ABC (After Bureaucrash) Action is a working group devoted to the creation of a new liberty activism organization.

From Xaq Fixx, on Facebook:

“ABC Action means After Bureaucrash Action – This group is dedicated to those liberty loving activists that have made BC great over the years but are exploring other options due to the new direction CEI and Lee Doren want to take the organization.”

I have been asked to start up a small sub-working-group, a task force, if you’ll pardon the term, of active people with the time, inclination, experience and knowledge necessary to provide and manage the technology infrastructure for this effort.

This will include, right away, setup and administration of a new ning.com social-networking site, and probably the same duties for a WordPress blog.

Longer-term, we need to create a new activist platform that goes beyond the capabilities of ning, and which could rival the reach and power of the online campaign management and fundraising systems used by groups like moveon.org, Campaign For Liberty, etc.

Anyone who would like to participate in this tech working group — or perhaps become its long-term leader — is invited to contact me directly, and right now!

Full contact info for me is at http://www.gogulski.com/contact.html

Yours in liberty,
Mike Gogulski

Once upon a time, I was a very early employee of an internet service provider that raised hundreds of millions of dot-com boom-days dollars. I was specifically a network engineer, and more generally just an IT infrastructure implementation and management guy. Heady days.

Some time after the company had issued its IPO and begun hiring people by the boatload, control of the IT department fell away from the executives I knew personally and into the laps of a bunch of new “white knight” corporate types hired in from the likes of the local phone company and various billion-dollar black holes of enterprises that had imploded in the not-too-distant past. My role remained in network infrastructure development and management for our customer-facing network; all of the internal stuff got reorganized under a newly-minted CIO. Internal infrastructure wasn’t strictly my problem any more, though I cared deeply about seeing it done right, both because of my own knowledge of the field and due to IT’s pivotal role in the automation and smooth management of a large number of complex business processes facing a customer base and deployment footprint that were literally exploding in size.

The new people charged with running IT were managers, not engineers. Their expertise lie in spheres like hiring consultants, drafting proposals and securing funding for projects. None of them had a deep grasp of the processes they were supposed to implement, and problems began cropping up almost immediately.

Ultimately, there was a grand proposal to spend something on the order of $30 million to outsource the bulk of the IT infrastructure and all of the business systems that managed those complex processes which we were only just learning how to implement, manage and scale ourselves, as a company. Now, outsourcing parts of your IT infrastructure often makes a lot of sense, if several things are true. You must have the right outsourcing partner, who brings solid experience in managing IT in your line of business. These were not in evidence. You must also be in a business where IT itself is far away from the focus. If you’re operating a nationwide network of sawmills and lumber yards, for instance, your top people really ought to be folks who know wood and the lumber trade inside and out. IT expertise is something you can outsource in such a case. But when your business is IT itself,  well, outsourcing your own brain is ill-advised at best.

Eventually I took my concerns to the Chairman of the company, to whom I had personal access simply due to my seniority. The Chairman was a brilliant engineer, a guy who had made a fortune developing a series of innovative projects in a burgeoning field and developed those projects in turn into successful products. His previous start-up had been acquired for a hefty sum, the bulk of which went to him personally, and he had stayed on there for a time helping to manage all the transitional stuff that comes along with corporate mergers and acquisitions.

I laid out my case over the course of twenty minutes or so: what was being proposed was ridiculously expensive, likely doomed to failure for reasons of ignorance of the players involved (the IT management and the proposed outsourcing partner), and foolish for the reason I outlined above. The Chairman valued things like “propriety” and “decorum” and “respecting the chain of command” rather more highly than I ever did, and I quickly found myself getting nowhere, as he assumed that if these men had been hired into these positions to manage IT, they must necessarily know what they were doing.

The end of the conversation boiled down to an exchange that went roughly like this:

“Well, Mike, I hear what you are saying, but what would you have us do? Fire the CIO, Mr. So-and-So?”

“Well, that’s certainly one option, and a better course than the one we’re on now.”

“And what then? Put you in charge? Are you, Mike Gogulski, going to run IT for a half-billion-dollar publicly traded company?”

“Well, if I were assigned to do that, I’d certainly give it a solid go, and I believe that I could do it far better than these jokers.”

“But Mike, that’s insane! We couldn’t give you such a job! You’ve never been head of IT for such a large enterprise before!”

A few seconds ticked by as gears turned in my head, my face no doubt flushing with mounting anger.

“And which half-billion-dollar publicly traded company has Mr. So-and-So served as CIO of in the past? And for which such company have you served as Chairman? “

The response consisted of several deep sighs and a great deal of spluttering — the answers, of course, were “none”.

And thus ended the meeting, with me storming out of the Chairman’s office.

I was reminded of this little anecdote of corporate elitist jackassery while watching the amusing — and terrifying — video at Congressman Pete Stark: crazed lunatic on the disinter blog. Enjoy.