I'm a web-tech startup of one person, but I'd like to create my organization as a direct democracy, (all employees having equal, voluntary votership unless they collectively vote otherwise). What kinds of internal technology systems would you recommend that I look to implement to best enable operational transparency and vote functions? The system will necessarily evolve such that all employees aren't bothered by every decision, but I'd like to always include these features of the Swiss system: Referendum (all-employee votes) Citizen initiatives (anyone may propose a ballot measure) Recall (ballot measures to remove an officers or manager) I'm also interested in arguments for/against managerial salaries established by subordinate voting. Thank you!
J(M)FC, this sounds like an unnecessarily complicated mess. Despite what you may hear, most people just want to do their freaking job and go home. Everyone is not ready for the heavy lift of long-term decision making. Shite like this sounds great (and egalitarian) over pot/coke/beers/acid. The implementation is a nightmare to say the least. Ask yourself. What is job 1? Building a profitable company or conducting a business management experiment?
What kind of implementations have you seen?
Enough to write a book on it. I’ve seen many up-close (used to be the IT guy for a small management consulting outfit). Built 3 companies out of years of hustle. When you start dealing with bootstrapping and unsecured debt, the reality hits home. These ideas often come from a good place but more fail than work. Especially as employees that don’t share the founders visions come on. I’ve kept a good eye on what Tony Hsieh is doing. Timothy Ferriss has also caught my eye. I am in the process of studying B-Corps so I could set one up (maybe) but here’s the difference goal 1 is not to make gobs of money because I personally am in a place where that’s not the most critical item. That’s not correct for every firm. And it shouldn’t be.
The goal of my company is to create tools that can help restore a citizen voice to the internet. Currently almost all content on the internet is subject to algorithmic approaches, scraping for metatags, SEO optimization tricks. We believe scraping and AI is going to help us create a semantic web, and we're upset with the results that Facebook and fake news has had on our democracy. More companies have failed trying to create Marc Andreessen's vision of open annotation to a place where people can have real discussions. Journalistic quality has been an absolute waterfall for more than 10 years, the Society for Concerned Journalists has formed and already dissolved. If we think AI and algorithms are going to take us forward in determining what web content has value, we're dead wrong. I believe strongly that our democracy has greatly suffered from the decline in journalism. I want to create tools that bring democracy forward. Half of our country believes the other half is completely effed in the head. We've stopped having a conversation, we've stopped listing. My goal is to create tools that move against this trend. I am not a programmer, I'm a web sociologist with business background, but I'm intensely interested in what people have to say. I believe a democratic company would draw people interested in human systems, and I could utilizes their collective intelligence. I want an organization of thinking people, not as a way to do something good, the product I want to build needs diversity of human input.
Dm me to discuss.
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Heard congress distributing wealth
Sounds like an awesome way to be bankrupt fast.
Thanks for responding! How so?
You started the company now you employ 1 admin, 8 developers, 2 sales people, 1 marketing person and 2 managers. The developers pull an all nighter to get a release done and win a big contract. Now they propose a bonus for all developers who pulled the all nighter. It wins because they have majority control. The big win turns into a loss due to the bonus payouts.