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Re: [ox-en] an idea looking for a home



Hi Matt and all!

Today matt wrote:
The part
that sticks in my head is what I call (apologies to un-cited references)
the 'one out of N principal': whatever the task, no matter how trivial,
unpleasant or difficult, one out of N people will gladly do the job for
free.  If it's a really dirty job, N is very large.  If it's merely a
hard job N is smaller.  If it's kind of interesting and useful, N is
pretty small.

This is a nice idea. So our aim need to be to have as little as
possible jobs with big N. Well, looking at it this way the GPL society
is only an optimization problem - which in fact I think is at least
part of the problem. Maximum automatization is an optimization
problem, isn't it?

One axis in Benni's multi-dimensional extension of that formula would
be what people consider hard / dirty / whatever. You can't generalize
this really because that's a parameter each individual sets on her/is
own.

Most non-geeks don't understand the amazing potential of distributed
collaboration so I thought of starting a project that non-geeks could
get into, that would produce a noticeable result.

There are a number of projects out there where you can donate your
superfluous computing power - SETI home might be the best-known of
them. I think this is similar to your idea - however, AFAIK without
the more ideological implications to promote distributed
collaboration. A few weeks ago I read an article in the c't (*the*
German computer magazine) about that.

If this worked, people would realize that much of the services provided
by government can be done by interested volunteers.

Actually this is an important point. As someone pointed out the
privatization of more and more public sectors shows that a state is
less and less needed. Sure, this is not the only thing to say about
privatization of public sectors, but it's an interesting point in our
context.

Free Software and projects like the one you're proposing show, that
you even don't need money or a corporation for doing useful things.
Indeed technology and especially the Internet brought lots of
possibilities here.

Other projects
mimic and evolve.  Taxes go down.
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ahmmm... Why?


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/


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