Values
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Our organisation (Platform) demonstrates its commitment by dedicating effort to evolving toward an ever-increasing fulfilment of the following organisational values (see also Category:Values for a more detailed description of each):
Core Values
Openness
A commitment to sharing operational knowledge and an ability to transmit the knowledge of the organisation to those who would benefit from it.
Completeness
A commitment to creating an ever-more complete description of the organisational structure and its effects on stakeholders.
All Aspects Changeable
A commitment to making every aspect of the organisation easily changeable by stakeholders through open and collaborative processes.
Think Global, Act Local
A commitment to aligning the organisation ever more closely with the needs of the wider community, so that local action can progress global goals.
Derived Values
By faithfully aligning with the core values, these following important values are automatically aligned with.
Unification
Many of the obstacles that are overcome in the process of aligning operations more and more closely with the core values turn out to be problems of a fragmentary or centralisation nature such as compartmentalisation, silo or rush-hour effects. Solutions to problems of this general nature are always in the form of a unification such as cooperation across diverse departments or working from home or changing from client-server to peer-to-peer systems.
Self containment
A commitment to ensuring that everything we've developed is in an reusable packaged form such that others can develop, deploy and educate with the system independently.
Freedom and Privacy
We believe use of technology should progressively empower and free people and ensure privacy. In practice this means having full knowledge and control over who accesses personal data and the routine application of strong encryption to ensure privacy. Freedom means being able to choose what the technology looks like and how you use it without having to compromise on functionality or connectivity.
- Free Software Definition - This page clearly defines what freedom means in the context of software
- Privacy - portal by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on privacy for more information
Openness and Transparency
If systems are open then they are able to improve scientifically through peer-review of clear analysis and objective reporting, thus minimizing inefficiency and corruption. Note that the concepts of transparency and of privacy can appear contradictory, but each has its place; people have a right to real privacy in their personal and financial affairs, but systems must be transparent to all who are affected by its operation and decision-making. A concrete way to pursue this approach is to implement open standards wherever possible.
- Open Organisation - article on P2P foundation site defining open organisation in more detail
- EFF transparency portal - the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Independence (Bottom-up, Peer to peer)
All platforms are able to operate independently of their connectivity with other platforms, but when that connectivity is available it's fully utilised. Independence also implies the principle that every platform should have the ability to fully replicate other platforms. The package comes with all the documentation and tools to create bootable USB sticks or CD's for other people to create their own platforms with.[1]
In an effort to prevent centralisation and monopolisation, we ensure that the latest state of our technology is available in easy-to-use form without restrictions to anyone, and that it can be used to connect directly and privately with any other person or group using the technology, to facilitate communication, trade and governance.
- Peer-to-peer - peer-to-peer article on Wikipedia
Organisation and Accountability
We submit that the widespread adoption of decentralised forms of organisation can help empowered citizens work together to solve problems and take responsibility for those aspects of civic life that are currently regarded as poorly administrated or managed. Technology should support the collaborative and democratic management of matters both trivial and profound. Policy decisions should be traceable to a point of origin and people in positions of responsibility should be directly accountable to all affected stakeholders. We believe that it should be easy to elect leaders, caretakers or curators through a democratic process for different aspects of any organisation, be it a task, project or department. That way leaders can take charge of promoting projects and take ownership and provide accountability by reporting back, and answering to, the stakeholders of such projects. At the same time, incompetent leadership should be easy to remedy by stakeholders promoting someone more able to the position through democratic processes. We believe organisational software should support such processes, essential as they are for the effective functioning of bottom-up systems.
