Slashdot Mirror
Toward the Open Company
Arto Stimms writes "The author of the e text editor is using the principles of open source to transform his company into an Open Company. Not only is he releasing the source, the company itself becomes totally open: no concept of bosses or employees. Anyone can join in at any time, doing whatever task they find interesting, for whatever time they find appropriate. This is in service of the idea of 'the real freedom zero': the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to work on."
...but without the paycheck.
This is the kind of thinking that made the hippie commune into the corporate juggernaut it is today. By "corporate juggernaut" I mean, virtually extinct.
The best "Open" corporate structure I've ever head of was a company that had a policy where no person could make more than seven times as much money as any other person in the company.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
so i can sit on my ass reading slashdot all day and say that i am contributing to research and development.
I think the new buzzword for this is "crowdsourcing".
They can invent "Open Bankruptcy" next. Call me when they reach "Open Assets Selloff" by the creditors.
What? Too cynical? Is that even possible anymore?
Oh, you mean this company is not going to pay me and I should work for free?
Read. The. Fucking. Article.
No, really.
Or cloudsourcing. No. Crowdcomputing? Wait... Clouds of crowds sourcing computers?
Atlas Shrugged is not actually a history book. It's not even a good piece of fiction, and the economics and politics therein are laughable.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
"Atlas Shrugged" is a *history* book? Perhaps you should read it again, this time more carefully.
The best 'Open' corporate structure I've heard of is the John Lewis Partnership in the UK.
ALL employees are 'partners', from the shelf stackers in Waitrose to the head honcho of the group. Yes the pay varies, but they all get the same bonus as a percentage of their salary.
The percentage is announced at the same time across all stores. By all accounts it's a very good place to work.
-Ben
There is a trustrank plan for assigning compensation, which is a little farfetched, IMO. FTA:
The problem is that any kind of trustrank system can be gamed. This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
Never mind the people who make valuable contributions that are unpopular among code contributors (such as marketing, sales, accounting, etc).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I bet the have no janitor...
Want a glimpse of how this works out? Think about Karma on slashdot or karma on reddit. If you've participated attentively in either of those systems you already know how problematic this will be.
Honestly, I've seen a lot of people complain about the Karma/moderation system on slashdot, but I've never seen a problem with it. I actually find it works quite well (for me at least). If I'm having a really bad day and write a flamebait sort of post, it'll generally be modded as such. The majority of my posts don't get modded at all, and when I write something that particularly interests people, it tends to get up-modded accordingly.
It may just be that I've never been targetted by any of those types that downmod based purely on their personal feelings of me personally, but looking at the mods in general on posts, I do tend to agree with them, so clearly it's working in general at least.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Yeah, it kind of sounds possible to use trust metrics to distribute the salary. But what kind of trust metrics?
If he uses his example of advogato, then co-workers would upmod their peers. But I'm not sure that structure creates the right incentives for modders - if I upmod some stranger, he gets a bigger piece of the pie - every upmod I do makes my take smaller. Every downmod makes my piece bigger. And if friends upmod friends, maybe they'll be expecting some kind of reciprocity.
This "opem source company" is a really interesting idea, but to the extent that trust metrics can be gamed, the concept can be broken.
The most recurring complaint I've seen with the slashdot mod system is from people complaining that it enforces groupthink. In otherwords, it's perfect for a corporate environment.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Earlier in the post it says "The central dilemma of Open Source is, and has always been, how to make a living doing it" -- but then it turns out that the actual plan is a non sequitur.
Slashdot introduced its notion of karma, earned for activities perceived to promote group effectiveness, an approach that has been very influential in later virtual communities.
So, to get paid more, you just say that Apple did it better and the Microsoft's version sucks and the best implementation is in Linux?
And to get vacation do you post stuff to get "Funny" ratings like; "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of e-editors" or "In Soviet Russia the e-Editor you!" and then there's the "All your e-Editors are belong to us!"
Yep, the Open Business, sounds like a great way for the Karma whore to make a living!
Getting really offtopic, but I thought I'd share this interesting Economist article regarding Atlas Shrugged.
Atlas felt a sense of deja vu
Feb 26th 2009
The economic bust has caused a boom for at least one author
BOOKS do not sell themselves: that is what films are for. "The Reader", the book that inspired the Oscar-winning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185404
The guy doing this determines the operating expenses, including (I'd assume) their own salary. If it's really as open as they claim, all the accounting will be public, too. So anyone who wants to do some work can see how much the company is spending on those operating expenses, and the (ongoing) income statements. If they accept it as reasonable, they can do the work, or they can just not do the work.
This principle could work. It's like a cooperative company, "employee owned", but without employees owning shares in the corporation getting dividends of the profits (income - expenses), just a direct share. Eliminating the shareholding eliminates control, but it also makes coming and going as a "profitholder" much easier.
Of course the real problem is the "trust metric". It's a popularity rating, set by members of the group on anyone else who joins the group. Joining requires only contributing code. There's going to be a fair amount of (paid) work by group members reviewing the code to decide trust, but that's a necessary part of software quality anyway.
