10 September 2002 (face2face)
agenda draft:
- our charter and 'social contract' (mission statement)[need to think about this term use] - to cover the fact the openorg.net should function first as an open organization (O-O) with its goals ('social contract') and how-to-reach-those-goals (charter). Later when the question was asked: is O-O the means to an end (values, implementation, an organization etc) or the implementation (end) itself, the answer we found was that: there is no distinction: the means are the end - "the journey is the destination" [some time I would like to explain this drawing on scientific basis. RM]
- systems thinking discussion
- simplifying the web presence - deciding on sections, hiding complexity for first-time visitors)
- drafting short intro simple, overall look at OO document (post meeting: this is the only point we really discussed, but made excellent progress)
date: 10 September 2002
time: 18:30
place: NFT (south bank), London
present: Ben Geer, Richard Malter [RM], Toni Prug
what: Framework for Open Organizations working meeting
goal: to write a short introduction to the concept of Open Org.
it turned quickly into a redefining session of clarifying what
we meant with certain terms and what the Open Org should/could
be.
This is collection of my memories of our discussion, in no particular
order, with some additional thoughts of mine.
Ben and i wrote a social contract for a tech group that influenced the
discussion. One of the proposed changes that came out of that was to
use, when listing Open Org values, "self-management" and "accountability"
instead of "autonomy and recognized interdependency". Richard spotted
well that those new terms are a political ones, as opposed to current
scientific ones. And that was the core change that i proposed when
approaching Ben few weeks ago about writing the social contract for a
tech group. Science can serve all kinds of politics. The reason we
are doing all of this is political, therefore we have to make sure
that our work has good political foundations to build on. Richard
accepted arguments, and we went into writing what do we mean by
'self-management and accountability'.
One notion that helped us was that if you visualise few parts
connected by dependencies, then it is putting values on top of those
that creates accountability i.e. it is not only maintaing the
dependencies that matters, but maintaing them in for certain values.
That is the distinction that turns Open Org into a political project.
Ben drafted 'self-management' as: "Those who are working on a project
have decision-making power in that project", while 'accountability'
as: "Those who are affected by a decision can participate in making
that decision" [ie have to be consulted about it?].
It is obvious that those two are in a contradiction to some extent,
since accountability means that sometimes those who aren't working on
a project get to take part in its decision making too.
This is the difficult 'line' to set, a line that Richard noted,
according to Henri Bergson might not exist at all (book where he
wrote about the superficial idea of a border between organizations
and the society, _The Two Sources of Morality and Religion_ .
[needs reading :-) ]
Regarding the above, the process we discussed means the relationship
between the organization and it's working groups, or, when this is
enlarged, between the political project and organizations that take
part in it, by subscribing to it's values. Roughly in summary, as
long as no one complains, an organization, or working group is free
to decide on their own. This is self-management.
In the case that the question is raised of a working group not
adhering to the social contract (or mission statement, or whatever
a document that describes the goals/values of the entire organization
is called) and if the organization agrees - by whatever
objection-pursuing process agreed on [the right to set up which must
be a pre-agreed inherent process of the whole organization] - then
the working group has to accept the input by the organizations. This
is the process of obtaining accountability.
Because the formation of a new working group has to be approved by the
existing (whole) organization - which can be done with little effort
by the Rough Consensus process - all that is left for the working
group is to respect the goals it sets for itself as a self-managed
group(in their [social contract], mission statement ...).
An additional case is that it's possible that a working group will
still be within their mission statement, but that the whole organization
failed to predict the possibility of overall organizational goals
being worked against (contardicted) within/by that mission statement
at the time when the working group was formed and approved. In that
case, the organization can intervene and ask the working group to
amend their mission statement to prevent future occurrences of work
being done against the goals of the organization.
These concepts of 'self-management' and 'accountability', as described
above, are only possible when political projects, organizations and
working group are transparent. It's transparency that enables this
_self-correcting mechanism_ to function. i.e. without the insight
[due to complete openness] into eachother's work, working groups
and organizations can not regulate each other. Transparency enables
the transition from hierarchical to holarchical(1). [this has come out
in very scientific language. which is not bad in any way; it is
indicative of the subject matter; it is also very much systems theory;
maybe we need to adjust terminology to be uniform with political nature
of O-O (?) this analysis has convinced me so far that it is an absolute
necessity t shift out of hieracrchy/non-hierarchy paradigm ! :-)) ]
We recognized two types of transparency: internal and external (2).
Most important external transparency is that an organization, or
working group, has clearly set: goals (missions statement), ways of
participation and ways of participation in decision making.
Essential parts of what makes an organization or working group
transparent are: Goals, Project Tracking, Debates, Summaries, and
Decision Making all done in public sphere - which is what Internet
makes possible with combination of different tools (mail lists, Wikis,
chat [conference] logs).
Summaries are a tricky form to get right. Often, people with less time
will use them to follow an organization; and if the person writing them
is (very) biased, they will get and transmit a very biased picture. To
address this, we need a template to write summaries, or at least a
guideline on how to fairly represent all activities. Evan's summaries
written for imc-tech working group could be a good starting point to analyse.
This is what we wrote by combining some existing text and adding new:
The idea of Open Organizations is one of a framework for
organizations. The values (motivation) of Open Organizations are
expressed in its core objectives: to promote and enable
transparency, inclusiveness (participation), self-management and
accountability and diversity.
The more your expertise and experience are respected, the more
weight your opinions carry. This is called authority. It is not
the ability to dominate others, but the respect that others grant
to your opinions. This authority releases the full power of
everyones abilities that would otherwise be restricted by a
superficial notion of equality. It is the power to reach your
objectives, not the power over people.
that's it from me, edit/improve before we post it to the list as
minutes of the meeting.
toni
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(1) this will work only if we manage to develop the term
holarchy to be consistent to it's meaning in biology and to lend
itself to our theory of organizations. Main difference, the way i
see it, between those two concepts [hierachy, holarchy] is that
in holarchy there's a high degree of autonomy existing parallel
(together and similtaneously) with the inter-dependency.
[In "non-hierarchical" organisations, as illustration,
words like "network" are often used and
preferred: this is because - at least in part - the
interdependencies/accountabilties are simply not recognized
(fully); I think due to a rebellious, 'resistance', negation of
domination, which blinds the recognition of non-domineering
interdependencies/accountabilities. RM]
In hierarchical organization, an 'order from
above' can not be challenged on any grounds, because only
definition of smaller parts (working groups) is to obey orders and
fulfil tasks given i.e. authority is not granted but given. In our
Open Org, smaller parts have their own mission statements which,
together with the principle of workers making all decisions, gives
them autonomy of high degree or what we have started calling
"self-management". However, recognized interdependency of
belonging to an organization means that along with that high
degree of autonomy (self-management) comes the interdependency too
(accountability) i.e. smaller part, by accepting voluntarily to
participate, grants authority [ie adopts its values] to the
larger one, or to be more precise:
to the goals/values set by the larger one.
(2) i'm now more inclined to think that this separation is false,
since too many of what we thought are internal transparencies
turns with a simple argument into an external one. but we moved
fast from this subject, we should think more about it.
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