[Cryptography] asymmetric attacks on crypto-protocols - the rough consensus attack

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2015-08-03 01:35:27 +0900 (+0900), Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
> Beneficial dictator.

I think the term you're looking for is "benevolent dictator" (at
least that's how it's typically phrased in free software
communities).

> It's not uncommon for a single person to be able to very justly parse
> arguments and make a choice. A good "beneficial dictator" will pull rank
> only with regards to "roadmap" and as a Deus Ex Machina decision-maker.
[...]

Agreed, at least this is the mechanism I've seen work out most
often.

I'm involved in collaborative development with a free software
community who embrace (perhaps sometimes even enshrine)
consensus/distributed decision-making. Often this works to our
benefit, but there are somewhat frequent cases where a particular
group fails to reach any clear agreement and for this we have
leaders elected by the community to make those decisions (team leads
within subgroups, and a separate body of technical leaders within
the larger collective community).

It doesn't _always_ help because there can be a pressure within the
collective for a leader to not alienate any one set of opinion
holders, and so a default non-decision outcome can still happen. In
those cases, "start implementing all relevant proposals and see
which turns out to be better/easier" is a useful fall-back position.
This has the benefit that the race to a solution will most often be
won by those with either the simpler solution or the most
development support (either of which are great proxies for
identifying which choice was actually the superior one).

This thread has reminded me that I should make groups aware on
controversial decisions when they appear to cross the line into that
realm where the decision-making process has become more important
than the decision being made.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley