[Linux-aus] With elections coming up soon I thought I'd post a few ideas

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On Sun, 4 Dec 2005 00:45, Janet Hawtin <lucychilli at adam.com.au> wrote:
> Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > Yes, you are free to elect the same person. However, how does that
> > person convince everyone that they are on the right track? If they
> > are focusing their energies into something that will take over a year
> >  to show results (or even worse, be detrimental in the short run -
> > the "no pain, no gain" approach), how will the voters judge them?
>
> According to whether theyve communicated the long term gain well?
> been honest about the short term risks and are on target for the stage
> of getting there maybe?

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way. Humans are not entirely 
rational beings, despite what economic/political theorists would like you to 
think. People can often have very different ideas and motivations about the 
same thing. Anyone in a leadership position is trying to convince their 
followers that they are taking the right course of action; they are selling 
their idea. In most cases, truly honest salespeople/politicians don't get 
very far.

We need a system which recognises this problem and takes it into account. I 
believe that two-year terms are a step in the right direction for this.

The "Founding Fathers" of the United States of America faced a similar 
problem. Buoyed by theories from the Enlightenment (mostly from France), they 
originally considered hosting elections every year and even revising the 
constitution every 25 years. They eventually came to see those ideas as 
impractical and idealistic. The flow of power must not be stagnant, but a 
torrent can be unmanageable.

> This means that the big challenging things which have to prove
> themselves are likely to occur at a project level?
> Is that where most of the permanent solutions are likely to be formed?
> How are projects proposed and teams formed? Perhaps they are intended to
> have a variable run time depending on the task?
> If so would that get away from the bandaid issue?

It might. What sort of accountability/oversight is there for projects and 
teams?

-- 
Sridhar Dhanapalan  [Yama | http://www.pclinuxonline.com/]
  {GnuPG/OpenPGP: http://dhanapalan.webhop.net/yama.asc
   0x049D38B4 : A7A9 8A02 78CB AB1B FCE4 EEC6 2DD9 249B 049D 38B4}

"...guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or 
unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the 
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
	-- US President Eisenhower, in his Final
		Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961
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