but on studying the dust cover, I find it says that the long term paradox of falling costs, is explained by internalising i.e. to the growth process, technological change. Such a simple insight, which from today’s view point seems so obvious. It may have impacted the capitalist economists more than the Marxians. …

Nice class of person

I have been reminded this week, of Robert Townsend’s book “Up the Organisation”; one gem goes something like this,

Don’t have reserved car parking spaces for senior managers, you should be in early enough to get the space you want and meet a nice class of person in the staff car park!

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Who got there first?

A friend has been quoting to me, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. It’s why I used part of the phrase in the last article, but who said it first; whom are we quoting?

This article provides a surprising answer, i.e. it’s not Thomas Jefferson and its best iteration maybe from Aldous Huxley,

“The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.”

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Modelling power

I have finally posted my long planned piece, on the way Bioware adopted a permissive licence for their AD&D games at the turn of the century. In doing so they enabled a fan community to create content which increased the value of the game to all its customers and also the demand in volume for the game binaries, and the period over which it was used.

I had planned a Part II having come across Ludovico Prattico’s academic paper, Governance of Open Source Software Foundations: Who Holds the Power? which in the abstract he states,

The research reported in this article attempts to discover who holds the power in open source software foundations through the analysis of governance documents. Artificial neural network analysis is used to analyse the content of the bylaws of six open source foundations (Apache, Eclipse, GNOME, Plone, Python, and SPI) for the purpose of identifying power structures.

I was interested if his techniques could be applied to the Bioware licence and see what one might learn, by comparing the output with Prattico’s findings. He had looked at six open source licences so it would be interesting to see how the formal outputs compared. Prattico used additional documents beyond the licence and used the tool Catpac II, which sadly is not free. (I wonder of Carat II will do instead; I hope not because I was/am looking for something better than a bag of words.)

I also wondered if it could be used for analysing, describing other power relationships, such as national constitutions, or the Labour Party’s rules. The latter would be needed in text form which is not easy to find. …