manifesto.md 3.9 KB
This is a draft manifesto for http://opencompany.biz/ to be ratified at https://github.com/timothyfcook/opencompany.biz/issues/5.
Intro: Something about how society is bigger now than it used to be and it's time to tweak and evolve to deal with new realities.
[I'm not sure this is the right metaphor, but ...] On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia tragically burned up on reentry, killing seven crew members. The resulting investigation determined that a meter-long piece of foam had come loose during lift-off and struck a wing. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't be a problem. At Mach 2.46, the foam punched a 20 cm hole in the wing. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't be a problem. During reentry two weeks later, this 20 cm hole was enough to allow hot gases to start ripping the wing apart, eventually disintegrating the shuttle.
Human society is no longer operating under "normal circumstances," and seemingly innocuous problems and inefficiencies have the capacity ....
As society scales, ...
This manifesto is our attempt to address inadequacies in the way humans currently organize themselves to do work together. The problems are:
Corporate anonymity encourages sociopathic behavior.
Work is plentiful, but jobs are scarce.
Three Principles
Rules are made to be broken. Open companies are deliberately not defined legally nor are they centrally certified, because legal definitions and central certification can only establish a lower bound, which then becomes a battlefield for a loopholes arms race. We want to reach for an asymptotic upper bound.
Any entity may advertise itself as an open company. By accepting the "open company" label for ourselves, we invite the public to constantly scrutinize us—as we try to scrutinize ourselves—according to three general principles. Each of us has our own understanding of how these principles apply to our company, and we leave it to the court of public opinion whether any one of us lives up to the name, "open company."
1. Share as much as possible.
An open company develops all of its products publicly, and freely shares all of its intellectual property. Any software it writes is open source. It publishes as much financial and other data as it can without compromising customer privacy. All employees of the company are publicly listed along with their level of access to private company information and private customer data.
2. Charge as little as possible.
An open company tries to charge as little for its products and services as possible. Price to cost, that is, instead of to value.
3. Employ everyone.
The world needs people who see something that needs to be done and start to do it, without permission or advice. They just start doing it. -- Wendell Berry
What about ... ?
An open company clearly differs from a traditional company in that an open company maximizes instead of minimizes transparency, prices to cost instead of value, and hires selectively.
An open company differs from a cooperative in that the resources of the open company are developed for the benefit of society as a whole, and not just the mutual benefit of the members of the cooperative. An open company in which the formal employees shared legal ownership might technically be an open cooperative.
An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that an open company is not registered as a charity with a government, and does not itself accept donations. An open company also does not have a paid staff, as most non-profits do in practice. From the open company's point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined.
An open company differs from an open source project in that an open company is a formal legal entity, and needn't be about software.
An open company differs from a B Corporation in that an open company is not centrally certified.