Developmental stages and problems for open communities and networks

Over the past 8 years, I have contributed to the development of www.sensorica.co, an open network for open innovation and peer production. 

SENSORICA can be described as a commons-based peer production community as defined by the p2pValue project, and as a permissionless p2p network like Bitcoin. 

Along with my hands-on involvement in SENSORICA, I have also contributed to other open networks and communities and observed their evolution. It didn't take long to noticed that these new types of organizations were developing similar problems as they were growing in complexity. A few months ago, I sat down to uncover the underlying mechanisms behind these problems. My theory is synthesized in the table below. 

In essence, open networks and communities go through developmental stages. The transition from one stage to the next requires organizational transformations, which are adaptations to the new conditions that the organization is facing. More often than not, these transitions are accompanied by organizational crisis. Sometimes, these crisis are fatal, they destroy the organization. This is an attempt to inform those involved in setting up open communities and network, to help them steer clear of potential pitfalls as their organization mutates through its developmental stages.  

Summary of developmental stages (see details below)

	Developmental Stage	Contribution and reward	Structure	Athmosphere	Problems
1	Informal	Only volunteer	Ambiguous and ad hock	Friendly, loose, fun	Attract attention
2	Formal	Mostly volunteer	Some basic roles, some norms, some procedures	Mostly friendly and fun	Dealing with complexity
3	Managing material assets	Volunteer and for benefit	Clear and more stable roles and relations, written rules, some adopted methodologies	Higher responsibility, some frustrations.	Dealing with the freerider
4	Tangible rewards generation	Mostly for benefit and volunteer	Clear and stable roles, formal relations, system of rules, body of methodologies, legal structure	Formal, professional	Dealing with the thief
5	Large potential	For benefit, wealth generation and projecting influence	Always filled roles structure, excellent governance, solid legal standing, proven body of methodologies, connections with the larger ecosystem	Responsible, formal, professional	Dealing with the jealous enemy

This table was created by Tibi, as part of a new synthesis work. In alpha version. CC BY-SA 3.0 licence

If the table above is not clear, if you need clarifications, please ask questions in the comments below, and I will use your feedback to improve this post. 

More details and explanations

After the Black March, the Women's March on Washington. When are we going to start marching towards the future?

First: I am not sexist nor racist. I am also very proud to say that I have never participated in the rigged game of representative democracy, never voted in my entire life, although I consider myself as part of the 1% of doers when it comes to concrete action and sacrifice to make the world a better place. I am completely outside of the Hillary vs Trump or left vs right debate.

Reading the Wikipedia page and a few articles on the Women's march on Washington 2017, I understand that after some issues during its planning and organisation, the goal was to come up with a very inclusive statement and to create an inclusive movement. I am going through a bunch of videos on Youtube and although I can sense inclusiveness, here and there I also sense a divisive language, a confrontational language between women and men. During the Bush years we've experienced the religious divide. During Obama, we saw the racial divide. Trump vs Hillary brings us the sexual divide. We had the left and right divide for more than a century... How many divides can our society sustain before it disintegrates and falls pray to a tyrant who will force piece upon us? 

We don't like our friend because s/he is a communist or a libertarian. We don't like our neighbour because her/his skin is of a different colour, or s/he eats or doesn't eat pork. Am I soon going to fight with my female friends because I am a man and therefore guilty of all the sins men have done in the past? Hey, I am just a guy brought up in a traditional family, trying to be fair and to respect the complementary between men and women, doing as much as I can to support the movement of emancipation of women, but sometimes I do make stupid mistakes... I am trying to unlearn and to improve my worldview tinted by my upbringing in my traditional family, trying, ... I think I am not alone in this situation. I don't want to be criticised or accused by my female friends of being "patriarchal". I want to be able to stay focused on building a better world. I don't want to feel obliged to measure my words and calculate my actions, afraid of being called a sexist, or a racist, a leftist, or some other ...ists. I feel alienated by all this and perhaps many other men who mean good feel the same. 

There is some racism in the struggled of race emancipation. There is some sexism in the struggle of women emancipation. Let's make sure we truly emancipate and not overshoot in the opposite side. 

And by the way, about Trump's victory, I think it is part of a global trend. Our society is in deep crisis and in need of a new world view. We are bouncing between the two extremes of our debilitating right/left dichotomy. Yes, we are going to see the extremes growing more popular, both of them, in different parts of the world, until we get exhausted and realise that these old models don't apply anymore. Only then the imagination of the masses can jump to something new. Only after this exhaustion people will go through the gestalt transition and see the new paradigm, which is already here, developing and picking up steam under their gazing eyes. 

Don't get me wrong. There is racism and sexism in the world. But the general problem in our society doesn't come from the Muslim or from the Man. Let's come to terms with the past. The world is what it is now. The problem is a system in decay, facing huge transformations coming from deep within. Read more about p2p, commons-based peer production and other things like that, and you'll realise that we are trapped into all these fights because we don't have the new/proper language to speak about what's wrong with our society and about how we can make things work better. So we put the blame on what's immediately visible (skin color, gender, etc.) and on the past.  

This is my angle on it, there are others to see, in order to get the full picture.

Broken Assumptions of GovernanceThe Future of Governance is not GovernmentsSituational Assessment 2017: Trump Edition

Deep code, foundation assumptions

The Coming Great Transition

See also Arthur Brocks view on FB

By Tiberius Brastaviceanu