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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: experts
 From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@e...> > I'm not flaming your general notion that you have to > design for and with the users, but saying that "experts" > are incapable of it is a disservice. Is it some kind of Noble Savage mythology cropping up here? Is the Academy ganging together to oppress or exclude autodidacts, talented amateurs, craftsman, innovators and other prodigies? It one looks at the RFCs at IETF, many of the significant ones came from researchers. The problem is not experts/trenches, but how to have systems that allow different people with different personalities or cultures to participate. And the #1 manifestation of this is not that $5000 keeps Simon out of W3C WGs but that the Web process is utterly dominated by the North-Western hemisphere: by people who have the skills to use English, relate to men, argue, and fit in socially with 35+year-old US white male corporate society. Only a couple of days ago I heard of a Japanese project to create their own stripped down EDI-in-XML (I think it is TEDI) which is being developed (prior to but) in isolation of/defiance to ebXML. The impression I got was that this was being done because of a frustration by those concerned (Government, large Japanese companies) that "standards" progress was being centralized in the West (e.g. Microsoft closing research labs outside US now that they don't need to pretend about the "China Wall"). Now, without buying into the idea that there should be "distinctly Asian" technology for the web, if we add that to the Chinese government's talk of having its own IP, and the development of non-ASCII domain names outside IETF-process in East Asia, if even the Japanese (often the East Asians most successfully capable of being assertive) have grave troubles, what hope for the rest of the world who are not even rich? Modernization!=Westernization How do we support plurality that enfranchises other time zones, hemispheres, disabilities, genders, personality types, cultures, value systems, religions, etc? It seems to me that the preconditions for these is not democracy (in the sense of making ever-larger committees) but insitutionalized humility in the centre to allow an exchange of ideas with the periphery. What forms would institutionalized humility take? For a start, schedule all meetings (face-to-face or teleconferences) entirely based on (computerized) population densities, for location, time and language. Make sure the institutionalized world pays as much attention to the world of individuals as it does to other institutions. Have review processes from the earliest moments for internationalization, gender issues, disability access, privacy, social impact, HCI, oligopolization, and "appropriate technology" (e.g. Schumaker's Small is Beautiful). The goal is enfranchisement, but the battleground is steering/limiting/correcting institutional power. I am not saying it is good to support the techno-hermit who puts out some brilliant hack to revolutionize the world after a weekends work; but I think it is naive to think that the techno-hermit can be enfranchised without making sure institutions are suitably humble-by-policy (or law). Cheers Rick Jelliffe 
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