Hey @lognaturel, wanna write up a post for OpenSource.com based on the code review session at CLS? :-)

Sometimes people new in a particular career/industry have the idea that only those trained in that field should have a opinion / be allowed to have an opinion. What they forget is we are influenced by everything we see and experience, and a specialized degree doesn't necessarily mean that one's voice is "worth" more than someone else's. Something here about generalists, specialists, experts, novices in FOSS

How we should be open to respond to "untrained" opinion because they aren't jaded by potentially false ideas. Something about how an idea becomes tangible.

Article on this topic forthcoming from @ldimaggi:

Any organization facing the prospect of change will confront an underlying tension between competing needs for standardization and innovation. Achieving the correct balance between these needs can be essential to an organization's success. Experiencing too much of either can lead to morale and productivity problems. Over-stressing standardization, for example, can have a stifling effect on the team's ability to innovate to solve new problems. Unfettered innovation, on the other hand, can lead to time lost due to duplicated or misdirected efforts. Finding and maintaining the correct balance between standardization and innovation is critical during times of organizational change. In this article, I'll outline various considerations your organization might make when attempting to strike this critical balance."

Article proposal from @funnelfiasco.

Some leaders, when faced with unfavorable coverage of their company, will fire those who talk to reporters. After all, they’re sharing the inner workings of the company in a way that makes it look bad. This can bring the wrath of customers, legislators, and — most importantly for some — shareholders. But what if we took a different approach. Maybe instead of it being a problem for the company, it’s a problem with the company.

Third installment in the learning agility series from @jenkelchner.

Friend-of-the-community Brook Manville brings to our attention a recent op-ed in The Washington Post: "Government 'transparency' has gone too far."

The current obsession with transparency is starting to take a similar toll. In a host of ways, government has been rendered less nimble, less talented and less effective.

I'd love to see someone write a thoughtful response to it for Opensource.com, particularly as it relates to our prior discussions on transparency and its limits.

I think there might be an interesting point to be made about how in open source projects and organizations that practice open hiring, there's a smooth distribution of effort vs. a blocky distribution in a traditional-hiring org. Instead of mostly full-time with a few half-time people, effort in an open org is continuous from super-full-time to almost-but-not-quite-never.

I've been aware of this for a while but I just realized that this one fellow who helps with Gratipay chimes in probably once a year ... but it's on important fraud review tickets. He represents that long tail of partial effort that can be amassed into a single org when open hiring is the norm.

Proposed articles from @jenkelchner (first in a three-part series):

Hiring practices have changed very little in both closed and open organizations. Sticking with these outdated practices puts us in danger of overlooking amazing candidates capable of accelerating innovation and becoming amazing leaders in our organizations. Developing more inclusive and open hiring processes will require work. For starters, it'll require focus on a key competency so often overlooked as part of more traditional, "closed" processes: Learning agility.

This took a different path than I had originally discussed in email with you @semioticrobotic, but you'll get that sometimes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0UUBz2tJtnzA5MDyOOgADafopyGNvn68IaZWtX3FYA/edit?usp=sharing

An article announcing the official release of The Open Organization Guide for Educators.

We talk about culture and fit and at the same time we talk about being diverse and inclusive. What makes a person belong in a community? How and why do some people fit and others do not? How can we create open organizations that are the most inclusive spaces, where truly anyone can belong.

I'd say it starts with individuals making the effort to make everyone feel welcome, especially when they, personally don't understand why a particular person is opting to join the community in the first place. Perhaps understanding a little about someone's motivations will help one gain insight into your own community.

That experience of being on a boat, not a Greenpeace ship, the opposite of a GP ship. Fishing trawler. Feeling the difference in culture. Dive community culture. The love the lurker phenomenon http://www.laurahilliger.com/leadership/love-the-lurkers/

Proposed book review from @trncb.

Proposed article from @creisinger, based on this submission to The Open Organization Guide for Educators project:

"... how do schools put open ideas into practice to foster future innovators and leaders? It's not as simple as installing Linux on 4,000 student laptops, holding hands, and singing the alma mater in the high school cafeteria. An open schoolhouse values all learners' unique strengths and passions to help them reach their potential. This work does not begin and end with curricula, worksheets, and test scores. It starts with building connections, relationships, and trust with students. In this article, I'll explain how we put these ideas into practice."

I know @arob98 has a keen interest in this subject, so I'm tagging her on it! Maybe one or two writers want to tag-team an article on opening up the performance review process a bit?

I'm creating a wider space for thinking through this idea, because @robinmuilwijk has expressed an interest in tackling it (thanks, @robinmuilwijk!).

