Content
1. Introduction
Over the years, the Edgeryders community and, especially, company have evolved a distinct style of working together to get things done. The word “evolved” is about right, I guess: there are strong elements of design, but people have been embracing some of the designed solutions and not others. We never voted on them, and probably never will; Edgeryders is about individual freedom rather than majority rule.
At the company retreat of May 2018, and with a view to enlarging its core group, some people expressed the need to have these principles spelled out.
2. Values and architecture
A word on Edgeryders’s main values and the architecture along which the principles are organised. Edgeryders-the-company is meant as a shared infrastructure for people to do meaningful work.“Meaningful” is defined by each person for themselves, with only a minimum of oversight to make sure personal choices do not mar the common brand. So, you could do Edgeryders dog sitting, Edgeryders space exploration or Edgeryders coffee trading (this last is in fact being tried), but not Edgeryders antipersonnel landmines. This is all predicated on maximising personal freedom. Over the years, as we grew personally closer to each other, we also developed an element of solidarity (“creating prosperity for each other”). The idea is to reduce the risks associated to all this freedom by pooling our activity: my idea might tank, but hopefully I can still make a living by working on your more successful project while I get back on my feet. Solidarity and risk pooling implies greater coordination, and potentially some extra constraint onto personal freedom.
Edgeryders architecture consists of an online community and a company living in symbiosis. The community is a place for free exchange of information and some cognitive collaboration; it is often where new ideas and projects emerge. The company is the place for delivery, and the economic and legal interface between the community and the rest of the world.
All this happens in a world with a given legal order. We do not challenge it directly, rather we seek to use it for our own purposes. In order to have a functioning legal infrastructure (sign contracts, bid for tenders, submit funding applications) we created an Estonian private limited company. This move enables all these things, but subjects our decisions to Estonian and European company law. For example, the company’s shareholders’ annual general meeting must make decisions by majority vote (“one dollar of capital conferred, one vote”). While shareholders can and do choose other methods to make decisions, in the end a vote must be held, and votes must be counted for the decision to have legal force.
3. Principles
-
Who does the work calls the shots. Edgeryders is a do-ocracy, rather than a democracy. If people want to do something and they have the energy and resources for it, they do not need permission, and they get to choose which things are done, and how. No one who is not personally involved in doing something has the right to tell those who are how to do it, within the limits of the law (you cannot charge clients without issuing an invoice, that’s illegal) and of the good functioning of the common infrastructure (the invoice needs to be recorded on our accounting software, otherwise you’ll break our system). As a consequence, we never vote on projects, we only check that they don’t break the law nor our infrastructure.
-
No plan is the plan. Our values make Edgeryders a very decentralized organization. The company has no overarching strategy, just values and principles for collaboration. All the intentionality is at the level of the projects: the company can be interpreted as a federation of sovereign projects.
-
Project sovereignty. Sovereignty means that the person or group running the project is responsible for its financing (it has to find the client or backer), and it gets to allocate the project’s budget, with no interference from the board. Every Edgeryders project contributes to the common resources with 20% of its budget, and disposes of the remaining 80%.
-
Teams. The absence of an overarching strategy has a negative consequence: you might end up going from project to project, without a real professional development trajectory and with a high risk of “getting lost”. So we try to work in small teams of twos and threes. Teams give themselves goals, and their members help each other stay on track. Teams also allow for a division of labour: it may not be efficient that we all become salespeople, but neither is it fair (or resilient) that only one or two people are responsible for dealmaking. So, we try to put financial and operational autonomy at the level of the team, rather than at that of the individual or that of the whole company.
-
Mutual support. Project leaders are encouraged to offer each other paid, meaningful, fun work in each other’s projects. This custom does two things: it encourages people to come together in a tighter web of collaboration and it adds to our individual resilience, because everyone is looking for (good) work for everyone else. Normally, the core members of Edgeryders get first ask on paid work procured by other core members (provided they have the right skills, of course).
-
Working out loud (and in writing). We communicate by being transparent, and letting each person decide which information she wants. This means we do not send each other emails (strongly discouraged within the company, a necessary evil when dealing with the outside world). Almost our entire workflow happens in writing on the company’s online workspace. This way, everything is written down, has a URL and is searchable. For short-lived communications (“Have you paid XYZ’s invoice?”) it’s OK to use the Matrix, but anything substantial needs to be on this platform to be findable and open. Company directors and collaborators also have access to our accounting platform, which ensures financial transparency.
-
You are responsible for staying in the loop, not for keeping others in the loop. Once you have documented what you do on the platform, you’re good. No one can accuse you of being untransparent or not keeping them in the loop. We do this because we value doers and their work. Doing more does, in Edgeryders, come with a responsibility of documenting what you do, but no more. Once the documentation is there, no one is allowed to claim ignorance of it as a way to accuse the doer of not being proactive enough in communicating. This is a way to protect doers from vetoes or sniping from non-doers. If you want to be informed on a project, read upon it. It’s all there. For example, you can set to “tracking” the relevant categories and topics on the platform.
-
Administrative minimalism. We recognize the need for tidy process, especially at the low level. At the same time, we are strongly averse to useless paperwork, and determined not to have anyone doing the bullshit job of creating administrative processes for others. Admin work is almost always unpaid in Edgeryders, to make sure our incentives stay aligned with not having any beyond the bare minimum. As a consequence, we are extremely cautious in adopting new common tools or procedures, because each person needs to make her own adoption decision. Occasionally we decide to give something a try, and then we promise each other to use the tool faithfully for a short period and see if the promised benefits materialise.
-
The board stewards the common resources. Edgeryders is formally run by a management board (Estonian: juhatus). In Edgeryders, the board stays away from day-by-day (because management sovereignty) and formulates no strategy (because no plan is the plan). What it does do is care for the common resources. It (a) watches over the company’s reputation. This is done through the exclusive power of representation of the company, granted to each member of the board individually by Estonian company law. If someone tries to do something crazy or pernicious like making Edgeryders landmines, the board will simply refuse to sign the contract, and the company will never be legally implicated. (b) It decides small financial investments into business development; for example, the Research Network was funded by the board. (c) It maintains the common services (hosting, accountant, banking, some software development for internal use…), making sure that people and teams in the company always have a functioning vehicle for their projects.
-
Festina lente. (Latin: “make haste slowly”). Our system is very efficient, but it reacts badly to emergencies and “I need it yesterday”. This is good. Designing the system around emergencies would just encourage us to be sloppy. Instead, we commit to respecting each other’s work. Move well ahead of deadlines, and be considerate of other people’s workflows. Never work on the day of the deadline; only exceptionally, and with abject apologies, ask others to adapt to your own emergencies. Remember that people have a right to refuse to act on others’ lack of planning.
