One more time.

What is entrenchment?

Entrenchment is the breakdown of organizational structure whereby individuals leverage their experience and knowledge to develop alternative rules and practices to maximize security and minimize risk.

As such it is a natural phenomenon that occurs in greater or lesser degree in most organizations, a logical outcome of the organizational efficiency and inertia wherever there is a successful business model weakly managed. Often entrenchment is synonymous with "the way things are" and though the practices that make it up are viewed by participants as highly personal and individualistic aspects of the organization they tend to be similar from one entrenched organization to another.

Entrenched organizations are marked by:
- Ineffective Overmanagement
- High ratio of managers to workforce
- Separation of management from workforce
- Lack of oversight and accountability
- General disregard for external standards
- Unclear business objectives
- Day-to-day focus mostly on concerns unrelated to business
- No job training or irrelevant job training
- Personality-driven culture
- Significant regular business functions dependent on single individuals
- Low service quality standards

Robert Link a while back pointed to an old posting by Cory Doctrow. I hadn't read "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" before, so was happy to see it. Lately Wired et. al. have been possibly too enamored of Google's world-dominating paradigm, but Doctrow merits some slack for talking it up, considering he wrote the piece in 2001. In retrospect his "Google has the answer" conclusion is prescient and a bit scary.

(citations:
http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperationcommons/blog/robert-link/457-revisiting-doctorows-metacrap
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm)

Link asks "what does this attitude mean for those interested in cooperation," which triggered several reactions, not all positive, that induced me to read on. (Attitude?)

Link himself reacted to Doctrow's essay as a "Tragedy of the Commons" story, in other words another situation where shared responsibility results in mutual negligence (similar to the "free-bicycle" programs where the bikes all get stolen), and then posits that more control is needed to force a utopian situation to happen. I said:

"(your) comment contradicts much of what Doctrow said about why a metadata utopia is impossible. Being more an "observe-and-adapt" kind of person than a "command and control" kind I'm inclined to side with him in general. However, not all metadata communities are created equal.

The answer to your question lies perhaps in observing groups like ISO, IEEE, et al and trying to determine both how they've managed to maintain the cohesiveness of their standards over the years and what threats they face in the increasingly open and opportunistic world of information today. There's a strange mix of the publicly open wrapper around a thoroughly arcane core that seems to work well today for organizations like Google and Apple, and some other odd experiments that work less well, such as the incendiary copyright enforcement efforts of the RIAA and the "competing standards" farce with DVD's-I-mean-Blu-Ray-Disks.

A question to your comment, why would you not automatically include all sentient beings in your utopian community from the start? Whatever system you might create would be fragmented and impossibly difficult to even begin to sum up, but you'd have eliminated all those scalability problems from the outset. Of course then you'd face a whole new set of problems, possibly resembling what Cory Doctrow's piece addressed.

Creating Communities (or even one community) seems to me much more than a trick; it's a lifetime of work. Contemplating problems like where the force of international law comes from not to mention how individual liberty can be fostered in an environment of converging bodies of control are truly undertakings of global proportions.

Thank you for your work and your insights."

But a few more thoughts.

Standards bodies are not typical communities. I don't think Cory Doctrow was writing about the IEEE as a meta-utopia, but that's as close as I can imagine common ground between his piece and Link's areas of interest (as I presume them to be from reading Cooperation Commons).

Virginia Postrel comes to mind, although I'm not a huge fan of hers. "The Future and its Enemies" http://www.dynamist.com/tfaie/index.html pretty much nails the problem in taking a stance opposed to the visceral reaction to control the chaos we run into when exposed to what she called "the future" but which could equally well be seen as the present, even back in 1999 when she wrote. Her description of the "emerging coalition" of the friends of this future, who she calls "dynamists" is pretty funny though. Her basic thesis is that the two bad, non-dynamistic approaches to life in the world are: 1) to prevent it; or 2) to control it; whereas the one good, dynamist approach is more to embrace it, perhaps in an Ayn Rand-ish manner, celebrating the creative innovators and free-marketeers who operating under a predictable set of controls (what those are I imagine have something to do with supply-side economics). Despite the foregoing attitude I think her general inclination toward openness and creativity combined with strategic holding of one's cards has merit.

Well, back to work now.