[Noisebridge-discuss] Consensus slides.

[Jason Dusek]

2009/09/18 John Magolske <john at b79.net>:
> Thanks for the presentation & the link. [...snip...] One thing
> I was wondering was whether or not any of this might have
> applications in human to human interactions.

  Actually, yes. People have no shared state (my brain is in my
  head and yours is in yours) and we try to synchronize state
  (come to and understanding) using speech and gestures
  (messages sent on an unreliable network).

  Some things to take away from the consensus problem when
  considering people:

 .  Without a leader, you have `n^2` message cost (where `n` is
    the number of people in a group). With a leader or small
    number of leaders, this becomes `kn` message cost. For small
    `n`, the hassle of appointing/handling leaders isn't worth
    it; for large `n`, the win on message cost is worth a lot of
    hassle with leaders. This offers an unusual perspective on
    the role of leaders -- their job is to make communication
    among the members more efficient. "To lead the people, walk
    behind them."

 .  Message acknowledgement is a big deal. If you send a message
    (communicate a thought) to a node (person) and don't wait
    for acknowledgement before acting as though the message was
    received, it's only a matter of time before you hit
    inconsistency (misunderstanding). You have two ways to deal
    with this:

   .  Recovery protocols -- an inconsistency, once detected, can
      be smoothed over with a lot of messages once in awhile.

   .  Acknowledgement protocols -- to avert inconsistency,
      always get acknowledgement before proceeding.

> when I first saw the title I thought it was going to suggest
> something to the Noisebridge consensus process :)

  Although that's not what I intended, there is a natural
  extension in that direction.

  Consensus as we understand it won't scale. We see how the
  membership adapted to this with the build meetings/debates. I
  was one of many people who, after a little arguing, said that
  they'd no longer participate in decision making but would show
  up and help out.

--
Jason Dusek