Decentralized Organizations



This article is intended to be a braindump of thoughts about decentralized/flat/self-organising organizations. It is in large part inspired by open source projects and the Valve Employee Handbook.

Examples

• Valve (see the Valve Employees Handbook)
  • As Hampus Jakobsson wrote when it came up in conversation: “Valve-style is a bit of a mythical dream. I think I need to see 5+ companies successfully implementing it before I’d believe it’s replicable” (translated from Swedish)
• Open source projects

Management

• If a product-person has an idea and needs engineers to build it, they need to convince the engineers to join themselves.
  • This seems to be what happens inside Valve according to the Employee Handbook.
  • Eric Schmidt called it “Bottom-up ideas, top-down decision making” in Masters of Scale #6 with Eric Schmidt @ 20:30

Decision making

• Futarchy

Funding

• DAO’s and DAC’s

Links

• https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/belonging-is-a-superpower-patterns-for-decentralised-organising/2017/10/27
• Radical transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXbsVbFAczg