Mitch Kapor should look at chaordic organizations
Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation blogs his impressions of the challenge to hierarchical structures represented in his effort to lead the development of Chandler, an open source PIM that, since it was revealed a couple weeks back, has been called everything from Agenda 2.0 to the Outlook killer everyone has been waiting for.
I'm flying to Washington D.C. this weekend for the board of trustees meeting for the Chaordic Commons, an organization dedicated to developing alternative forms of organizational structure and systems of shared ownership based on the ideas of Dee Hock, who founded VISA International. I'll be blogging the conference here and on my social and political blog, if the facilities allow.
Mitch writes in his blog (this is an excerpt -- read the whole posting):
In a conventional corporation, there are a basic set of ground rules about how activity is organized. Corporations are still ultimately hierarchical. Some pyramids of power are steeper, others flatter, but they all point to the top. Anyone who works in the business world absorbs a set of default rules about how workplaces operate, e.g., your boss tells you what to do, but you don't tell your boss what to do.
As an open source project, we are experiment in progress. Like every other project we have to determine how decisions are made and who has what kind of power. Other projects have pioneered various methods of organizing their own activity, i.e., who can submit code for inclusion and who can commit it. There's a lot to learn from them and there is not yet any general consensus....
In a world in which all points can be discussed endlessly, it becomes important to have generally agreed-to processes by which decisions can actually be made and respected. Whether munging reply-to headers is really harmful or not isn't the point. It is that it's a Brave New World out there and we better get used to it. What's new here for me is not the endless discussions of mailing lists, but their impact on a project which is trying to work in an open and participatory fashion. And everything I discussed here is just the tip of the iceberg.
Take a look at the Chaordic Commons' discussion of principles of transition:
In some cases, participants may need or want to develop a special set of principles for the transition from one type of organizational system or structure to another. This is more likely to happen when working with existing institutions that already have well-defined or ill-defined relationships, or within a single organization that will be adopting a new structure or governance system.
During the transition from the pre-existing Bank of America licensing structure to the formation of Visa, for example, Dee Hock and his colleagues were consciously guided by several principles concerning the position of banks then involved in the system:
- Duplicate levels of management should not be created but that for greater efficiency and economy, the new organization should combine all existing structures.
- Every bank heavily and directly involved should be entitled to voting membership.
- Assessments should not exceed the present royalties.
- No bank should be financially damaged or otherwise left in a lesser position, as a result of the reorganization.
- The plan must offer enough advantages to gain voluntary acceptance from a majority of the licensees.
- All existing contractual obligations must be honored for any bank that might decide not to accept the plan.
- The unique position of the Bank of America in the system must be recognized, properly compensated, and its ability to provide sustaining assistance during any transitional period should be utilized.
Getting from point A to the end of a collaborative project, especially one where people hope to profit in some way, is tremendously difficult. Dee Hock's book, The Birth of the Chaordic Age, tells the story of VISA's creation, which involved getting a bunch of banks to share customer information that they had held sacred for decades. What is not in the book is the story Dee's son, an accomplished lawyer, told me: When the various banks met, the lawyers had to sit in the corner and could not talk unless asked a direct question -- it was the only way they ever got anything done.
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