# Why a Grenzland Club association?

These are my arguments for having the [Grenzland Club association](../grenzland-association).
I took some of the things I said on IRC and put them here. Thanks, hasran!

**Informal power structures** often mean hidden power relationships.
That's not good in the long term.
We don't know what the conflicts are. It allows us to "solve" conflicts by sidestepping the issue,
like calling in favours instead of listening to grievances.

**Meritocracies** are often abusive because they depend on people doing the work.
This favours people that like to move fast and break things.
It favours people who have little else to do and lessens the stakes held by people that are otherwise busy.
Sometimes people have good reasons for having little time and that shouldn't limit their rights.

**The right to fork** is a very low bar. For the moment, for example, I don't see how one would "fork" grenzland.club without understanding how to setup a DNS zone, configure a webserver, get certificates from Let's Encrypt, configure the IRC server, set up email, configure the mailing list, configure the news server, configure the MUD, create users, get security updates, make backups, and so on. Only a very small part of all that is documented on the wiki and if it were all documented, we'd have dozens of pages where reading and understanding them requires yet more time and energy. The freedom to fork without the ability to maintain is meaningless in a world where the services cannot be bought or the funds are not available.

**Community** trumps hyper-individualism. The right to fork presupposes that not only will the maintainer only do what they want but also that any dissenter exercising the right to fork is as competent as the original maintainer. Both of these assumptions are wrong. People do work for issues that don't benefit them individually. People being helpless without the necessary skills is a political problem that needs a political solution. To ask them to spend the time and energy to become skilled assumes that there is no other way of resolving a conflict of interest. It is only true under hyper-individualism.

**Everybody** must get a say. If we want to facilitate playing games then our say should not depend on our ability to administrate a system or on the free time we have available.

**The goal** is for the infrastructure we build to survive individuals and to share power. To rely on benevolence is different from having a right to have a say. This is where a formal organisation can help.