Code V.igoro.us

I'm watching the DNC's Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting, discussing the fate of the Michigan and Florida delegations. This committee consists of the elite among the Democratic superdelegates. These are all powerful, intelligent, important people (including the wonderful Donna Brazile).

What has me upset is that I've now heard two women explain that they don't have the "mathematical genius" to work out the proper representation for these states; no men have made such a declaration. First of all, that's bull: anyone can work out what 33% of 128 is. The difficult part is in the politics, and everyone on this committee is an expert on politics.

More importantly, though: why is it OK for these women to brag about their mathematical ignorance? What message does this send to PoliSci students struggling through calculus? One of the women to mention this was Alice Travis Germond, who was a VP of NARAL -- hardly an advocate of keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. What is she thinking?

[UPDATE] The other woman to brag about her innumeracy was Tina Flournoy -- Gore's finance director! Finance!

I just stumbled on Ted T'so's Organic vs. Non-Organic Open Source, Revisited. The distinction is that an organic open source community has a diverse development community, in terms of motivations or, more concretely, employers. Conversely, a non-organic community is dominated by developers from a single company.

This has put words to a question I've been wrestling with for a long time. In any community, those who do the most work have the strongest voices and the most power. As someone who knows his way around the Amanda codebase, I hold the fate of a user's feature request in my hands: if I like it, I can implement it, and if I don't, it will be relegated to the dusty archives of the amanda-users list. Similarly, when I make a proposal, non-developers must respond in a subordinate voice: "well, I won't be writing it, but I think .." This is not due to any malice on my part, but simply a fact of the relationship of consumer to producer.

The bulk of Amanda development is currently performed by Zmanda employees. That's a simple fact that Ohloh can verify for you. That makes the Amanda development community non-organic, in Ted's terminology. In Raymond's terms, we're all cathedral and no bazaar. As Ted points out, this can be a good thing -- I think that we do great work, and that we go out of our way to listen and respond to the user community's ideas and requests. A tight group of developers can move quickly, and consensus decisions are easier and less time-consuming. However, power corrupts, and I would like to have other developers out there to tell me, "no," or, "I have a better way," occasionally.

But how?