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The Open Source Business?
Ted wonders: "Being an advocate of the open source software movement for some time, I'm wondering how and if the principles of open source software could be applied to a new type of open source business. In a world where people slave away for the sole profit of a board of directors and merciless shareholders, is there room for a new type of organization that throws away the archaic and monolithic organizational structure of today and from there form a company that has its direction dictated by all of the members that run it. An organization where everyone has an equal say in what goes on. There isn't any limit on how many people can be involved (the more the better, in fact) as long as they can be useful. Could this be the way of the future?"
It would take a big shift. Too many people think in terms of who's neck is on the line, they like to think of the board of directors or the CEO or the team manager.
.. the 'great democracy of the west' has what seems to be leaders passing jobs to friends, companies providing campaign contributions to ensure that demcoracy works.
Let's not knock communism, like all political ideologies it has it's faults, and the common flaw with most systems is the abuse of power. Even democracy has it's abuses
This form of an employee owned and managed business is called a worker's cooperative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative. It's a pretty old idea, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
Many open source projects work because of
1. A charismatic leader, such as Linus.
2. The fact that if said leader misbehaves it's easy for even a small group of competent programmers to fork the project. This forces leaders to strive for consensus.
#1 can happen in a co-op (or a regular business). #2 is a lot harder in a business.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Actually, I just read the source code, I don't want to get involved with this guy:
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Isn't metadata annoying....
liqbase
Strangely enough, we tried this type of concept in running our WoW guild. It was nice at first, but as we increased in visibility, we needed people to take on specific roles, and be able to make snap decisions without consulting others. A hierarchical power structure ended up materializing despite our best efforts to keep it decentralized. Also, when we tried decision-making by polling everyone on every single issue, the decisions would take insanely long to determine. In the end, while in a perfect world an "Open-Source Business" should be implementable, I would need major convincing to believe that it could be done and maintained in our world.
Obligatory Movie Quotes:
"Business is War" - Rising Sun
- and -
"We are here to preserve democracy, not to pratice it" - Crimson Tide
I've had some pretty shitty bosses in my career, and I'm now in the process of starting my own companies. One's bringing money in, the other will get there soon.
This is my comment(s):
In my current 9-5 job, whenever the democratic approach, people tend to debate things over until there's nothing left to be debated. Everyone in an organization fullfills different tasks, have different qualifications and skillsets as a result. If you were to run an org with true democracy, NOTHING will get done. You would have to A) make sure that EVERYONE understands WTF that they are voting on, B) you'd get so many different variants of ideas and sorting them through and then doing voting would be a nightmare, and C) there won't be any time left over from voting and hearing everyone's ideas.
What works best is soliciting a few ideas (have ideas bubble up to the top) then discussing a select few ideas that made it, and then having a decision made. A good leader would also justify why that decision is made (ie, I think this has merit, I"m aware of options X, Y and Z, but I'm chosing option D because of blah blah blah) and a good team should learn to stand behind the leader's decision. This of course goes both ways and assume a competant leader (which my current 9-5 job lacks, hence me heading off and starting my own business in the other 8 hours a day).
- SK
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They called it anarcho-syndicalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchosyndicalism and it was successfully done in Spain until the fascists crushed them during the spanish civil war. Also a variation was/is used in Israel on kibbutzes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz.
As other posters have mentioned, cooperatives and collectives are one option for a more free business model; there are many others. You may be interested in Anarcho-Syndicalism. Syndicalists see labor unions as a force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the State with a new society democratically self-managed by workers. Millions of human hours have been spent thinking about and articulating radically free economic paradigms. Your idea for an open source business is interesting, but doesn't go into much detail. You just say that it would be web based, have startup costs, and will go in whatever direction the workers want. It's not a bad idea, but if you and anyone who reads your "plan" are serious, then you should look at the history of nonhierarchical organizations and learn from the theories, failures, and successes of the past. After you develop stronger ideas about how to create democracy in the workplace, you should create a more concrete plan.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
It says something that the most succesful open source projects tend to be run on a model almost identical to a typical corporation. I believe Linus refers to it as the "benevolent dictator" model.
What the poster is describing is nothing less than mob rule. Theres a certain amount of this to all open source projects, but you'll find almost all have a small group of people ultimately making the decision about what direction to take. And of course if they make enough bad decisions, a portion of their developers can always create a fork
If anything, its the pirate form of democracy. Everyone gets their say, the captain makes the final decision, and if makes enough bad ones, they vote in a new captain.
once you go slack, you never go back
So, rule by those with the most free time. With housing co-ops, it turns into a geritocracy of the attention deprived.
