Thanks for the many helpful answers to my query about arbitration.
The answer I got most often was: Stay out of the arbitration business, and
post a disclaimer that everybody needs to maintain their own good judgement
when exchanging services and NCN offers no guarantees at all that you will
be happy with what everybody here does.
Some of you are obviously a lot more skilled in mediation and arbitration
than I am and I got some excellent advice. Some of you are even
professional arbitrators.
One thing I learned is that it is not something to just do casually. There
are certain rules and principles that ought to be followed. Well, most
likely there are several schools of how to do it. But most of them would
probably include that the parties who are in disagreement need to agree
that now mediation or arbitration is taking place and what the rules are.
Mediation would probably be when somebody facilitates a negotiation of some
kind. And arbitration would be a step further, where the arbitrator would
come up with a proposed resolution, and the parties would need to agree in
advance that they will adhere to the decision of the arbitrator.
What I attempted, somewhat innocently and naively, with A and B would
probably be called mediation.
Now, I agree that NCN itself shouldn't offically be in the business of
arbitration. There should not be an offical authority here that decides
things for people. NCN is a space to facilitate that people connect up, it
isn't any kind of hierarchy of decision making.
However, NCN is also about exploring how a new civilization might work. And
in any group of people there is likely to be conflict, and it can be useful
to work out ways of dealing with it, beyond just referring people to the
oldciv court system. So, I'm still interested in having the facility for
mediation and arbitration. Not in the form of an official NCN Arbitration
Authority, but more in the shape of listing some people who would be
willing to play that role. That would work the same as listing any other
kinds of people here. There are no guarantees involved. If a plumber signs
up as a member of NCN and has a web page and somebody else uses his
services, the rest of us will not be responsible for that. But you might be
able to connect with somebody else here who might help with any disputes.
Again, people sign up in NCN by themselves, using automatic forms in a web
page. There is no mechanism for verifying or certifying whether or not they
are "good" people, whether or not they really have the qualifications they
say they have. And that is not the point either.
Based on the character of NCN, it is not unreasonable to expect that you
can find good people here to interact with. But there is absolutely no
guarantee that you will be able to pick anybody off the member list and
they will live up to all your expectations of them. If they don't, you
might well find understanding and helpful people here, but you can not
really hold me or the rest of us here responsible for it. Keep your good
judgement.
For those of you who offered to be available for mediation or arbitration,
let's work out between us how to present that.
For myself personally, I will probably be hesitant on playing that role, as
it might more easily kick back on NCN in a negative way than if somebody
else does it.
Also, to clarify my own role in NCN. NCN is a self-organizing network. It
is not an organization, per se, and it is not a legal entity that is owned
and controlled. There is no central point of authority. If you see more
posts from me here than from other people, and if you see me organizing web
pages and mailing lists and that kind of stuff, that doesn't mean that I'm
charge. It just means that I invest a lot of time and energy in providing
these services. I control some of the resources we're using here. Others,
like Max, control the actual computer resources. We don't control what
people do within this framework, and we don't want to.
I still plan on providing a way for recording feedback on different
people's services. Again, not because I or NCN as a whole is responsible
for the outcome, but just because it would be helpful.
- Flemming
o o
/ \------------------ Flemming A. Funch ------------------/ \
/ * \ World Transformation/New Civilization/Whole Systems / * \
/ * * \ ffunch@newciv.org / * * \
o-------o----------- http://www.worldtrans.org/ ----------o-------o
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