I repressed the memory of Rafmun. Who was he?

Megan E's husband. He showed up and told us that a noisy few (unnamed) were poisoning the waters and driving people away by bending the board to our whims. And then, as Bureaucracy churned like sharks after chum (as everyone took it personally, pretty much) he accused us of ignoring his point.

Except meaner. And WAY longer. All sorts of dirty laundry got hauled out, and people left over it.

Hec, it was very calming to see that people already did what we did, and that we pretty much had to do it to keep going.

And, painful as it was, it worked! Or we survived despite it. Either way. I like to think we're bigger people because of it.

This is the one that made me personally stick everything out in Bureau:

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

Hec, it was very calming to see that people already did what we did, and that we pretty much had to do it to keep going.

Exactly! It was calming. Just a calm resolve knowing that this was the task in front of us if the community was going to survive. That it was necessary. Less hand wringing about whether we should vote at all and more about pushing through to find a way to vote that we could live with.

You were too busy setting up Farscape fic archives, and running the quotes generator.

Yeah, also I was either still on dial-up or getting yelled at for my internet usage at work prior to moving to Chicago.

BTW, I'm watching Archer and laughing my ass off at it.

Of course, Clay didn't mention the "makes sane people crazy on contact" part of it. I never ever guessed I could read that stuff for fun.

It's funny too but I forgot the main reason we were talking about voting was that we were tired/annoyed with trying to come to a bullshit consensus on the same issues.

We wanted a way to stop talking about certain things.

BTW, I'm watching Archer and laughing my ass off at it.

I could definitely see you working at ISIS.

Also it took a while for me to realize that the "Supreme Court Thread" I keep referring to is what became Lightbulbs.

This conversation made me start clicking through the BRQG, and I found this:

DavidS: Now, if you'd read my book you'd know that was a song written by a gay, alcoholic dwarf for a dim and lumpy rentboy.

and I must know, what song was this in reference to?

The song in question is "My Funny Valentine."

Oooh, another choice bit from Clay Shirky:

We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.