Platform roadmap
|
These notes are regarding a concept that is a work in-progress and are to help guide the development of such an organisation on the Organic Design Wiki. A functioning platform would be an example of an "Open Organisation". The question of how to set up a platform arises for people on the path when they want to surround themselves with others that are on the path to decrease their stress and increase their opportunities and companionship. What form can the living and or working arrangements take to ensure a smooth and harmonious interchange? This is no trivial question, experience has shown us that when communities or teams of any size fail to address it properly, stress, alienation and financial mismanagement are all too common.
For people on the path, the next order of magnitude for organisation up from personal organisation is the platform. Historically this unit has been provided by the family, in modern times this could be looked at more like a team of like-minded people living and/or working together. The platform is a form of collaboration that includes elements of teamwork, flatting and self-employment, but what sets it apart from the contexts mentioned is that is that it is based on people coming together with clearly shared values using decentralised forms of organisation to get things done. It is also different in that it features a strong emphasis on life and work integration, the idea is that people with various interest and abilities come together so that each of them might do what they are most interested in, supported by the other group members. This can work if there is a clear shared awareness of roles and members are selected based on filling gaps in the teams spectrum of abilities.
The idea is that by having organisation in place, many things that can be quite the chore to do or expensive to access for individuals, such as a car or ensuring there is always fresh and healthy food on the table, can be provided by the larger group, thus allowing the individuals to focus more fully on whatever they are good at and enjoy doing. Furthermore, by having a group of well-organised people that are able to work together over time may opportunities may be developed and brought to fruition, allowing the group as a whole to act as a freelance service provider, meaning opportunity and cash-flow is created "in-house", in accord with the values of the group, thus thus allowing the members to overcome the challenge of "right livelihood".
Of course this way of working is flexible and could be adapted by flats, companies, families or mixtures of these kinds of groupings to add as many or few of these elements as desired.
Contents
Global Organisational Concepts
These are ideas for an integrated business management system which platforms may use to manage their own activities as well as coordinating with other platforms. We require a portal to the platform-based organisation, where everything runs together and which is used to run the organisation. The true test of the effectiveness of this interface will be whether someone (or a team) with no prior context but experience in dealing with the system could run the organisation using it.
Global
The "blue" aspect (goals/knowledge/global) contains information about the platform, relevant research, values statements and links to related organisations as well as the overall goals of the platform network. There is is a definition of the organisational structure the local organisation would like to move toward, this is expressed in terms of products and services as well as roles and resources.
Schedule
In the red section we find the timeline of the local organisation, which gives access to the schedule as well as past and future activities and events within it. Here we find the necessary filters and reports to give us a good understanding of what is happening with the organisation in terms of time. News and updates will also be available through the red section. Currently timeline views are fragmented into email inboxes, wiki-recentchanges, spreadsheets and scheduling applications. These are unified in the red section, which is also where the creation process happens. This is handled through the process of nodal reduction at the nodal root and consists of roles completing tasks at the level of organisations.
Resource
In "green" we have access to the local aspects of the organisation and can see its current state in terms of roles and resources. This allows for the management of local infrastructure and other resources. Proper accounting and a complete organisational description allow us to see the current state accurately (sight/awareness) and take this into account when moving toward the goals defined in "blue". For an existing organisation wishing to implement the platform template in order to gain a unified organisational interface, the green interface section is filled in via the process of "Borgification". This is a service performed by a Consultant, assisted by an Operator who can aid the process from any Platform via a control uplink established from within the organisation about to be borgified.
Media channels
Platforms and sanctuaries both exhibit an educational aspect as part of their system design. This is accessed as channels of information and media such as documentaries or platform news/newsletters. These channels ensure that all members have a good shared context and are all up to speed with their plans and current state of affairs. The project's channels will include many documentaries about the state of the world and the conceptual nature of how these ways have come to dominate as well as about the many groups which are successfully making a positive difference and their common patterns of success.
Related Concepts
- Set up a Platform - procedure
- Platform network
- Channel
- Sanctuary
The next order of magnitude is a group of platforms that may form larger organisations together as the need or desire arises amongst the members. This would lead to the organic formation of sanctuaries.
Organisations that will be based on the Platform template
Related work
- The coworking movement has set up many shared work facilities, although there is not a strong awareness of shared systems, it tends to be more casual
- "Outpost" - based on Post-carbon Institute definition
- "Headquarters" - good in the sense that it conveys the notion of a place where everything runs together, although this name may imply centralisation
Old notes from About OD
|
The Project
The big-picture project of which the Yi is an instance of an attempted solution, ie supplying tools to the common people allowing them to grow organisation in accord with the fundamental patterns. Organic Design is an organisation that is set up like a "branch office" to carry out work on behalf of the project in the region covered by its nodes.
People & their Roles
Aran's role is to direct the path of development of the nodal model and develop its software implementations. My responsibility lies firstly with The Project, Organic Design is the org I've set up to help assist in The Project development, but is currently not trading. My main areas of development are the nodal-core, network-architecture, interface-geometry.
