I came across this old quote last night in finishing up David Post’s In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. It seems a fair approximation of how things work (should work?) in the new digital humanities:
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”
David Clark, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball: Visions of the Future.” Internet Engineering Task Force, July 1992. [PDF].
That is one of my all-time favorite quotations about the process of innovation. I think it gets right to the heart of how the Internet rapidly developed, grew, and succeeded. It also describes the power of the social network — ideas need to be put into a public space. Through interaction with the community, bad ideas will die and great ones will flourish.