I believe @LauraHilliger suggested something along these lines at our last meeting. In particular, we discussed the need for an article that offered folks inside an organization who lack experience reaching out to and connecting with communities:

• Tips for interacting
• Tips for asking permission
• Tips for gathering awareness

So, @robinmuilwijk, I'm wondering if something like this wouldn't be a place to start:

How (or how not) to engage your community

Introduction and framing

• Open organizations "engage participatory communities inside and out," Jim says, but what's really the best way to do that? What are the consequences of doing it wrong? What are the benefits of doing it right?
• I (@robinmuilwijk) occupy a unique position, because I'm a community manager; I operate at the interface between a for-profit firm and a volunteer commnity.
• I've seen companies engage their communities the right way, and I've seen them do it the wrong way.
• Let me share some tips.

Best practices

• What do know before you engage (and what to do)
• What do know while you engage (and what to do)
• What do know after you engage (and what to do)

(I'm sure Robin can help fill in some of the blanks here, but I know he's eager to have community input.)

• Working Draft
• Draft 6
• Draft 5
• Draft 4
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• Draft 2
• Draft 1

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• Draft 1

Copying over a braindump (of mine) from the Changelog slack re: moby/moby#32691:

Also about branding: https://opensource.com/business/16/2/how-choose-right-brand-architecture-your-open-source-project.
But announcing a change like this without any apparent community involvement in the decision itself is a definite recipe for push-back.
On the other hand, name choice is the ultimate bikeshed, so maybe they wanted to avoid that.
Our most epic bikesheds w/ Gittip/Gratipay were around renaming. 🙂
gratipay/gratipay.com#138
And then gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#73.
If renaming a small project like Gittip/Gratipay generated that much engagement, imagine the bikeshed Docker would’ve had on their hands if they’d involved the community in the naming decision! 😮
Of course, it’d still have been preferable to be honest and transparent about that.

Docker is transitioning all of its open source collaborations to the Moby project going forward.

No reasoning given, no explanation. No links to sources. 😞
It’s like the flip side of inner sourcing: when open source projects have opaque inner circles making decisions behind closed doors.
Needs a clever name. 😉
“outer sourcing”
“inner circling”

As proposed by @jonasrosland: We could use a resource for helping ambassadors (and anyone, really!) facilitate ad-hoc, unconference sessions related to open organization theory and practice. Ambassador @jonasrosland already ran one and has agreed to share his knowledge and best practices.

An update to the perennial favorite "6 steps to running the perfect 30-minute meeting" by Jimmy Sjölund may be in the works. We'd love to see this one happen if @jimmysjolund is up to it!

Ambassador @jenkelchner proposed this piece, based on the forthcoming chapter from The Open Organization Leaders Manual 2nd edition.

Proposed article from @jenkelchner. Second in a series.

From @jimmysjolund:

"I've been thinking about this article for almost two years on the struggles I encountered in a previous job, why I failed, what I learned and how I could have done differently."

We chatted for a bit on today's (private) ambassador call about this topic. Open source is optimized for people who are naturally comfortable with taking charge and setting their own direction. But many folks in the world respond better to situations where there are clear guidelines about how to contribute in an organization. How can open organizations accommodate this tendency, and help people take more responsibility as they're comfortable doing so?

Some stream of consciousness bullet points culled from @LauraHilliger @ruhbehka @LappleApple et al.:

• list what needs to be done
• provide people with an ability to think for themselves in different places
• framing: "Hey, if this doesn't work for you, try your own thing!"
• mix up task scopes—design some tasks to be really simple
• thank people, communicate where their contribution is utilized, "because you did this, this happened"
• carve out roles for people to fill

Proposed article from @arob98:

The prerequisites for a successful mentoring relationship are openness and vulnerability. I both serve as a mentor and receive valuable perspective from my own mentor—so I'm familiar with both aspects of the mentor-mentee relationship. In this article, I'll explain what a professional mentor is, why you might want to find one, and how you can go about doing it.

A recent article in HBR raises the issue of "open secrets" in organizations, and it asks some questions I think would prompt an interesting response/rejoinder from the open organization community:

Why do issues remain open secrets in organizations where multiple employees know about a problem or a concern, but no one publicly brings it up? ... We found that as issues become more common knowledge among frontline employees, the willingness of any individual employee to bring those issues to the attention of the top-management decreased.

A full research report from the authors is also online.

Proposed article on issues of boundary drawing and over-extension. Openness as cause? Openness as solution?

Ambassadors @arob98, @jenkelchner, @LappleApple to discuss and brainstorm.

This will be our annual round-up of the year's most-read articles, compiled by @semioticrobotic.

Proposed article from ambassador @amatlack.

Article on this topic is incoming from @ldimaggi.

Article from Geert Booster of @sourceopenNL explaining the steps his organization will take to become an open organization.

On today's call I talked about a post that's gestating. Here's a ticket for it! :-)

A braindump:

• Mini-rant: "If you receive value from a person or organization, you should reciprocate via a method of their choosing. If the person or organization states that donations are their primary source of income, you should donate money to them. We each bear the burden of empathy: to know our vendors and how they prefer to have value reciprocated, and then … to act!"
• Rifkin, Empathic Civilization
• http://theempathybusiness.co.uk/
• tie back to https://changelog.com/posts/open-products
• tie in to post on Gratipay blog forthcoming under gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#950
• tie in to https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/11/open-source-free-rider-problem
• possibly tie in to The Success of Open Source

Proposed piece from @arob98, which will announce her 2019 open leadership resolutions for the purpose of transparency (and community accountability!).

