Organizational Structure

Blog Cooperatives don't have employees, in the traditional sense. There are no bosses, superiors, inferiors, or 'direct reports'. There is no hierarchical structure. There are no 'titles' or 'positions' or 'departments'. The organizational structure of a Blog Cooperative is fluid, appearing more like a diagram of the Internet than a traditional 'org chart'.

The above begs the question: how will the organization function? And can we even call it an organization at all, as it doesn't seem very organized?. I believe that Blog Cooperatives can function and organize themselves much more effectively than traditional organizations. The constantly changing structure of the Blog Coop enables it to adapt faster and restructure itself to respond to new business projects, opportunities, or crises. In order to achieve this, Blog Coops will need to find new ways to interact, make decisions, and cooperate in the performance of business functions. The entries that follow include a number of ideas and questions about how Blog Coops may be able to interact and conduct business. All of the ideas are concepts borrowed from elsewhere, that I think could be applied successfully to this kind of business.

A structure is inevitable for a working group - otherwise it dissolves into an amorfic amalgamat of it's members. An interesting argumentation about it you can find in
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky.

One could postulate that the needed structure would emerge individually for each new task - but the proces can be just too much overhead.

Clay's article is a good summary of the issues that face online communities. I think there are solutions to leaving a blog coop particularly vulnerable to the problems he mentions. It may require a move away from 100% continuous democratic decisions. Dave Pollard has a good article on New Creative Enterprises that highlights some of the common values this type of organization could be founded on.

I posted a few ideas I've been tossing around in the previous topic. I really think some form of that structure could work for blog cooperatives without degrading into a continual political forum for each and every minor issue.

A blog coop has a chaordic organisational structure (see chaordic.org and chaordicinitiatives.org).

The best thinking on how to make decision in such organisations is, I think, Liquid Democracy.

Trade amongst members can be done using mutual credit systems and community currencies (reinventingmoney.com).

We're got people working on a zope implementation of all this that will incorporate things like openflow and mod_pubsub.

We think blog coops and other chaordic organisations should use their collaborative advantage to earn some money, buy land and property and build collectively owned and managed ecovillages