RE: A Better Tomorrow: On Blockchains, Individuality, and Civilization (Part 1/2)
I'd be interested to see how particle physics collabs work out the mess, and you're right - the common goal is important. And discipline too! Were there cases that the collabs went totally out of control or dysfunctional? Perhaps because of human error, servers destroyed by fire, etc?
Oh about laziness. I think access to incentivized learning and collaborating will make a huge difference for "laziness". I've updated my text to clarify better, and will continue refining what I meant -
Lazy. This, however, is highly subjective. Some activities that are purposeful for certain individuals may be entirely useless for others. We can be too focused on our needs, or wants, or even stretch ourselves too thin across the board in pursuit of holistic development. Who is lazy? There are no clear distinctions in this day and age. Are you lazy if you don't, or can't grow your own vegetables? What if I just sign papers all day? Am I lazy? I'm just signing papers here. In my opinion, laziness lies in the free-market, and not the individual. The better way to frame this: we have an incentive / motivation problem.
It is a monster. Let me try to describe it in a rough but understandable way (knowing that I am not an experimentalists and do not belong to any huge collaboration of more than 3000 people).
You have different groups focusing on different aspects (data analysis, data quality monitoring, data taking, etc.). Within each group, you have subgroups and within each subgroups, you have other groups. It is a kind of giant tree. At each leaf, if I can speak that way, you have responsible taking care of what is going one below them. And those are renewed regularly.
You also have teams taking care of transversal activities with respect to all leafs. For instance, each analysis group will produce a physics analysis note. Internal referees that have no connection with the analysis group are nominated (and a good number of them) to review the work. There is something like an editorial board, and a publication committee. Etc.
At the end, a lot of administration but it works well.
A bit late, but you may want to read this one. The scale is smaller (~400 people with a common goal) but the organisation is already non negligible. SVN has been used here. A blockchain could have worked too.
PS: you can go directly to the organisation section.