Organic Design peer group

This article is the public portal, or entry point, for a trust group. In the context of Organic Design this is a group of people that have common alignment in a way which is explicitly stated in their group's alignment statement. For organisations this alignment will normally refer to other aligning documents which the members have agreed that the group will operate in accord with such as charter, manifesto and best practices.

Organic Design peer group/Vision statement:

Our vision is to see all of our world's inhabitants governing ourselves with an open, accessible and understandable global system which has as its bottom line the common good, and which we define and operate ourselves by effectively utilising and allocating our common expertise and resource.

One way of deriving a group is from how people answer a specific set of questions. Even if the "members" of such a group don't appear on any list, are not stored anywhere or never communicated their answers to anyone, the group still exists in a certain sense if it exhibits the potential for action. Here at Organic Design we call this kind of "non-explicit" group an organic group, as distinct from a trust group which is one whose members are known to one another.

One such question is, if you were performing a particular task, would you like to know if anyone anywhere else performing the same task had a better way of doing it? Another related question is, would you like to live in a world where all such "best ways" were made openly accessible to and easily understandable by everyone? An overwhelming majority would answer "yes" to the first question. The second though is one that many people would think about more deeply before answering and may answer "no".

The people who share the common vision we talk about here at Organic Design are those that answer "yes" to both of the previous questions. We don't know how many people that is, but judging from the popularity of the free software movement and other similar projects, we can be very sure that even if it's not a global majority it's certainly hundreds of millions of people world-wide!

That's an enormous potential for action, but how does an organic group like this begin to achieve anything together? We believe the answer lies in alignment... [more]

Key defining aspects of the peer group

• Director: Aran
• Manager: Milan
• It aligns itself with OrganicDesign (it aligned to the OrganicDesign charter and the OrganicDesign manifesto to help attain the OrganicDesign vision).
• It's primarily concerned with the platform specification and software architecture aspects to the OrganicDesign vision.
• The peer group are dedicated to openness and are attempting to make all aspects of their operation open and public, not just the resulting software and documentation.
• It's members are system architects and developers, and as such are dedicated to "eating their own dogfood" by using the system for as many aspects of the group's operation as they can. Currently this means using Wiki Organisation, this may soon become Drupal-base, and ultimately our own Squeak-based system.
• The members are committed to spending a lot of time in conceptual and research-oriented group sessions and for this reason have a lower ability to take on hands-on work such as programming or IT-support.
• The members are dedicated to exclusively using Libre software where ever possible.

Peer group membership

Membership is based on collaboration and governance. In general, membership is composed of those who take sufficient interest in, and have the expertise to, collaborate on the core architectural documents such as glossary items, platform specification, software architecture, manifesto or to help with development of our code or procedures. People who are involved, but not in this collaborative capacity, are considered to be subscribers; passive members who are engaged at an observational level.