Milan works for The Project voluntarily, and is in the process of setting up a similar organisation to Organic Design to support his work on The Project. Milan specialises in finding and connecting with other aligned organisations and maintaining relationships and information between these various organisations and roles.
Rob is a voluntary developer for The Project specialising in Graphical interfaces, PERL and Peerix aspects.
Sven is a voluntary developer for The Project specialising in PERL, R, LaTeX and Statistical analysis.
Jack is a voluntary writer for The Project attempting to make the workings of the nodal-core generally accessible.
Peder works for The Project voluntarily, and uses the tools on Organic Design as a personal management system, as well as a testbed for training business on the project
Organic Design Limited
An organisation set up by me (Aran) for assisting with the development of The Project through its organisational structure, not through its ability to generate profit. It is a legal trading entity that could be paid for performing services in the field, and any profit generated goes into paying fairly for man-hours and required resources, and into propagation and growth of other independent Project instances. It is not currently trading since development hasn't yet reached a stage where it can support the its intended services. After it reaches that stage, it is intended to build and run the Organic Design Limited business system using the developed tools.
- Organic Design Limited currently has no staff, clients, suppliers or any relationships. It owns a domain name, and has a single director/shareholder (Aran).
- Organic Design is just a single instance of work for The Project.
Platforms & Sanctuaries =
The business OD will be carrying on is organisational-functions and seminars and would be set up as a system including cafe, accomodation, education etc. The busniess plan would be a platform-template to allow other orgs to set up in the same way with more or less focus on the carious service aspects. For example a modified version was under construction called sanctuary which was desgined to be more remote and handle longer-term accomodation and education programs.
Money
I think a concern that needs to be made clear is that money is not the only means to success or influence. It is a centralised way of thinking to assume that to make a significant difference we need money and resource. This way of thought leads to the competitive model which has little use for sharing. Things can propagate through their excellence and easy accessibility with no strings attached.
If other people see what your doing and decide to do it that way without your permission and maybe make money out of it - great! you've succeeded in propagating your way further. Maybe that person "saturates the market" with a better implementation than your original one - great! your way's propagated even more with less work for you to do.
Not being in it for financial gain, means not worrying about the state of other peoples financial gain from it either. Those concerns are trivial and anti-spritual merely serving to hinder progress.
Intellectual property & security
One of the main principles is sharing and absolute knowledge re-use. The core organisational structure shows us that the intellectual property concept is invalid and anti-spiritual. Any groups we work with will need to be working in accord with the same principles. We believe in privacy of conversation and specific organisation or personal information, but not in the hiding of knowledge. For project-related wikis this means that most articles should have public read access, but may be protected from public editing. Articles relating to server configuration or financial information can have private access.
Liscencing & Intellectual property protection
Another problem with intellectual property law is the ability for knowledge to be prevented from being used by others. We've been ensuring that we put LGPL liscences on all core programming to prevent reduced access to it. We've chosen the LGPL rather than the standard GPL so that there are no restrictions on commercial use.
Project Redundancy
Another aspect of all this is that it is actually a very simple and common logical structure at its core and is being developed simultaneously in many places and disciplines. At any time any one of these could reach its critical foundation development and begin spreading exponentially thereby making further effort of the others redundant.
Peer
Most of the development strands are focussed on the peer. This is the full p2p network operating system built on The Nodal Model. It is designed to be widely available using any OS/interface environments, but to be capable of working completely independently as well using its own Linux destribution called Peerix. This is an interface designed for non-IT-specialists to design and maintain any kind organisations in an extremely efficient and sustainable manor while inherently increasing co-operation, re-use and growth.
XmlWiki
This is a collaborative development environment built on top of the freely available wiki software called MediaWiki which was designed for the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. We have found that existing solutions like Source Forge are excellent for raw programming, but are too complex and rigid for conceptual development or other use by non-developers. With XmlWiki, we've combined the programming features we needed into the more adaptable wiki environment allowing us to evolve the environment to our needs as we go.
The purpose of XmlWiki has always been to be a temporary stepping stone into the new environment. We were unable to progress on the peer-environment effectively without an existing, but adjustable environment to work togther in.
The peer and XmlWiki enviornments are closely linked as far as content goes, but most actual programming development is wasted going into XmlWiki and should instead be put into peer-based solutions. Although many features are still being specifically added to XmlWiki every week because its a powerful enough environment to add a lot of functionality with little effort.
Requirements
- Writers - general and specific (Jack is currently making an attempt at describing the nodal-core in non-technical language)
- Programmers - there are strict conditions on this which have made it impractical to try to integrate other programmers so far. There are many threads of development that could be assigned to different kinds of IT-specialists, but the problem is that the organisation is not of a scale to support this properly. We have not found any financial support solutions that could abide by the projects principles and work sustainably so far. It's not as bleak and stagnant as it sounds though! since what we're developing is a distributed development environment, it means that development can help itself more as it progresses.
- Administration, The role that's needed to hold all the other work together is administration, which would include the management and maintenance of content, contacts (responsive communications), routing of information to roles (eg. driver updates to the IT role). This role is also has crossover with the general-writer role. Milan is working "In the field" on setting up a sustainable situation supporting this project-role.
