diplomacy

greek diplomacy

most below via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy

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Diplomacy (from the Greek δίπλωμα, meaning

a folded paper or document)…

not fold.it, …folded paper.

sitting on that for just a bit.

soaking it in.

Diplomacy… is the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states. It usually refers to international diplomacy, the conduct of international relations through the intercession of professional diplomats with regard to issues of peace-making, trade, war, economics, culture, environment, and human rights. International treaties are usually negotiated by diplomats prior to endorsement by national politicians.

In an informal or social sense, diplomacy is the employment of tact to gain strategic advantage or to find mutually acceptable solutions to a common challenge, one set of tools being the phrasing of statements in a non-confrontational, or polite manner.

The scholarly discipline of diplomatics, dealing with the study of old documents, derives its name from the same source, but its modern meaning is quite distinct from the activity of diplomacy.

on diplomatics:

Diplomatics (in American English, and in most anglophone countries), or Diplomatic (in British English), is a scholarly discipline centered on the textual analysis of documents – particularly, but not exclusively, historical documents. It focuses on the conventions, protocols and formulae that have been used by document creators, and uses these to increase understanding of the processes of document creation, of information transmission, and of the relationships between the facts which the documents purport to record and reality.

The discipline originally evolved as a tool for studying and determining the authenticity of the official charters and diplomas issued by royal and papal chanceries. It was subsequently appreciated that many of the same underlying principles could be applied to other types of official document and legal instrument, to non-official documents such as private letters, and, most recently, to the metadata of electronic records.

so – perhaps..

a nice, as in clean/manageable, way, to mark people as valid?

as in – Denise Pope‘s and/or Eric Mazur‘s and/or ??? research.. you come into Stanford with a 4.0+ – valid – until you confess (95% of you) that you cheated (only to you it was survival).. and/or you come into Harvard with a 5 on your AP Physics exam – valid – until we find out you know more about taking the exam than about physics…

no one’s fault really. (or maybe everyone’s.)

we just need to wake up.

perhaps we’ve been proving/interceding/credentialing things for long enough.

perhaps we start finding/sharing/providing/being spaces of permission with nothing to prove.