take *The Open Organization* on board

[chadwhitacre]

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance is a 2015 book by Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. Written primarily for organizational leaders, the book demonstrates how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness are changing the nature of working and managing in the 21st century.

https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-organization

Discovered via https://twitter.com/#openorg

[chadwhitacre]

Ordered the book.

[chadwhitacre]

Book arrived, read preface and first chapter. Pretty high-level business book. Anecdotes from Delta in addition to Red Hat.

[chadwhitacre]

Hehe. :-)

I am returning here from a (private) mailing list thread, with this feedback from @semioticrobotic:

Wow, Chad! This is shaping up to be an immensely useful resource for nascent open organizations. I'm impressed, and enjoyed reading through it this morning.

I also think it's a lovely extension of the line of thought we're pursuing in this thread. Gratipay's definition of open organization is great, but also very specific to it and its mission. It maintains three characteristics (which are also a set of criteria, as I read this, or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for open organizations, which is important to Gratipay because it makes decisions about membership based on these criteria):

• Liberal licensing
• Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) revenue
• Take-what-you-want (TWYW) compensation

Mapping these to the set of characteristics we've identified in our definition, we might say:

• Liberal licensing is part of Gratipay's approach to TRANSPARENCY and ADAPTABILITY
• PWYW revenue is part of Gratipay's approach to INCLUSIVITY and COLLABORATION
• TWYW compensation is part of Gratipay's approach COLLABORATION and COMMUNITY

Chad is likely shaking his head now, and that's fine :) I probably have that all wrong anyway. But my larger point here is that while Gratipay's methods (it's specific operationalizations of the key characteristics) might be most germane to it, its processes do reflect a more common set of values that seem to recur across specific cases.

The context of the thread is the open organization definitional document that the open organization ambassadors are putting together (https://github.com/whit537/openorg/issues/8).

[semioticrobotic]

Commence head shaking.

[chadwhitacre]

Hah! I wouldn't go quite that far ... yet! ;-)

---

For the record, my reply on the private mailing list:

Thanks for the kind words, Bryan, and for engaging with The Gratipay Guide. What you find there today was written by yours truly nine months ago, and it turns out (as I revisit it) that getting those thoughts out on digital paper was intimately tied to my reaching out to OpenSource.com for the first time.

I find that I still kinda like it! :-) Perhaps I will have a chance to work on the Guide again some day (it's definitely still a rough draft). I've saved your comments over there as a reminder to incorporate all of the great conversation taking place amongst the Open Organization Ambassadors, if and when that day arrives. 🙇

And for easier reference, here is the doc we're discussing in the mailing list thread and in whit537/openorg#8:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cKdldNA9wnl67MiS5UGhYzy2IDrCyDRTvXJeDRQ9wnI/edit

[chadwhitacre]

Ftr, the open org definition is now public and on GitHub:

https://github.com/opensourceway/open-org-definition
https://opensource.com/open-organization

👍