[Advisors] Telecommunities Canada -- are we letting it go?

[Garth Graham]

On 2014-09-28, at 4:47 PM, Marita Moll wrote:

> So this seems to indicate that very few people on this list read and/or signed the documents that Anthony sent around.  Was it because you were unclear on what to do here, or because you really thought we should let the NGO status go.  … I'd be interested in any feedback.

James, I've never abandoned my question - if leadership is the problem, then why is more leadership the answer?

In reluctantly finding myself contemplating what I would put in Telecommunities Canada’s obituary, I pulled up the Wikipedia analysis of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men>
 
I then saw that the essay’s critique sort of works if you replace its references to “The Poem” with “a history of Telecommunities Canada” as follows…..
 
In appropriating “The Hollow Men,” as a template for a history of Telecommunities Canada as it might have been written by T.S. Eliot, we depict figures "Gathered on this beach of the tumid river" – drawing considerable influence from Dante's third and fourth cantos of the Inferno which describes Limbo, the first circle of Hell – showing community networkers in their inability to cross into Hell itself or to even beg redemption, unable to speak with God.  In fact, they couldn’t find any kind of authority figure to bow down to who might listen. Dancing "round the prickly pear," community networkers worship false gods, recalling children and reflecting Eliot's interpretation of Western culture after the emergence of the Internet.  The final paragraph of Telecommunities Canada’s history will appropriate the most quoted stanza of all of Eliot's poetry but will remain unread by anyone not standing by the river’s edge:
 
This is the way community networks end
This is the way community networks end
This is the way community networks end
Not with a bang but a whimper.
 
This last line alludes to, amongst some talk of the Internet’s transformative impact on governance, the actual end of the Gunpowder Plot mentioned at the beginning: not with its planned bang, but with Guy Fawkes's whimper, as he was caught, tortured and executed on the gallows.
 
Perhaps most revealing, though, is that when community networkers were asked if they would appropriate these lines again in defence of the Internet's real edge, they responded with a ‘no.’ One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to the radical practices of community networking, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that they are not sure the practices of community networking will end with either. People whose community networks were bombed with indifference have told them they don't remember hearing anything.

GG