I am the Sr. Warden of my Episcopal Church. I think we do a better job of following an open source model than you might think. If someone wants to work with the Sunday School or rewrite the policies for the hourly employees, we have a process. That process is not a top-down business process. Our goal is to empower and support anyone who wants to contribute with some safety checks in there before it becomes policy. This seems similar to the way that open source projects are managed.
We are all volunteers after all and are doing this because we believe it is the right thing to do. Some of us contribute a lot, and others have pockets of influence/interest. Others just come on Sunday and are in receive mode instead of give.
It works...
They can contract out the janitorial work, just like most other companies.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I agree with many of the above comments. I think it's a good idea on paper, but a business needs to have direction and leadership in order to steer it in some direction. Can you imagine a ship where the navigation was done via majority rule? It wouldn't work.
I wish the OP luck in his/her business and will gladly admit closed-mindedness should this succeed, however, I predict the business will either quickly move away from this model for core decisions or fail from inertia of having to come to a consensus.
As usual, Brazil is ahead of the rest of the world in social things. Ricardo Semler has been doing open source business for 20 years, as Chief Happiness Officer. Here's a review of his book, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works. Some people are extremely enthusiastic about Semler's ideas: He's my idol.
Normal CEO's are Chief Unhappiness Officers. They steal everything they can, and act out their anger toward everyone they can.
One of the most important examples of a business run in an adversarial way is Microsoft, of course. After all this time, major media outlets are starting to get it right. Here are quotes from the CNN article Microsoft security--no more second chances?:
"By now, Chertoff's people must be thoroughly frustrated that Microsoft still turns out poorly designed products."
"Here's something to consider: If bridge builders or airplane designers applied the same standards to their labors, do you believe that the public would so easily forgive the regularity with which bridges would collapse and airliners fall out of the sky?"
If you like the CNN article, don't forget to D I G G it.
I've always thought that given the nerdiness ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H linux expertise within slashdot that some people could band together to form their own little linux venture. Given the expense of windows' and other closed source software i think you could make a hell of an impression demoing linux for a corporation and showing them just how much they could save not having to renew their liscence or upgrading to vista. Once they've migrated to linux, this said hypothetical company could provide support thereafter = 2) ??? 3) Profit!
I worked for a company that had no hierarchy: of the 4 managers we had, the CEO got fired, the Sales and marketing manager left to join another company and the customer service manager also joined another company. What we were left with was the development manager (it was a software company) who really had a company in a distant country, and came by once every couple months to see whether everyone was happy. Did it work? Yes, because that CEO had made the company a smooth running machine. It ran without him as well. (Albeit he did the accounting, so now that was outsourced)
Democracy is (as has been said here before) a system in which "a majority" take away rights from minorities. It may seem a good idea: every person gets a vote, and the most votes wins. But it works by exclusion of the ones that voted against.
A good system works with a truely good leader, who listens and takes the best decision for everyone. Therefor, it is best if that leader is not influenced himself by the decisions. The best decision may be the one with the least supporters! In absense of such a leader, the system should always strife to have a consensus, with which everyone can agree.
Time had an article titled "The End of Management?" a while back, in which they discussed companies which had successfully used internal prediction markets (among their employees) to make company-wide decisions. HP and BP were cited as examples.
As it turned out, they were finding empirically-better sucecss using these markets than they were with using their layers upon layers of bureaucratic, 20th-century-style management.
Frankly, I don't think management will ever go away *completely*; who else is going to create the items in the market upon which employees will bid? So on that note, I do think Time's title is a little over-zealous.
But at the same time, I do think such markets can be a force for flattening organizational hierarchy and reducing management headcount. And as more companies become enlightened to the idea of prediction markets -- rather than just mere internal polls, which, unlike a market, have no serious, direct incentive to make a correct decision -- they will turn to such markets instead of middle-managers, who tend to have been promoted into management because they are technically-incompetent and/or are better than other people at dressing well and kissing ass.
The "people's revolution", if there is ever to be one, will (in usual paradoxical economic form) probably not come at the hands of a communist dictator or a starry-eyed Euro-socialist, but rather, in the back rooms of corporate America.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?