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"a fine balancing act of INSISTING ON WHAT today APPEARS IMPOSSIBLE, WHILE PRAGMATICALLY DOING (and expanding) WHAT IS today POSSIBLE - all along with an ongoing investigation, and awareness, of Conditions of Possibility and their PLAUSIBILITY."

It's really not clear to me what this means. I think it might mean:

"Implementing our principles as much as possible now, while investigating plausible social changes that would allow more of our principles to be implemented, and working to bring about those changes."

Ben: Is that an accurate paraphrase?
Toni: Not accurate enough.

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Goals:

• discuss the above difference

Followup could be a discussion on language in the openorg project:

• possible parallel uses of different language to describe the same thing in different contexts and for different purposes
• necessary use of different languages in different parts of openorg work (this is how i imagine presentation order i.e. what will be presented to someone arriwing at openorg website. creation order is usualy reverse)
  1. short and longer introduction (WHAT short and long)
  2. framework itself (HOW - processes and functional rules, abstracted from implementation)
  3. implementation options (HOW - implementation of 2. guideliness, patterns (MODs)
  4. context, problem and forces (WHY - current conditions, interdependencies, core values)
     • this layer can have different languages, language of philosophy, and language of daily life being two extremes. Those two languages can be mixed together well, which is style of writing that could be good option for us (i'm far from sure, this needs a proper debate on language and form). Master of such form (see examples) is slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

language differences

In general, paraphrase strips some important meanings - it is reductive, and it removes some crucial points.

"Implementing our principles as much as possible now" - this part misses several important notions from the original:

• most important: the idea of possible has to be taken as appearance
  • notion of appearance will be a link to (it's a pointer for now, a hint) the application of contemporary theory of ideology on this issue. most importan questions being: what form does that appearance take? through which process? what purpose does it serve?

• temporarility of appearance (imposibility is how it appears today)

• properties (long term) of the process of dealing with conditions of possibility (COF):
  • insistance on all of the above
  • being a fine balancing act

I couldn't see any of those points in the paraphrase (did i miss them?), and all of the where important to me. The original was crafted with a lot of care to express it all, and to open up the space for questioning. Paraphrase hides the complexity, forecloses the questions and thus leaves wrong impression of the COF.

2. "while investigating plausible social changes that would allow more of our principles to be implemented and working to bring about those changes "

This paraphrases two ideas: "expanding what is today possible" (PRAGMATICALLY DOING (and expanding) WHAT IS today POSSIBLE) and "ongoing investigation". It adds that we do that to allow our principles to be implemented. I took that that is implicit and is unnecessary. I set the whole conditions of possibility operation for several reasons, one of them being to allow more of our principles to be implemented in future - by discovering obstacles, hinderances that could exist today and everything else mentioned above. It misses:

• properties of our ongoing (today) work in relation to COF operations:
  • pragmatism - this is a political catergory with many consequencies and hard decisions.
• timeline:
  • investigation -> awareness -> plausability

note to the reader: THIS ANALYSIS IS NOT FINISHED.

-- ToniPrug - 07 Sep 2004

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Another proposed rewrite:

Open-org should contain proposals that can plausibly be implemented now. It can also contain proposals that cannot be implemented now, as long as there is a plausible plan for removing the obstacles to implementing those proposals. At the same time, we must remember that what seems plausible or implausible to us (in the short term and in the long term) is influenced by the society we live in; we must therefore think critically about those judgements.

-- BenjaminGeer - 08 Sep 2004