Decentralized Organizations

Erik Bjäreholt



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