Alignment

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

In the OrganicDesign context alignment is a process ensuring that all members of a Platform are in agreement with the core values and are actively working towards the common vision. This process can apply to team members, clients, associates or anyone else related to the group.

Alignment ensures that the members can work in harmony together and that the Platform as a whole can work in harmony with other Platforms to form the Platform network. It is achieved by the members formalising the trust-relationships they have as a trust group into contracts allowing them to work together to form a stable foundation of assurance on top of which more complex and large scale systems can be built.

An important aspect of systems which is all too often forgotten is that it must be designed to account for the forces at play in its operating environment. In the same way that a physical machine must account in its design for forces such as gravity and momentum, so must an organisation or social mechanism account for the forces such as the conflicting goals of existing centralised systems, or peoples habits that are based on wide-spread false conceptions.

The most fundamental and dominant force is fragmentation which benefits the centralised, materialistic, self-oriented systems that emerge generally in our social mechanism in the form of the economic bottom line. So in our deployment of the common vision, we must ensure that our organisational infrastructure is properly designed to be deployed into a heavily fragmented and centralised environment which is in many cases overtly hostile to systems aligned towards unification.

The most common means that these opposed systems use to hinder alignment is through the use of legally binding contracts which in turn occur through the acceptance of benefits (i.e. there doesn't necessarily need to be a piece of paper with a signature involved for a legally binding contract to exist between parties). So independence is the key to being able to freely pursue the common vision.

The core aspects of alignment

• Agreement with all aspects of the common vision
• Actively helping to make the vision clearer and more widely accessible
• Actively helping to make the vision more complete in its description of the needs common to all
• Actively helping to raise awareness of the one harmony and the way of unification
• Apply the way in their own lives and families to achieve their own goals in harmony with the common vision

Specific to OrganicDesign

When it comes to team members, there are some major aspects of the project which require strong alignment:

• Using the Platform trust structure for ensuring funds coming into the project are allocated in accord with the OrganicDesign charter and OrganicDesign manifesto
• Having a vision of building Land-based platforms
• Collaborating together on the Platform system
• Collaborating together on the software interface and use-cases
• Building the global platform network
• Attracting funds into the project to achieve these aims

Merging aligned groups

Countless groups around the world see the same need for us to align together somehow and organise the planet together rationally, but they all must include within their own workflow the project of establishing what other groups they are aligned with and merge together with them.

It is becoming increasingly obvious to some of us that in reality whilst it appears on a basic level that we are free, the reigns of control seek to guide us, tax us and manipulate us into working ever harder, and submitting ever more to authority. How we come to this conclusion is different for us all and ultimately this is not important. What is important is what we peacefully do about it. TPUC was created as a community for people across the world to communicate with and join other men and women who feel the same. It is not about politics, it is not about religion, it is not about money. Nor is it against them. Those who wish to pursue these things are free to do so.

— The Peoples United Community

OpenIDEO is a place where people design better, together for social good. It's an online platform for creative thinkers: the veteran designer and the new guy who just signed on, the critic and the MBA, the active participant and the curious lurker. Together, this makes up the creative guts of OpenIDEO. To become a place where good ideas gain momentum, OpenIDEO depends on participation — your inspirations, his comments, her concepts, our design process. It's these efforts, these big and small moments of sharing and collaboration, that make this platform a dynamic resource for tackling significant global challenges.

— OpenIDEO

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

— OpenSourceEcology

See also

• Trust group
• Contract
• Alignment checklist
• Alignment statement‎
• Direction
• Bottom line
• Evolution