Assigned to @jenkelchner at her request!

Ambassador @arob98 has begun the first draft of this important piece. @LauraHilliger may want to chime in with her thoughts or motivations for opening this issue.

Article proposal from @RonMcFarland:

In both personal and organizational life, energy levels are important. This is no less true of open organizations. Consider this: When you're tired, you'll have trouble adapting when challenges arise. When your energy is low, you'll have trouble collaborating with others. When you're feeling fatigued, building and energizing an open organization community is difficult.

• Do "open" contexts and organizations attract a certain "type" of participant?

Following on from gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#757 (comment), I want to write about something practical! I'm thinking of collecting examples of open company handbooks—GitLab, Enspiral, Loomio, Gratipay ...

• Working Draft

Proposed article from Jason Hibbets

This came up in IRC this morning and again on our monthly call. @LauraHilliger is active in this scene (recently keynoted https://2017.open.coop/) and suggested that she and I cowrite something.

Dump from IRC:

lurking here - got any pointers to the alt/coop economy? (here or in Europe)? New term for me :-)

http://www.shareable.net/ is maybe as a good a place as any to dive in.
It's out of SF.
http://magazine.ouishare.net/ is based in Europe (Paris?).
Maybe also http://www.bollier.org/
Honestly it's a lot of what I'm hoping Weber will get into in The Success of Open Source.
Basically, the idea that Linux shouldn't exist given the assumptions of industrial-era political economy ... and yet it does!
Also https://www.ted.com/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.
I haven't engaged deeply with either Bollier or Benchler yet.
But I understand them to be at the theoretical forefront of the {next,collaborative,sharing,coop,alternate} economy.
Reading Ostrom was groundwork for me.
Weber has already referenced Bollier, actually.
"Bollier has consistently made the most sophisticated and eloquent arguments on this point."
Endnote 10 to Chapter 1.
"this point" is ...
"[T]he idea of open source as a major challenge and counterpoint to the possibilities for government and corporate control of the architecture that will help shape the e-society. [Lawrence Lessig] implies that this is part of an almost epochal battle over who will control what in the midst of a technological revolution, and that open source is on the right side of that battle" (p. 8).

@LauraHilliger points to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/weareopencoop/issues/co-op-quarterly-q1-2017-38503 and has already published on this topic on opensource.com (links?).

@semioticrobotic observes that Weber does not talk directly about cooperatives per se. "The absence of co-ops specifically in the book is actually probably a good thing for you and LauraHilliger, as two people who can really extend the work and continue the conversation"

New guide from @jenkelchner:

Most of us have encountered a certain paralysis around implementing culture change because of the perceived difficulty and time to realize our efforts. However, change is as hard as we choose to make it. In order to win at change, we must simplify our understanding and approach.

Forthcoming article from @samuelknuth, Red Hat, to extend the series initiated in January.

Opensource.com editor @jehb notes this rather interesting post from website user experience monitoring company HotJar.

Says @jehb:

It's basically a radically honest story about their own internal analysis about why people stop using their product. But what's interesting to me isn't the story itself, it's that they decided to share it. And not only did they decide to share it, as you might gather from the long-ish URL, they're putting advertising money into sharing a blog post about why people leave their product. Talk about transparency!

Noting this here in case anyone wants to investigate or follow up.

Proposed article from @funnelfiasco.

Article proposal from @jimmysjolund, based on his recent working for The Open Organization Leaders Manual, Second Edition.

Article proposal from @RonMcFarland—a case study in open organizational approach to nuclear decommissioning.

Jeremy Brown (@tenfourty) has proposed an article on this subject.

"Culture is not a real thing despite how much we talk about it as if it is, as Niels Plaeging says 'Culture is like a shadow' it is merely the result of the things you do—your actions. In an organisation your culture merely reflects the context that you create through your actions—how you do things and how things are able to be done."

Anticipated first draft date: August 20, 2018.

• Working Draft
• Draft 1

Ambassador @amatlack proposes a new piece based on her eagerly anticipated and well-received presentation at Red Hat Summit 2019. Suggested talking points: digital transformation, bad tastes and smells, pufferfish, being literally literal, and responding well to change.

Proposed piece from @engineerteacher, who argues that "Open Organization language has a better shot at penetrating the ed space than most other 'organizational improvement' methods that have come down the pike over the years."

Proposed article from @arob98:

I admitted I was feeling burned out when I read the recently published WHO criteria for the condition. Despite my enthusiasm, the resolutions I designed to prevent burnout just weren't enough. My guess is that you might be feeling burned out, too. In 2018, Gallup released a report that indicated roughly two-thirds of full-time employees experience burnout—feelings of exhaustion, detachment, and lack of accomplishment. And this study doesn't account for employees working multiple part-time jobs.