The real problem is for people who contribute code (or review, or other work) who aren't rewarded with trust metrics by others in the group, perhaps because of a bias by some against others because of the type of work. If some people contribute only code, and others contribute only review, that might lead to a "class war" where one group discounts the value of the other, regardless of the (only guessable) "real" value of each kind of work to the profits being divided up. If more people review than code, even if that's not necessary, and the reviwers all have a bias in rewarding each other's work more than they reward coders, an coders don't have a bigger bias against reviewers to compensate for their smaller numbers, then reviewers will get a higher rate of reward than coders. Which could prevent any coders from contributing. Or the sizes/biases could be reversed, and reviewers could get shorted enough that no one reviews.
I think this project goes too far all at once. If this system were familiar across our large Internet development population through its exercise within closed groups, with more permanent membership, perhaps assigned traditionally by a boss who hires, it's less likely to be torn apart by people who don't understand they're working against their own best interests. Then, once it's understood to be workable by people who understand their best interests, and not just an easy target for losers looking to game a system they merely clumsily destroy, maybe the transition from co-op to open co-op would work.
Does anyone know of any successful closed co-ops running like this one, but centrally hired, fired and assigned shares of the profits?
--
make install -not war
Hey dude, there's no bosses around here. Giving orders is like uncool, man.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I'll read your "history book" when you watch my "documentary."
The system is supposed to ensure fairness by having employees rate each other, but I know how this goes simply by watching people around me, in person and in real life.
Every 'contest' I've ever seen has been about popularity, not efficiency. They guy who sucks up to everyone and buys them beers after work will have the highest pay, while the guy who does his shitty job in silent magnificence will have one of the lowest pays. In addition, everyone in a group will rate their own group members higher than they rate other group's members. This means the biggest group will have the highest average pay as well.
Absolutely none of it will be based on efficiency or profitability.
That is, assuming it's truly 'open' and not just claiming it and then having the owner overrule everything anyhow.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Lowerer UIDs concurer ... oh, wait..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
So basically, executives?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Oh boy, a text editor with all the quality and accuracy of a Wikipedia article. I can't wait for the first edit war between two high-ranking programmers.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Social Darwinism is a propaganda tool used by conservatives to maintain the current power structure.
I'm confused... I thought conservatives reject Darwinism in favor of Creationism.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'd say you didn't read "Altas Shrugged" but you already did say it. In it the subject John Galt travels the world to talk business owners to convince them to abandon their business because of socialist governments nationalizing businesses.
If Ayn Rand was right, engineers would make more money than CEOs.
It's easier if they start their own business and or work for themselves. Even Bill Gates started as a programmer when he started Microsoft. He was the first person to hack a basic interpreter, the Altair BASIC, for a homebrew or microcomputer. He dropped out of college to do so.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Atlas Shrugged is not actually a history book.
It definitely feels like current events though.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Let me know how that works out, especially when what you are smoking runs out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ideas on organization are always in competition. what is the yardstick we use to measure them? simple monetary success or monetary failure.
But maybe that won't be the criterion that people involved actually use. IME, the more people really enjoy what they do, the happier they are just to be able to cover basic living costs. If the company were to tick over for a decade or so generating enough income for the people involved to live on without screwing anybody over or trashing the environment, I think that might meet quite few people's ideas of "success."
I like to believe that I can see a distinct cultural change happening these days: people want to remain child-like for longer, and are increasingly resistant to anything that forces them to grow up. This has its downsides, of course, as anybody with conservative tendencies will have noticed (and I have a few myself): failure to take responsibility, solipsism / narcissism, selfishness. But the flip-side is that people don't want to live with the sort of constant low-grade background anxiety that the current socio-economic system generates, and want to be able to play, i.e. do creative stuff they like. We may be able to transcend that Darwinian struggle, and if the opportunity's there, it's worth making the attempt ..
to exorcise simple greed from the human mind as you would exorcising the desire to have sex
greed is greed is greed. monkeys, insects, hell even bacteria understand the notion: get it all for yourself
its an instinctual drive deeper and more rooted in the human mind than any social system you could ever possibly devise. it is not taught. it is organic. children brought up in isolation from any social influence you deem harmful would spontaneously recreate it
so you need to work with greed, because there's no getting rid of it
or choose to reject my words. that's fine. i don't really expect you to listen to me. such is your passion. there are in fact people on this planet who do not want to have sex. asexuality is a real psychological phenomenon. likewise, i believe there are psychological classes of people, such as yourself, who are fanatically altruistic organically. no greed
but the fanatical altruists, and the organically asexual: we are talking about classes of psychology that are firmly and permanently in the minority, and have no hope to influence the majority. not that that will stop you. nor should it
i don't think you should stop with your attempts at creating your visions. why? because your uptopian scheme, like the millions that have come before it and the millions that will come after, they DO serve a valid purpose in society: it keeps people like you occupied in mediocrity and obscurity, and away from real businesses that works and real society that works, where you might do real damage
xoxoxoxoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but we have enough trouble with people doing direct rips of our site /without/ providing the source code.
Yeah, I know that GPL uses copyright law too, but the problem is we're dealing all the time with people who don't respect copyright law. Exposing our code would just make it easier for people to rip us off.
Most I can push for at work is "Let's not actively obfuscate anything we're sending over anyway".
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All