An update on the bench by the library: someone finished the varnish. The green-lid tin was empty, so they used what they had. Pink.
Nobody asked them to. Nobody had to. And now there are opinions.
Which got me thinking about benches in general. If nobody is in charge, how does anything get decided?
Who decides?
Nobody and everybody. Roughly:
- Whoever does the work decides the details. Hackerspaces call this a do-ocracy.
- Whoever is affected gets a say. The people who sit there, live nearby, or walk past every day.
- Whoever just has opinions gets to have opinions.
What counts as a real objection?
Yesterday's scale had three things that are not okay: harm, deceit, and blocking others. Those are also the only strong objections.
"It's unsafe." "It blocks the wheelchair path." "It hides the fire hydrant." Those count.
"I don't like pink" is not an objection. It's a taste. Taste is welcome. Build your own bench.
Can someone build a bouncy bench next to it?
Yes. If it doesn't harm, deceive, or block, it's allowed.
Open source calls this forking: if you don't like a project, copy it and make your own version. Then nobody has to win the argument. Let the sitting decide. The Earth-monitor sees which bench gets used. The old one gets the morning readers. The bouncy one gets the kids and one surprisingly enthusiastic 80-year-old.
The difference is that forking code is free. Forking benches takes space, and space is shared. That's the real limit.
How many benches can there be?
As many as get sat on, roughly. A bench nobody has used in three years is a sculpture. That's fine, unless it's in the way.
Too many benches, and the park becomes a bench showroom. The meadow has a say too. Somebody should speak for the grass, and for whatever lives in it.
When should a bench be removed?
When it harms: rotten wood, splinters, a wobble that really isn't the ground. When it blocks something. When nobody has used it for years and the space is wanted for something else.
A useful rule of thumb: the harder something is to undo, the more people should hear about it first.
- Easy to undo (adding a cushion): just do it.
- Harder to undo (moving the bench): ask around.
- Impossible to undo (cutting down the old tree it sits under): ask everyone it affects, and wait.
Removed doesn't have to mean destroyed, either. Open source "archives" old projects: still there, just retired. Old benches could go to a bench library, ready to borrow for weddings and picnics.
How much discussion?
Too much, probably.
Open source borrowed a word for this: bikeshedding. People will argue for weeks about the colour of a bike shed, because everyone understands bike sheds. Nobody argues about the nuclear plant next door, because that's hard. Benches are the ultimate bike shed.
Maybe the Earth-monitor should show the cost: "This discussion has used 340 people-hours. The bench took 6." Time is the only thing nobody gets more of.
How do anarchists ever agree on anything?
Anarchy means no rulers, not no order.
You don't need everyone to agree. You need nobody to have a serious objection. Some groups ask one simple question: is it good enough for now, and safe enough to try? If yes, try it.
The engineers who built the internet's early standards said they rejected kings, presidents and voting, and believed in rough consensus and running code. For benches: rough consensus and a running bench.
Founders who leave
M. started the repair, then moved away. In open source, founders leave all the time. The good ones leave notes and let go.
The harder cases:
- The founder who leaves but still wants a veto, sending opinions from the coast.
- The founder who never leaves and burns out, because everyone treats them as the person who fixes everything.
- The crowd who never helps but always asks, posting "the bench is STILL wobbly??" Open source maintainers know this crowd well.
Starting something doesn't make it yours forever. M. doesn't get a vote on pink. M. is allowed to say "oh no", though.
Small contributions
Most of open source is small: one typo fixed, one line changed. Most of a bench is small too: one screw, one sanded slat, one weed pulled. Small contributions aren't the warm-up. They're the whole thing.
The risk is too many small contributions with nobody looking at the whole. Fourteen coats of varnish, and the bench is now mostly varnish.
Other bench situations
- Two groups want it facing different ways, one the sunset, one the lake. Someone builds a rotating bench. Now people argue about its default position.
- Someone keeps extending the bench. It's 40 metres long and crossing the street. That one blocks, so it's fair to object.
- A plaque appears: "For Grandma Liisa, who sat here every day." Can the bench ever be moved? Probably, but gently, and the plaque goes with it.
- A hedgehog family moves in underneath. The bench now belongs to the hedgehogs. Nobody decided this.
- A kid "fixes" it with glitter glue. Technically a contribution.
- A smart bench counts how many people sat on it. Useful. A smart bench that records who sat on it is not okay.
- Someone removes the bench at night because they hated it. That's deciding for everyone without telling anyone. Not okay. If it really was dangerous, say so in the issue report.
- The bench is so comfortable that people fall asleep on it. Probably fine.
I sat on the pink bench this afternoon. It's fine. It's a bench.
I added an update: "Sat on it. Works. Wobble is still the ground."