What is to be done about the SRCF?
Late last century I co-founded a club ("the SRCF") for providing UNIX shell access to people, on a machine that would remain connected to the Internet at a stable address. A key feature of this organisation was that it was democratic and independent: the users had to be members of the club, and elected a committee, which granted root access to competent individuals to administer the club's machines on behalf of all members.
Needless to say, this drove a number of people completely off the deep end. They simply chose to be unable to cope with the very idea, and these feelings would occasionally erupt and trigger controversy.
The main bugbears of those offended by the SRCF were roughly:
- people have no right to agency in their use of computers, and definitely should not be writing their own computer programmes, making those programmes available to each other, and having unmediated communications with third parties, etc, etc; luckily this attitude was confined to officers and employees of the actual IT department that the SRCF was competing with, and therefore largely irrelevant
- UNIX and/or Linux were intrinsically offensive in some way, by not being Windows, VMS, Lisp or otherwise not invented in the University of Cambridge, and were in any case dying out
- unpaid technical experts should not be bossed around by the great unwashed (variously: non-programmers / arts and humanities students / people who are not into Tolkien and Star Trek) regardless of what the constitution, the law or general common sense may demand
- any club that involves computers should mainly comprise and represent people interested in computers for their own sake, rather than as a means to an end
The third bugbear is one I have much sympathy for: if people are volunteers, then if their concerns are not respected and taken adequately into account by an organisation, they'll take their efforts elsewhere. There's basically always going to be a tendency for organisations dependent on expert volunteers to collapse into technocracy unless some way of compensating the volunteers can be found that does not compromise the democratic integrity of the organisation.
I have quite a bit of sympathy for aspects of the third bugbear; volunteers need to have their say; and I've written about adjacent issues in the past (see the link at the bottom about "productivity shearing").
The final two bugbears lead, in the case of the SRCF, to the following phenomena:
The club presents itself as an organisation dominated by a particular subculture that is totally unrepresentative of the membership (namely the Tolkien-, Star Trek-, and Richard Stallman -adjacent subculture). There are thousands of members, most of them likely joined for the free webspace and not to hang out with people who grok Elvish. I say that as someone who thinks Tolkien is magnificent.
There have been proposals to effectively abolish the "non-technical" membership and simply have the system administrators as a self-selecting oligarchy
- At times, the club has gone slightly out of its way to downplay the role and existence of the wider membership, to the point where members might not even realise they'd joined the club(!)
The notion of a self-selecting oligarchy of sysadmins is fine, but the way to achieve that is either to set up a second club, or to get the existing club to agree to convert itself into a technocratic oligarchy. A sincere and open attempt was made to do the latter at the 2001 AGM and defeated in a landslide. It is quite unclear in any case whether University of Cambridge would continue to tolerate the existence of a club so constituted.
The SRCF is now half as old as the youngest of the University's colleges. It has lasted. Part of the reason it has lasted is that the existing organisation provides something of value to the University ... a vehicle for IT services the University won't itself provide. But by adopting the constitutional form of a generic university society, the SRCF has not developed the muscles for longevity: colleges provide formal arrangements for recognising talent, which is why some of them are the "Master, Fellows and Scholars of X Y Z": the "scholars" here are a formal constituent of the foundation of the college, funded out of the original endowment. Over time, additional donations accrete to the foundation of a college, for funding its expansion in new dimensions.
The growth of the SRCF, however, has been non-financial: donations in kind of second-hand machines have suppressed fundraising, and complicated what the club provides, maybe taking it in a different direction from what the committee and sysadmins would have chosen. There's also no funds for compensating the sysadmins.
This growth may also have informally taken the SRCF outside the scope of the objects of the club in its constitution: focused on providing a central Linux box. The inclusion of UNIX/Linux is an important constraint anchoring the society in a particular tried-and-tested way of providing an open computing platform.
In the future, I'd propose that the SRCF seriously consider doing voluntarily what the Proctors should have required it to do years ago: restructure itself as either a non-profit company with the same sort of broad membership, or the lighter company model which the Cambridge students union has recently adopted, or become recognised as a syndicate within the University's governance, much like the arrangements for theatre.