What follows represents an overview of the Organic Design documentation project and concerns the key public documents we are writing here, as well as how they relate to each other. When more complete, these documents should make sense as a book downloadable as a PDF from this page. Currently the documents are very incomplete, many not much more than a stub or "brain dump". This document therefore also serves as the documentation project's specification for the authors to follow and refer to for guidance.
Organic Design
About Organic Design: This is our example of an organisation working on the project. We want to develop in the direction of making available the workings of this organisation as a generic template which can be used freely for the common good. In practise it is formed by a team of contributors and developers working together using web 2.0 collaboration technology to form a project team, with dynamic hierarchies.
Purpose: Make sure the team is on the same page. We introduce the ontology being used, there is a public explanation of OD activities - the products and services being offered. This document helps team members, associates and the general public understand what we do and how to contribute.
Current work: The focus currently is documentation of the project and all its aspects, refining and implementing wiki organisation, and setting up Platform One as a living and working environment for some of the local members.
Road map: After working within Platform One for a while and evolving the organisation system, we move to a larger communally owned property and set up a Sanctuary. In terms of the organisational system, we intend to move our environment into a P2P architecture with a 3D interface based on open source Sim technology to achieve the Geoscope ideals.
Charter
This is a summary of rules we must operate in accord with which are derived from the Manifesto (described below).
Vision Statement is a very short summary document outlining our vision of the future. It draws on Vision and The Good Future as well as the personal visions of the OD members.
Business Plan
Organic Design as a business must generate an income and may need to attract resource from external sources. We therefore need a clear outline of our potential revenue streams, and the unique advantages of our approach over conventional business systems.
Comparison of MediaWiki with other solutions
From a business point of view it's important to know what the pro's and con's are of the various solutions available. This puts us in a better position to advise the best solutions for individual installations, and allows us to integrate our organisational system with other environments.
MediaWiki Workshop
The MediaWiki workshop can be read as a document for self-study and reference, or can be used as a presentation or hand-outs for seminars and lectures. It's divided into three stages, the first teaching basic wiki skills, the second advanced skills for collaboration such as watchlists and categorisation, and the third introduces wiki organisation.
Wiki Organisation
Wiki Organisation: A description of our current system using wiki software as the documentation and collaboration platform. The system is composed of documentation, procedures and best practices. The result of setting up a wiki organisation is a functional system allowing new people to be added and their potential to be actualised for example through propsal submissions or IT project bids in sites like RentACoder.
Procedures
The first step in defining a system for an organisation is to document all the procedures that are carried out by the people and to classify these into roles (job descriptions). The aim is reduce the tacit knowledge (knowledge carried in people's brains and notebooks etc) down as much as possible, because tacit knowledge can't be passed on easily to new staff or reused.
Best Practices
Best Practices: This document codifies policies and techniques evolved through use in the field. It is our way of defining convention for the work being done on OD and related projects. It is a way of capturing tacit knowledge. The difference between best practices and procedures is that procedures are a list of instructions like a recipe, but best practices define general ways of working while carrying out procedures. For example a best practice defined for a machinist may be to ensure that long hair is tied back at all times in the workshop, but this should not need to be explicitly stated in every workshop procedure.
Manifesto
Manifesto: The values that guide us. Here, we describe our core values, the way we think organisations could be structured, to better serve the people; and some criteria that can be used to assess our organisational alignment with our values. To contrast this we look at what it means on a personal level to be a member of such an organisation. After all, organisations are made up of people and we cannot discuss organisational structure without discussing the kinds of people that comprise the organisations. After this we outline our goals, the tangible things we think we can achieve if enough of us manage to set up these new kinds of organisations. We refer to other and related values statements, followed by some self-assessment questions.
Purpose: This document is to help guide our decision-making and is also intended for potential clients and associates and others wishing to run values-driven panarchies.
Panarchy
Panarchy Specification: More detail about panarchistic organisation and the basic aspects they need to cover and how various scales could relate to each other. This guides our work on template organisations, it refers to the 7 layers, seed and recursion aspects.
Platform
Platform: A specification for a group of people working together to implement a panarchistic organisation. This is very IT oriented because the specification is based on setting up a replica of our own organisation.
Sanctuary
Sanctuary: Extending the platform to cover living sustainably on the land as a community. These notions of an ideal living environment, to be formed by larger platforms, cover the purpose, or mission of a sanctuary and refer to the procedure for setting one up, to make it easy for others to do the same.
Vision
Vision: Our vision for Organic Design, an example of the life we want to create for ourselves, together with all those who share our ideals.
The Project
The Project: The big picture of the work being done on Organic Design. When we thought about what is going on in the world, and after that, what we could do to make difference, we found after a while that people have always been working toward a better world. Our expression of the work is but a local and current version of what people have been doing earlier and are doing elsewhere. We hope to build bridges between many groups working toward a better future.
This document needs to convey a clear and continually improving description of what we think are the roots of the current problems and what we believe is a worthwhile path to walk in solving them. After introducing the technology that could be used to bring about the solution, we discuss the Robertson model as a way to structure network organisations on a larger scale. In the latter parts of the document we look at the issue of implementation, for how does one work toward harmony in a hostile environment tending toward chaos? We also want to refer here to many groups we believe are working toward similar solutions. Hopefully we can highlight and encourage some synergy among various projects.
The Good Future
The Good Future: Vision on the global level. Our idea of the way the world could be inspires us to do the work we do. We think it is important to work together on a description of the world we would like to live in, and eventually pass on to our children.
FAQ
Over the years, many questions have accumulated which are to be divided up by general sections and put into the main FAQ article.
