The forked elephant in the room

[Walter Bright]

On 1/19/2024 7:46 AM, Don Allen wrote:
> Walter sets a very different tone for this project and I value that. The man 
> behaves like a gentleman. Of course he's imperfect, just like the rest of us. 
> But he tries to improve upon the imperfections. de Raadt? His way or the highway 
> and that will never change.

I do agree that the tone of any organization flows down from the top, so it's up 
to me to lead by example.

The other thing I've tried to do, perhaps with more success, is to emulate the 
honor system used at Caltech when I attended it. I enjoyed it and appreciated it 
very much as a student. It's unique to Caltech (other universities have honor 
systems, but with "adjustments"), and it's what made Caltech into a top shelf 
institution.

In the years that followed, Caltech added more conditions and complexities to 
it, to its detriment. The original (from memory) was simple and straightforward:

"No member shall take unfair advantage of any other member."

It had far reaching consequences. For example, exams were unproctored, 
take-home, with time limits. Nobody would know if you cheated or not. It was 
entirely up to one's honor.

Of course, there were cases of cheating. But it was never organized cheating. 
The students liked the honor system, and would ostracize anyone who took 
advantage of it. This was why organized cheating never happened. Cheating was a 
shameful thing one did in a closet, not something one bragged about getting away 
with. Nor was theft an issue, people would leave their dorm rooms unlocked. The 
only thefts I heard of were from outsiders who wandered into the dorm.

The other interesting result of that is the professors and students became 
collaborators rather than adversaries.

I've never made any explicit mention of this with the DLF, but it's the way we 
operate. To my great satisfaction, the DLF members adhere to it. It's really 
marvelous.

For example, at our DLF conferences, nobody worries about leaving their 
possessions laying around.

But we did have an incident at the last DLF where a couple laptops were stolen. 
Unsurprising to me, the culprit turned out to be a person who wandered in off 
the street, not one of our attendees. Our response for the next DConf is to hire 
a security person to gate keep at the door.