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 of 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 required 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. The current members most engaged in online collaboration on the core content, projects and activities are: Nad, Jack, Infomaniac and Milan.

The Organic Design peer group has existed in one form or another for close to ten years and also acknowledges the past contributions of members who have have had significant input through attending meetings, working together on projects and partaking in general discussions of interest over the years. These members include Dana, John Whyte, Phalseid, Ouroborous, and Flower. All of these people have contributed more or less substantially to the efforts of the Peer group, even though they are not currently actively collaborating online.

Finance & Contracts

There are three three important issues that come up for the members with regards to the group integrating with business:

• When any member(s) of the team decide to engage in a financial contract with one of their contacts, it must not compromise in any way the right of the other members to remain free of obligation.

• Members that engage financially with their own contacts must be able to fully call the shots with respect to that funding source, as they are the ones that have entered into contract for it, and know the specifics (some of them possibly private) of those obligations.

• The structure we operate to must be capable of reflecting the reality of financial trust that exists between members. The question "which members would you operate a shared bank account with?" immediately shows that there is a trust network amongst members that forms from relationships covering a spectrum of financial trust ranging from weak to strong. Ignoring this awkward fact will result in arguments, and as more members become involved this will become more of an issue.

So to ensure that these key points are accounted for, the peer group can have no contracts as a whole, any of its members can chose to enter contracts outside of the context of the peer group, i.e. not representing the peer group in their external activities within other groups or organisations, but rather making use of the knowledge they have gained from their engagement with the peer group.

Any funding that does come into the peer group is purely in the form of donations and is completely free of contractual obligation. How its gets used and distributed will be determined by the current manager of the peer group, and by the groups internal governance system.

Related groups

Another issue of critical importance to the peer group is that we are not Platform One and we are not Brazil trust, these are groups dedicated to implementing particular instances of the concepts architected by the peer group. These groups sometimes make the mistake of believing that they somehow form an umbrella or management structure around the peer group and its concepts, but this is not the case. The peer group is an independent self-governing group of peers with membership formed through collaboration on the architectural concepts.