Open communities are the primordial soup of human ingenuity that form in puddles at the boundary of order as both concepts mutually repulse each other. Droplets of this soup merge into flows and torrents building great inertia and as we see so often, wash away the incumbents and their barriers of anal sensitivities and adherence to structure. Now keep in mind they are a primordial gloop, and like any gloop will be made up from an awful lot of plain old stuff that doesn’t do much, then a sprinkling of other stuff that does a little and even less that does a huge amount. The jerks are a tiny minority constituent in that gloop but IMHO are an essential element in stimulating the previously mentioned mobility within gloop. Think white blood cells and the jerks being the vacuous cells that form a vaccine, switching on thousands of those rather inactive white cells.

I also like to see open source, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek as a few giants standing on the shoulders of many midgets.

To TJC: I’ve found it very helpful for the community to be seen to turn on the jerk rather than any kind of authority figure. Of course, some encouragement behind the scenes might be needed. I realise this isn’t transparent but, heck, we’re dealing with unreasonableness here.

The question is how. It’s easy to react rather than act, and so try to shut them out of the community or limit their participation in it — put their heads on pikes as a warning to the other jerks out there. I’ve had to do that sometimes (I moderate the forums on a site). I’m not sure I’m convinced that’s the best way, from a human standpoint or indeed from an effectiveness standpoint (especially not in an anonymous or semi-anonymous spaces). But sadly, I don’t have the answer to this one. Cahill may well be right that we need the pikes and their grisly adornment. But do we (who are smarter than me ;-) ) have better ways of doing it? It’s not like this is a new problem, we’re just finding it in new places.