The rules can matter

I had written a variation of this in a couple of spots now and wanted to put it here, this weird place where I keep writing things:

Organizations with vague rules get captured by people who just fill in the gaps with rules they make up on their own to their own advantage, and then they will continuously find reasons that the “official” rules can’t be fixed because the proposed change is somehow imperfect so they force you to accept the rules they have made up.

The first time I ran into this sort of problem was probably in college being involved in student government, but I haven’t been able to come up with the specifics of what happened that makes me think that it was.

A later instance where I came across it that I remember more vividly was when I was involved with the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council and how one of the executive board members would squash efforts by citing “standing rules” that nobody could ever substantiate.

More recently, I came across it in looking at discussions of why certain people are or are not allowed to vote on PHP RFCs where the lead developers of one or more popular PHP packages have been shut out because of what I would argue is a misreading of the “Who can vote” section of the Voting Process RFC.