People aren't supporting Moon Plan

>
> As far as volunteer effort is concerned, my limited experience with it
> seems
> to fit quite well with TangoMan's take on the matter. I believe that
> nothing
> of true importance, especially with a time sensitive nature, can be
> entrusted to it. It certainly will always be the rare exception to
> efforts
> that are based on compensated work and clear, scheduled rewards.
>
> Val

I think that volunteerism is a very important concept that does need
discussing. Val's wrap-up above implies that the result is all that
matters and that the path to the result does not. Volunteer production
and paid production are different paths. I would normally take examples
from the world of software but in this case I am going to use a more
concrete example: Habitats for Humanity. My son and daughter of high
school age have contributed hours to this organization. The result of
theirs and others work is a house. In the same area is a house built by
a contractor. The two houses were almost identical. Different paths,
same result. So why is this organization wasting all of their
volunteers time if it is ending up with the same result as the contractor?

Was the contractor faster? My observations would indicate that the
volunteers were faster. The Dilbert strips on contractors with
alternate reality calenders have always seemed on the mark to me.

For people moving in the only major difference will be that one family
has a large mortgage and the other one doesn't.

The social obligations implicit in a community barn raising or house
raising provide a social cement that use to bind communities together.

While I am unable to state clearly why a paid or volunteer path should
be used, I don't believe that the quality, timeliness, or any criteria
about the end product makes one better than the other. Intellectual
property rights are an exception but they are not really the product,
but a fiction that we associate with a product.

Intellectual property rights are a reason to do everything associated
with space as volunteerism. Imagine a scenario where a space colonist
is looking at a piece of broken equipment made by a paid contractor.
His laptop has a blank for information on the internals of this black
box. The contractor used unreleased proprietary information to develop
this box many years before it broke. The company is now out of
business. What does our colonist do? Open source implies volunteer
effort. Closed source implies commercial companies. As a colonist
which do you want?

Mitchell James
mejames@...
www.InnerTransit.org (Homebase for collaborative engineering on the web)