ARPANET's Request for Comments Protocol
Steve Crocker / ARPA researchers (1969)Building the first internet nodes, researchers faced a problem: how to create fellowship among people at different institutions working on an unprecedented system? Steve Crocker invented the RFC—Request for Comments. Not mandate. Request. RFC 1: 'These notes are intended to be informal fast reactions... not official policy statements.' This humility created genuine fellowship. Fire (clarity) rising to Heaven (universal scope). One yielding nature (Crocker's modesty) uniting many firm persons (brilliant computer scientists). RFCs became internet governance foundation—fellowship in the open, through shared goals not authority. Anyone can read. Anyone can comment. The protocols we use daily exist because fellowship succeeded.
Practical Integration
You're trying to get people to work together on something that's never been done before. No established authority. No clear hierarchy. Just shared goals and the need to coordinate. Here's what this probably means: you need fellowship but you can't command it into existence. Steve Crocker faced this in 1969. Brilliant researchers at different institutions, all building pieces of ARPANET, needing to coordinate without any one person having authority over the others. His solution: RFC 1. Request for Comments. Not mandate. Not specification. Request. RFC 1 begins with an apology: 'These notes are intended to be informal fast reactions... they are not official policy statements.' This isn't weakness—it's the one yielding nature that unites many firm persons. When you're coordinating people of equal or superior technical capability, you can't command. You can only create conditions where fellowship emerges naturally. The classical text says fellowship must be 'in the open.' Not secret factions, not exclusive groups, not inner circles with privileged information. Everything public. Participation open. Process transparent. This isn't naive utopianism—it's engineering pragmatism. Difficult problems need all available intelligence, and intelligence won't participate if it's excluded or manipulated. Your version: open-source governance. Public design docs. Transparent decision-making. The Linux kernel mailing list. Python Enhancement Proposals. W3C standards development. These succeed because they're principle-based rather than personality-based, open rather than closed, humble rather than authoritative. The practical consequence: when you need to coordinate capable people on unprecedented work, your role isn't to control but to facilitate. Create the minimal structure that lets strong opinions coordinate productively. Make everything accessible. Invite critique. The alternative—closed-door decisions, inner circles, information asymmetry—creates factions rather than fellowship. Factions cannot cross the great water. They can't accomplish difficult work that requires genuine coordination of diverse capabilities. Crocker's RFCs are still how internet standards get made, fifty-plus years later. That's what fellowship in the open accomplishes.